You wouldn’t think current mayoral candidate Doug Greco and former City Council Member Don Zimmerman would have much in common. Zimmerman is a hard-right ideologue who proclaims an aggressive creed of muscular Christianity. He also explicitly rejects any tolerance for LGBT rights such as same-sex marriage, which he has described as akin to legalized pedophilia. Greco, on the other hand, is a longtime progressive activist and community organizer, a former high school teacher, who is currently campaigning to become Austin’s first openly gay mayor.
Yet the two men now overlap in one legal context: Each has sued Austin over the city’s campaign finance laws.
In 2015, Zimmerman sued the city concerning campaign finance limits and successfully overturned the “blackout” restrictions, which had created certain before-and-after election timing restrictions on fundraising – those were abolished. Notably, Zimmerman did not succeed in overturning the limits on contributions from out-of-city donors; the federal court ruled that since council member elections seldom reach the non-resident limit (as Zimmerman’s own campaign had not), he failed to achieve “standing” to challenge that limitation.
Enter Greco. The candidate has indeed reached the limit for mayoral elections on out-of-town donations (indexed to inflation, and currently $47,000). In Greco’s lawsuit, he argues that the cap is an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment, as it prevents his out-of-town supporters (family, friends, collegial “networks”) from exercising their “free speech” by donating to his campaign. More broadly, Greco claims the current regs provide structural advantages to wealthy “self-funding” candidates and incumbents, while serving to disadvantage candidates like himself who aren’t personally wealthy or don’t have longtime “West Austin” (i.e., wealthy) connections.
Since the mayoral campaign is well underway and early voting for the Nov. 5 election begins Oct. 21, Greco is asking for a quick federal injunction that would immediately block enforcement of the cap, enabling him to collect more out-of-town funding.
Greco’s chances? To be Austin’s next mayor, frankly pretty slim. But to blow yet another hole in the city’s increasingly fragile dike against money flooding local politics, probably pretty good.
Money Doesn’t Talk, It Swears
Greco’s attorneys’ submission to the court reads both as a formal legal brief and as a campaign manifesto, complete with a version of the candidate’s campaign bio.
Mr. Greco raised more money than any other challenger to the incumbent, relying in part on broad-based grass-roots support that included friends and supporters from Austin, childhood friends and family from the Pennsylvania coal region, classmates from his various degrees, friends who no longer live in Austin, allies and admirers from across the State of Texas with whom he worked in the Legislature, and fellow organizers and advocates for social justice and LGBTQIA+ equality with whom he has worked for decades for social change in Austin, in Texas, and across the country.”
Greco’s legal and personal position is that all these people from all over the country should be free to contribute to his campaign (to the current individual limit of $450) just like Austin residents. To do otherwise, he argues, would “violate the equal rights of people who live outside of Austin in order to protect a monopoly on political speech and political power of incumbents, independently wealthy candidates who can self-fund without limits, and the old-money network of Austin insiders.” Of the four other candidates, Greco’s particular targets are incumbent Mayor Kirk Watson and former Council Member Kathie Tovo, who possess not only considerable personal and donated campaign funds but, as longtime public officials, name advantages as well.
A co-plaintiff in the lawsuit is Greco’s “coworker, mentor, and friend” Ramon Duran, who lives in San Antonio. Duran (a fellow organizer who gets his own florid bio in the brief) previously donated $250 to Greco’s campaign but cannot currently donate more (to the $450 level) because of the total contribution cap. That is (the brief laments), Duran is “suffering a present and ongoing injury in the complete deprivation of his well-established First Amendment right to participate in the election by making a donation.”
I’m sure we all share alarm at Mr. Duran’s complete deprivation. Nevertheless, although I consider San Antonio a fine and fair metropolis, I feel un-deprived by the prospect that I’m not allowed to vote in San Antonio elections; moreover, it’s at least arguable that my financial contribution in those elections would be an even firmer thumb on the municipal scale than my singular vote might be.
I put that question to Greco, and he responded that the only way he can hope to compete with the larger fortunes of Watson and Tovo is to ask for more donations from his supporters in Pennsylvania, Florida, and California. He’s also received the endorsement of the national LGBTQ+ Victory Fund, which supports gay candidates across the country, and he says he should be allowed to parlay that network into out-of-Austin contributions – now that he’s hit the cap, he can’t do so.
I’m well aware that I’m swimming uphill against Greco’s argument, in an era when the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled repeatedly that money equals speech – meaning, by definition, it’s untainted by “corruption.” The consequence, of course, is that the rich have much bigger bullhorns (or online platforms) than your average citizen, indirectly but effectively fulfilling the late Texas tycoon H.L. Hunt’s utopian fancy – shared by many of the current crop of odious billionaires – that votes should be apportioned by wealth.
Danger on the Rocks
Greco’s lawsuit was triggered in part because both Greco and Watson have reportedly already exceeded the outside contribution cap to some degree, according to a complaint before the city’s Ethics Review Commission. That means Greco, his classically alluding lawyers suggest, “will be forced to conduct the remainder of [his] campaign navigating between the Scylla of constraining its fundraising efforts to entirely exclude a class of citizen donors and the Charybdis of criminal prosecution.”
Alas, Odysseus Greco, his lawyers warn ominously, already riding the treacherous waves of political obscurity, will henceforth be navigating the electoral waters on a leaky craft, with little hope of landfall. O Homer, O Aeschylus!
What are the chances of Greco’s lawsuit succeeding? A couple of lawyers who know this campaign finance territory much better than I do told me that his likelihood of persuading the federal court to issue an injunction – and effectively overturn the contribution cap – appear pretty good. Greco’s lawyers cite a single Alaskan decision under which a similar limit on out-of-state contributions was overturned, and that they have found no other examples where similar caps have been permitted, barring evidence of “corruption or the appearance of corruption,” which they describe as the only relevant standard.
My own spam filters, and probably yours, are filled with congressional campaign solicitations from Colorado, Montana, North Carolina, ad nauseam, so it’s not as though campaign money doesn’t flow like a Texas flood across nominal political boundaries. When I spoke to him, Greco seemed untroubled by the prospect that, should he succeed in court, the next Zimmerman-like mayoral candidate will gallop through that new opening with contributions bundled from outsiders by the state Republican Party, the Club for Growth, whatever MAGA PACs that persist into the future, and so on, blowing to smithereens Austin’s undoubtedly naive attempts to limit the local influence of big money. Greco might not win the mayor’s seat, but he’ll leave another legacy long after his campaign has concluded.
I also asked Greco, since he’s lived in Austin for roughly 30 years, why he hadn’t thought to use his skills as a community organizer to organize an actual citizen’s campaign to overturn this tyrannical City Charter provision obstructing the electoral “free speech” of those living outside the “favored zip codes” (as his brief defines the city limits). He’s waited, instead, until a frenzied mayoral campaign to file a lawsuit – indeed, that’s the increasingly default tactic of Austin “activists” of all stripes. Since they cannot themselves win an election, they prefer to throw a legal monkey wrench into the attempts of actually elected officials to govern the city and get things done.
Greco admitted that he hadn’t considered how quickly he might hit the limit on out-of-town contributions until his current run for mayor; indeed, it hadn’t occurred to him as an issue until somebody complained about his contributions to the Ethics Review Commission. Perhaps if he and the federal court collaborate to let these expensive horses out of the barn, he can help organize another campaign to overturn Citizens United, create a serious effort for public funding of all political campaigns, and thereby do some small part to constrict the role of big money in politics in Austin and elsewhere … at least a little bit.
I wouldn’t hold your breath.
From 2005-2020, now-retired Austin Chronicle News Editor Michael King wrote about city and state politics from a progressive perspective in his weekly column, “Point Austin.” We’re pleased to bring back his column whenever he’s inspired to tackle the state we’re in.
Editor’s Note Thursday, 4:35pm: This story has been updated to clarify that Doug Greco was aware of out-of-town contribution limits, but had not considered how quickly he would hit the limit.
This article appears in September 20 • 2024.