HARTFORD — Guerrilla political warfare among majority Democrats boiled over on the General Assembly's penultimate day Tuesday, when the House and Senate created competing campaign finance-reform bills.
Rep. Christopher L. Caruso, D-Bridgeport, chief proponent of the measure in the House, said the Senate version was tainted because it wouldn't kick in until the 2010 election.
He charged it would also allow town and state committees to make unlimited contributions to candidates, in a huge loophole that runs counter to the spirit of fairness that public financing was supposed to foster.
That, he said, would threaten the very nature of taxpayer-financed elections.
Both chambers were set late Tuesday to begin debate on the legislation, but the Senate began first, shortly after 11 p.m.. For a bill to succeed, it would have to pass both chambers and be signed into law later this month by Republican Gov. M. Jodi Rell.
Rell supported the House version, which would bring full public financing for House and Senate races in 2008 and to the governor's race in 2010.
Caruso said the House bill would immediately ban political contributions from state contractors and ban lobbyist contributions on Jan. 1.
"This is a major reform done in an accelerated manner that the Senate bill doesn't do," he said. "The Senate bill is just trying to protect incumbents."
After a three-hour House majority caucus Tuesday night, Caruso, co-chairman of the Government Administration and Elections Committee, said that support appeared strong in the 99-member Democratic House majority.
Caruso, in an interview on the House floor at 9:30 p.m., said caucus leaders were attempting to count votes in the House. Upstairs in the Senate, the bill was marked for action sometime before recess today, the last day of the session.
"We're going to send our bill up to the Senate and they're going to have to decide what they want to do," Caruso said, detailing a chain of missed meetings by Senate leaders. "Senate Democrats don't really want campaign finance reform."
The Senate plan would reduce lobbyist contributions to $100 in January and would totally prohibit them on Jan. 1, 2007. Rich Harris, Rell's spokesman, said Tuesday night that time was running out on the legislative session.
"With a little less than 24 hours left in the session, the governor wants nothing less than real campaign finance reform to get through the Legislature before the session ends," Harris said.
"She and the House and Senate Republicans and Democrats in the House are supporting a plan that brings real reform quickly and achieves the goals that she laid out as well as those of legislative leaders," Harris said.
Ken Dixon, who covers the Capitol, can be reached at (860) 549-4670.
