New Jersey Gov. Murphy Signs Bill That Reshapes Campaign Finance Laws

In January, a watchdog agency created 50 years ago to safeguard the integrity of campaign fund-raising in New Jersey filed four complaints. Three cited irregularities in powerful Democrat-led accounts, and one dinged a committee set up to elect Republicans.

All of the complaints had the potential to result in hefty fines. And all of them vanished Monday afternoon when the governor, Philip D. Murphy, signed a controversial bill that fundamentally reshapes New Jersey’s campaign finance laws.

The bill, which narrowly cleared the State Legislature last week, began as a way to double donation limits to candidates and to require some so-called dark money fund-raising groups to disclose large donors, whose identities are currently secret.

But as the legislation moved through Trenton, where Democrats control the Assembly and Senate, amendments were added that make it harder to rein in — or police — campaign spending.

One change gives Mr. Murphy an easier way to replace the executive director of the Election Law Enforcement Commission, known as ELEC. Another lets state and county political committees collect contributions to pay for operating expenses — funds that Philip Hensley, a policy analyst for the League of Women Voters of New Jersey, has decried as unregulated “slush money.”

And a third alteration to the bill slashes the time for investigating allegations of impropriety to two years, down from 10. The change is retroactive, and the four complaints filed in January, which stem from fund-raising done in 2017, will be quashed, along with an estimated 80 percent of the agency’s other open investigations, officials have said.

On Monday afternoon, the governor’s office sent an email that noted he had signed the bill, but it offered no additional comment.

The overhaul of New Jersey’s campaign finance rules comes 13 years after a United States Supreme Court ruling in favor of Citizens United unleashed limitless federal spending by corporations and unions. Since then, some Republican and Democrat-led states have also taken steps to curb the enforcement powers of agencies set up to limit the influence of money in government.

“At a time when people everywhere are concerned about the health of democracy in our country,” Mr. Hensley said, “this is just the antithesis of good government.”

He called New Jersey’s new law a “frontal assault on some of the rules that have protected good government.”

After the bill passed, the election agency’s three commissioners — two Democrats and one Republican — resigned in protest. The fourth seat on the board had been vacant.

Stephen M. Holden, a Democrat and former state judge who quit the board last week, called the legislation a “transparent abuse of power.”

“It eviscerates our authority and independence,” he said.

The two-year time clock for investigations will start at the moment an infraction occurs. But allegations of impropriety rarely surface until at least six months to a year after an election, Mr. Holden said.

“If we didn’t get to you within two years, you’re home free,” he said ruefully.

Nicholas Scutari, the Democratic president of the State Senate and a sponsor of the bill, has defended the altered statute of limitations, likening the 10-year time frame to a police officer writing a ticket long after a traffic infraction.

The agency’s executive director, Jeffrey M. Brindle, had argued that a five-year window would be appropriate, bringing New Jersey in line with many other states.

Opponents of the bill said that the two-year statute of limitations was a bald political effort to quash pending investigations and to be free of risk from any as-yet-undiscovered campaign finance violations that took place before April 2021.

“What is in those previous eight years yet to be investigated that they don’t want to be investigated?” asked Assemblyman Brian Bergen, a Republican and one of the most vocal opponents of the bill.

“Just wiping it off the books? This doesn’t pass the sniff test,” he added.

He found rare common cause with many of the state’s left-leaning advocacy organizations, which fought for over a month against the bill.

“It rolls back decades of reform,” Mr. Bergen said.

The bill became intertwined with the Murphy administration’s efforts to remove Mr. Brindle from a job he has held for 14 years after the discovery of an email he wrote, which the attorney general’s office later concluded was “demeaning” to members of the gay community.

Mr. Brindle has since sued the governor and several aides for what his lawyer has said was an effort to extort Mr. Brindle’s resignation by threatening to publicize the email. Mr. Murphy’s spokesman has said that Mr. Brindle was never threatened.

The new law gives Mr. Murphy 90 days to appoint an entirely new four-person election board, circumventing the traditional approval needed from the State Senate. The commissioners, who are empowered to hire and fire the agency’s executive director, would also be paid a $30,000 annual stipend.

In Mr. Murphy’s most recent comments about the legislation, during a March 22 radio broadcast, the governor declined to discuss the merits of the bill, instead noting that his administration had expanded voting access over the last several years.

“Anything that we believe is on the side of transparency that is responsible, that opens up democracy, that shines a light as opposed to the opposite, assume that we’re going to be for it,” he said, noting that at the time, the bill was still being amended. “I think we wait and see what the final, what this looks like as it iterates.”