Jim Gerlach's Fuzzy Campaign Math

If you ever hear 6th U.S. PA Congressional District Repug Rep Jim Gerlach complaining about a budget or misappropriation of funds or any kind of financial matter at all, I’d appreciate it if you kept the following in mind.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reported yesterday (as well as Keystone Politics and PA Progressive here) that Gerlach “has agreed to pay what appears to be the largest penalty ever imposed on a Pennsylvania member of Congress for violation of federal campaign-finance laws.”

And this is why…

Gerlach reported to the Federal Election Commission that he had raised almost $2.2 million in a period of less than two months after the election. In reality, he had raised $18,000 to $20,000.

And Gerlach calls the penalty of $120,000 “way out of line,” huh? Well, I would say the same thing about a discrepancy where two zeroes are accidentally inserted to the right of a decimal.

And as the Inquirer story notes, it’s not as if this hadn’t happened before, though not to this degree…

Gerlach admitted to two smaller mistakes that he also described as bookkeeping errors. One was misreporting $8,911 in refunded contributions in 2005. The other was failing to itemize $8,832 in contributions from another fund-raising committee in 2004.

And in true Repug fashion, he threw somebody else under the bus for it, so to speak, namely former campaign treasurer Alan Randzin. And I suppose Randzin should be the one to take the hit for it, but if Gerlach kept him on despite the ’04 and ’05 errors, then that’s his fault as far as I’m concerned, assuming Randzin was directly responsible all three times of course.

Well, I don’t think Gerlach should worry too much about this. After all, as noted in this Bloomberg story, he should have about $82,086 of loose change from the prior campaign kicking around that was handed over to him from Tom DeLay and powerful oil and gas interests, so he can cover at least two-thirds of the fine with that.