LA Times Profiles "Shadowy" Adam Smith Foundation

Los Angeles Times business columnist Michael Hiltzik has a fascinating column today about Missouri's Adam Smith Foundation -- you should go read it. Hiltznik, like many Californians, is concerned about why and how the Jefferson City-based 501(c)(4) moved $500k into a ballot initiative trying to gut CA's "pioneering regulation of emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide."   

The organization was established in 2007 by a group of conservative political activists, some of whom were associated with former Missouri Gov. Matthew Blunt (whose father is Roy Blunt, the former House Republican leader currently running for U.S. Senate).

Its guiding spirit is James Harris, a political consultant in the Missouri capital, who says he was driven to found the group by "a need to have right-of-center organizations to counter the aggressive policies of the left, radicals like George Soros, and their ideas that are truly in contradiction to free markets."

I asked him why the foundation got involved in California. "When you look at — no offense — liberal politicians out there running California into the ground, often crazy radical ideas start in California and start moving," he said. (No offense, but the environmental program that Proposition 23 would overturn is a pet project of our Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.)

[...] Until now, it confined itself to a couple of local issues in Missouri. It spent $4,000 last year to support a proposal to kill the state's nonpartisan judge-selection process in favor of one subject to more political wrangling, and $2,500 to defeat a 63-cent tax levy in a local school district. The year before that it raised $30,000, made a single $2,000 grant, and spent $22,500 on professional fees and payments to "independent contractors."

The foundation's president, John Elliott, told me the Proposition 23 campaign is its first venture outside Missouri. He said the money for the donation came from "fewer than 10 individuals, not industry or corporations." He said the foundation's involvement in the California campaign was initiated by the donors, not the foundation's four-member board.

Until recently, Harris was far less open (publicly, anyway) about his involvement with the organization. 

As we noted a few days back, supporters of CA's existing law are asking the U.S. Attorney General to investigate whether the Foundation's funneling of money to California for their pro-pollution donors is legal.