* On one level, it’s easy to understand why the legislative leaders don’t want to place contribution caps on their caucus campaign committees. They love their power and they want to keep it.

But they ought to just go ahead and cap themselves and avoid all the negative press they’re getting for rejecting this demand by the governor’s reform commission.

Why? Because nobody except the reformers, some columnists and the newspaper editorial boards really believe that caps on leader committees and state parties will do much of anything to limit campaign spending. The very idea is a complete folly once you look at the real world.

* The governor’s reform commission wants to import Washington, DC’s campaign contribution caps. DC limits contributions by caucus committees and party organizations. But they’ve gotten around the caps by doing what are called “independent expenditures.” On just one day last October, for instance, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spent over $7 million on 41 congressional races. In a single day.

During the final week of the 2008 campaign, the DCCC spent a grand total of $23 million, while its Republican counterpart, the NRCC, spent $9.5 million on independent expenditures.

In Illinois, the DCCC did over $4 million in independent expenditures on two races last year. Incumbent Republican Mark Kirk was hit by about $2 million in DCCC independent expenditures and the open 11th Congressional District contest experienced about the same level of spending.

All told, the DCCC spent $76.7 million on campaigns last fall, while the NRCC spent $23 million. That’s $100 million by Congressional caucus committees alone. The Senate caucus committees and the national parties spent millions more.

* Independent expenditures do make life a little more difficult. The candidates, by law, can’t have any input into the expenditures or be told anything about them.

The only requirement in the reform commission’s draft legislation is that when independent expenditures rise above $5,000 they must be reported to the State Board of Elections because the IEs can’t legally be stopped.

Again, there’s no real reason for the legislative leaders to continue allowing the reformers and the newspapers to attack them and possibly derail a budget balancing deal with any screams of “No more money for a corrupt government.” They should just play along with the game.