* Like them or not, campaign contribution caps will be with us a long time, so the state’s aggregation rule really needs to be changed. Check out how state Senate candidate Tom Pliura avoided reporting tens of thousands of dollars in campaign loans until after the March primary…

State disclosure laws now require that any donation over $1,000 has to be reported to the State Board of Elections within five days.

But Pliura avoided the re­­quirement by accepting 79 sep­­arate loans of between $550 and $999 between Jan. 30 and March 19, the day before the primary. Among the transactions were 29 separate $900 loans from his wife, Pam, made between Jan. 30 and March 15. […]

Under Illinois’ old campaign-disclosure rules, if a candidate got multiple checks where each was under the disclosure threshold but the aggregate was over the threshold, then the candidate had to disclose all of the checks, Morrison said.

After the Legislature ap­­proved so-called campaign-disclosure reforms that went into effect Jan. 1, 2011, the State Board of Elections tried to enforce the aggregation rule.

But the Joint Commission on Administrative Rules, made up of legislators, “shot them down and said, ‘You can’t do that,’” Morrison said. […]

In a report the Campaign for Political Reform wrote last year, it argued that the change to the aggregation rule allowed candidates in municipal elections to hide nearly $500,000 in campaign contributions until after the elections.

Enough, already. The aggregation rule should be changed back to the way it used to be.

To see Pliura’s long list of small loans which avoided the $1,000 reporting requirement and, therefore, detection during the campaign, click here.

* Ironically enough, pretty much Pliura’s whole campaign was based on a pledge to never be a “typical politician.” Check out this Internet ad where he pats himself on the back for being so fed up with the status quo…

It could be Pliura feels like he got one over on the powers that be by using their own rules against them. All’s fair in love and war, I suppose. But it didn’t do him much good. Pliura lost the GOP primary to Rep. Chapin Rose by 20 points.

Whatever the case, this has been yet another edition of “Always, Always, Always Beware Anyone Claiming to be a Purist Reformer.”