Huckabee bashes campaign finance system

“Prohibit nothing, disclose everything, and disclose it on the spot and let the voters make up their mind,” he said Tuesday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

{mosads}“If you want to beat me up for having taken a check from someone, ok, do it.”

The presidential hopeful agreed with the show’s co-host and former Rep. Joe Scarborough (R-Fla.) that the current system, which caps donations to candidates but allows super PACs to accept unlimited money without strict disclosure requirements, is not ideal.

“If somebody wants to give you a lot of money, give it to the campaign. Let the candidate stand up and say ‘Yes, Joe Scarborough wrote me a $25 million check and I’m a wholly owned subsidiary of Joe Scarborough,’” Huckabee said.

“That would be less disingenuous than what we have now which is this utter separation, no coordination which sometimes doesn’t even work in favor of the candidate.”

The Supreme Court ruled that super PACs can eschew the regular donation limits as long as there is no coordination between the groups making independent expenditures and official campaigns.

While Scarborough bemoaned that many potential candidates have found ways to tip-toe around those rules, Huckabee said that his campaign has been so careful that it’s “almost ridiculous and silly because our lawyers have scared the daylights out of us.”

Huckabee added that the donor class forces politicians to “dance to [their] tune” and questioned the ability of major GOP donors to pick the right horse in the race.

“People have to start voting on their principles rather than on their prognostications and their prophecies. The donor class has been wrong more times than it’s been right,” he said.

“You know who gets it right most of the time? It’s the working class that nobody seems to even remember is out there. “