What do you call a political committee that violates the trust of its donors and even misleads nuns? If you guessed Protecting South Dakota Kids, the organization opposed to cannabis legalization in South Dakota, you would be correct. In an August 8 guest column published by Dakota War College, South Dakota Senate President Pro Tempore Lee Schoenbeck blasted Protecting South Dakota Kids for involving themselves in Republican primary races and misusing donor funds.
Protecting South Dakota Kids was created as a ballot question committee in 2022 to oppose Initiated Measure 27. After that election, they carried forth their efforts into the current election cycle. However, rather than continue to operate as a ballot question committee (a political organization specifically intended for involvement in ballot question campaigns) Jim Kinyon, the leader of Protecting South Dakota Kids, chose to terminate his ballot question committee and reestablish it as a general purpose political action committee with an intentionally similar name: Protect SD Kids PAC.
Kinyon did this so that he could use his funds to support far-right candidates for the legislature with little regard for their actual positions on cannabis. What are the advantages of a general purpose PAC over a ballot question committee? Simply put, a regular political action committee has much wider latitude to just do what it wants without interference from pesky campaign finance rules like spending money on your stated purpose. For a ballot question committee, expenditures are supposed to be in support or opposition of a ballot question, which makes sense.
In the end, Jim Kinyon successfully gamed the system and used $37,000 that was raised to oppose ballot questions and instead stuffed it into the pockets of his favorite far-right politicians.
Politics can be messy, but Jim Kinyon, the Executive Director of the Western South Dakota Catholic Foundation, should know better than to fundraise from nuns and then misuse those funds. The Presentation Sisters (a group of catholic nuns) of Aberdeen, South Dakota donated $500 to the Protecting South Dakota Kids ballot question committee to oppose cannabis legalization. Instead, their money went to fuel the civil war being fought within the Republican Party between moderates and, as Schoenbeck described them, “wackadoodles” on the far-right.
As Schoenbeck states in his piece, “the public can’t trust the Protecting South Dakota Kids group”. It’s important to note that Schoenbeck has opposed cannabis legalization each time it has appeared on a South Dakota ballot. He is by no means a supporter of our effort to legalize cannabis in South Dakota. But unlike Kinyon, Schoenbeck believes that integrity and honesty are important to our democracy.
It’s one thing to spread misinformation and disinformation while attempting to win an election – as Kinyon and his gang do on a near constant basis – but it’s a new low to mislead South Dakotans into thinking they are supporting one thing when in fact they are supporting something very different. In this case, donors who opposed cannabis legalization were duped into becoming donors to far-right extremists within the Republican Party.