With the last meeting of the D.C. Council’s current session taking place next week and comprehensive campaign finance reform nowhere on the legislature’s radar, Councilmember Mary Cheh (D-Ward 3) today announced that she was introducing emergency legislation banning money orders worth more than $25 from local campaigns.

Sound familiar? It should. Cheh introduced the same measure in March, but it never moved and was eventually subsumed by comprehensive campaign finance reform legislation introduced by Mayor Vince Gray, which has also remain stalled. In a statement, Cheh said that she was moving the legislation as an emergency so that it could take effect in time for the campaigning leading up to the April 23 At-Large special election.

“Money orders – in the tens of thousands of dollars – have played a major role in the campaign finance scandals that have occupied much of the public’s and the Council’s attention for the past two years,” she said. “To leave them unregulated headed into a special election seems to invite precisely the kind of mischief that has occurred in the past.”

Under current law, cash contributions to local campaigns are limited to $25, but money orders are not. Money orders have become the center of a new controversy in D.C. politics, as a variety of candidates have accepted thousands of dollars of contributions of questionable provenance in the form of money orders.

Last year, Councilmember Vincent Orange (D-At Large) accepted tens of thousands of dollars in money orders from businessman Jeffrey Thompson and his associates, leading good government advocates to fear that the money orders were simply no-so-discrete ways to get around individual contribution limits. Money orders also played a large role in the $653,000 shadow campaign that aided Gray’s election in 2010.

“In light of these serious and documented campaign finance abuses, I am very disappointed that the Council has failed to address campaign finance reform in Council Period 19,” said Cheh in a press release. “Given that a special election has been scheduled for April, I believe that it is prudent for us to at least take some action to try to prevent these abuses from reoccurring.