One thing you can say about this year’s race for Congress — it ain’t gonna be one of our standard sleepy affairs. Here we see candidate Norman Solomon coming out strong against presumable front-runner Jared Huffman on the grounds that he has taken campaign contributions from lobbyists — including one “tainted” lobbyist.

Electoral politics. Not so bad, right? If only every state and federal race were decided this way, rather than by the traditional North Coast dedazo.

Press release:

Jared Huffman Takes State-Banned Contributions from Lobbyists for Congressional Campaign

As most people were preparing for the winter holidays, The Sacramento Bee reported Assemblyman Jared Huffman has accepted thousands of dollars in political contributions from lobbyists to fund his congressional campaign.

Most notably, according to the Bee and publicly available reports from the Federal Election Commission, Huffman took nearly $5,000 from tainted lobbyist Darius Anderson. Anderson is the same lobbyist who in 2010 agreed to pay $500,000 to the State of New York to settle a corruption probe being investigated by then-Attorney General Andrew Cuomo.

As state legislators return to Sacramento this week to start the second half of the 2011-12 legislative session, these same lobbyists funding Huffman’s congressional campaign will have interests in state legislative bills upon which Huffman will vote over the course of the next year. To prevent such “pay-to-play” situations, California law prohibits its candidates from accepting lobbyist money. However, Huffman is readily accepting state lobbyist contributions as part of his congressional-campaign fundraising.

While the prohibition exists for any candidate for state office, there is no such prohibition regarding federal candidates. Due to this federal law and in contradiction to California law, Huffman can legally vote on the very state issues and projects those lobbyists seek to influence in the Assembly while taking their money as a congressional candidate.

“There is what is legal, and then there is what is ethical and the right thing to do,” said Dan Mullen, Norman Solomon’s congressional campaign manager. “When a state legislator exploits a loophole to grab lobbyist money, it raises questions about what other loopholes he’ll exploit in the future to advance his political career,” Mullen added.

Solomon said: “I call on Jared Huffman to do the right thing. Huffman may know what is legal, but he should raise his standards above that minimum. We deserve better. He can start by returning all lobbyist contributions today and refusing any lobbyist money in the future. I look forward to hearing from him that he has done just that.”

Huffman and Solomon are candidates for Congress in the new North Coast district that stretches from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Oregon border.

Now in his third term as an elected delegate to the California Democratic Party central committee, Solomon was also elected as an Obama delegate from Sonoma and Marin counties to the 2008 Democratic National Convention. He is also national co-chair of the Healthcare Not Warfare campaign, along with Congressman John Conyers (D-Mich.) and Donna Smith of the California Nurses Association.