“Darkness washed over the Dude. Darker than a black steer’s tookus on a moonless prairie night.” – Sam Elliott as the narrator in the film “The Big Lebowski.”

The political race shaping up to be the spiciest one on next year’s Republican primary ballot surprisingly appears to be the contest to decide who will be Alabama’s next attorney general.

There are several contenders vying for the prize of replacing outgoing Attorney General Steve Marshall, who has turned his own attention toward claiming Tommy Tuberville’s U.S. Senate seat.

The three candidates so far, all Republicans, are Pamela Casey, a district attorney in Blount County; Jay Mitchell, who resigned his seat on the Alabama Supreme Court to run for attorney general; and Katherine Robertson, one of Marshall’s top lieutenants in the state attorney general’s office.

Mitchell and Robertson, in particular, have already taken a shine to slinging mud at each other with still miles to go before primary election day.

Reporting from various state news sites has boiled down the dustup between Mitchell and Robertson as revolving around Robertson’s acceptance of $1.1 million worth of campaign contributions from an out-of-state group.

Mitchell is calling this a dark money contribution by a group aligned against President Donald Trump. Robertson’s campaign retorted that Mitchell had been seeking this funding for himself and is now behaving like a scorned suitor when the funding went to Robertson instead.

I will leave the sifting of the slung mud to you, beloved reader, but I do want to discuss the concept of dark money campaign contributions since it is often mentioned during recent campaign seasons.

The groups we traditionally think of as making contributions to political campaigns are known as political action committees. PACs are required to report who provides contributions to them as well as to whom the PACs bestow contributions.

PACs that register in the state of Alabama have to report the funds they provide to state and local candidates to the Alabama Secretary of State’s Office. PACs that provide funds to candidates for federal offices must report their dealings to the Federal Election Commission.

However, the million-dollar contribution to Robertson’s campaign did not come from a PAC. Instead, it came from an organization called First Principles Action, Inc., a nonprofit organization based in Tennessee.

If you have any experience in the world of nonprofits, you likely know nonprofits are heavily regulated when it comes to politics. Most try to avoid any actions that could have the slightest appearance of being politically motivated in order not to put their tax-exempt status at risk.

Yet, First Principles Action is not what most people think of when it comes to nonprofits. Instead of registering as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, First Principles Action is registered as a 501(c)(4).

According to the IRS, this type of nonprofit “must be operated exclusively to promote social welfare.” A 501(c)(4) is allowed to be active in political races as long as the majority of money spent by the nonprofit is not used for political purposes.

Political contributions from 501(c)(4) nonprofits are known as dark money because these nonprofits do not have to reveal their funding sources like PACs do.

While there is a lot of speculation out there as to the funder or funders of First Principles Action, there is no mechanism to force it to reveal who or what is supplying it with money. I tried a quick Google search for First Principles Action with no results.

So is First Principles Action truly spending at least 51 percent of its money on social welfare causes and not political campaigns?

This determination is left up to an understaffed and underfunded IRS and a Federal Election Commission that literally does not have enough commissioners appointed to form a quorum and make rulings.

The Alabama Legislature could pass legislation to regulate dark money in state elections, but a state law would likely end up in court to determine if the state has the authority to impose upon a federal regulation.

The best course of action would be for Congress to tighten the rules on dark money and provide the funding and authority to federal agencies to enforce those rules. Without this, the use of dark money will only continue to grow.

It is tough to get an elected Congress involved, though, when its members stand to benefit from these types of campaign donations, too.

If you thought the refereeing was atrocious for the Auburn-Oklahoma game last Saturday, the ability to penalize unsportsmanlike conduct in dark money campaign funding in our current situation may not even reach that feeble level of competency.