Capitol Ideas: The Money Chase
Befllell, Tom
This is the background image for an unknown creator of an OCR page with image plus hidden text. now want to block. Forever denying the existence of unintended consequences, reformers assume...
...The resolution received 38 votes in the Senate (Sens...
...Even David Broder of the Washington Post has called for an increase in the $1,000 limit, which would "reduce the number of phone calls a candidate has to make...
...In fact, voting tends to remain stable over an entire career...
...In a recent column, he referred to campaign contributions as "bribes that must eventually be repaid with political favor and privilege...
...To the extent that there is a problem, it was caused by the money limits...
...McCain have made the same argument...
...He repeatedly urged colleagues who used the corruption argument to give him an example...
...Why do the news media so eagerly support this assault on political speech...
...Rep...
...According to Rep...
...Think again...
...He should contact the news desk of his own newspaper with the evidence for this...
...The very opposite is the truth...
...It would be a front page story...
...But they don't examine lists...
...In the latest election cycle, $675 million was spent contesting House and Senate seats...
...John Lott of Yale Law School points out that if contributions cause politicians to vote in opposition to their own preferences, they should behave differently in their last term, when the loss of future contributions is irrelevant...
...The latest reform measure would prevent the GOP from using "soft money" to overcome the builtin advantage that compulsory trade union dues and get-out-the-vote efforts have given the Democrats...
...Yet McCain says: "The level of cynicism about elected representatives is growing quickly and could lead to alienation...
...His reform is not expected to become law this year, but we can be sure that it will be back soon...
...If only people realized how much of their money Congress disposes of every year, they would rationally spend a great deal more than they now do to gain control over the massive redistributions that take place in Washington...
...The cost of a serious campaign has risen by a factor of ten since 1974...
...7 trillion a year, and a senator will be in office for six years...
...The reason is that Democrats are bitterly opposed to it, as are Common Cause and whiskey heiress Ellen Miller's Public Campaign (supported by George Soros...
...A partisan bill has been dressed up as a good government measure...
...The First Amendment, one thought, was the one part of the Constitution they took seriously...
...Divide through by a million to make these figures more meaningful, and we see that five dollars gives you a onehundredth share of control over $io million...
...Cochran, Jeffords, Roth, and Specter voting aye on the GOP side...
...The reality is that both Shays, a McGovern supporter in 1972, and McCain have used their nominal Republican affiliation to lend a bipartisan aura to what is in effect Democratic legislation...
...Sen...
...Ernest Hollings tried an end run around the Supreme Court in 1997 with a constitutional amendment that would have gutted the First Amendment by giving Congress the power to regulate "the amount of expenditures that may be made by, in support of, or in opposition to, a candidate," there was not a peep from the media...
...In the presidential election year of 1996, the Economist wrote, "spending on political ads amounted to only one percent of all television advertising...
...It's gotten to the point where most people figure, `Look, there's nothing we can do about it...
...Campaign finance reformers are usually portrayed as virtuous seekers after the public interest...
...When Sen...
...The new law would increase the media's power by restricting alternative sources of information...
...But he "never got one in ten years of handling that debate...
...The key to understanding the media's position is their exemption from the law...
...He stirs up the pot of cynicism and then says how badly it smells...
...Chris Shays of Connecticut and Sen...
...Meanwhile, $8 billion a year is spent on pornography...
...In the 1998 Senate races, Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut said, "winning candidates raised a total of $161 million for an average cost of just under $5 million...
...When Bill Bradley claims that there is "way too much money in politics," the press corps nods complacently...
...Thus a House seat is somewhat more expensive, because it buys a smaller share, and for only two years...
...The Washington Post has misplaced the obscenity...
...C onventional wisdom says that "obscene" amounts of cash are flowing into politics...
...But his research found no relationship between the reduction in campaign expenditures in politicians' final term and how they voted...
...Forever denying the existence of unintended consequences, reformers assume that, when their plans go awry, more regulations are needed...
...Yet Congress disposes of more than zo percent of GDP...
...The Washington Post says it repeatedly—without evidence...
...They assume that legislators can be bought with campaign donations that exceed $1,000...
...Coats drew attention to the canard of corruption when he testified last March: "Most of us couldn't even go through [contributor lists] and identify exactly who gave what, we are so busy trying to do all that we need to do...
...The term "expenditure" does not include "any news story, commentary or editorial distributed through the facilities of any broadcasting station, newspaper, magazine or other periodical publication, unless such facilities are owned or controlled by any political party, political committee or candidate...
...How much do we have...
...Notice the undisguised cynicism of Max Frankel, former executive editor of the New York Times...
...Kevin Brady of Texas, the average cost of a competitive campaign for a House seat "is just a little less than a million dollars...
...These groups are beholden to special interests and they won't change a lucrative system that keeps them in office...
...With 196 million eligible voters, this is less than $4 a head, or, as Sen...
...The truth is that they are imbued with a profound cynicism...
...McConnell likes to say, less than the price of a McDonald's extra value meal...
...Thus $5 million "buys" a one-hundredth share of control over the disposition of about ten trillion dollars...
...McConnell says that although he was chairman of the Ethics Committee for four years, "we never got a single complaint on that issue...
...Conservative publications, inciThe American Spectator • November 1999 dentally, would qualify for the media exemption, and might even be flooded with political advertising for two months of the year...
...But the Congress spends about $1...
...That indeed would be a consequence unintended by Common Cause...
...He thought that was too much...
...Candidates may say, "What is our total...
...Yet neither proposed such an increase in their bills...
...A McConnell staffer notes that if the Republican National Committee bought NBC, the Federal Election Commission would regulate the evening news, and under Shays-Meehan, "Tom Brokaw could not mention a candidate's name within 6o days of a general election...
Vol. 32 • November 1999 • No. 11
