Peddling Political Access

...Judging from lobbying reports, most of those big donors had long, narrow wish lists for legislative and/or bureaucratic action...

...It is the right to make your case—not the right to win it—that is for sale under the pay-to-play system institutionalized in recent years...

...The Democrats offered coffee in the White House...

...They are buying access...

...The checks go to party committees, but the committees are dominated by and raise money through incumbents, who either ask for it outright or offer themselves as lobbying targets in their offices and at party special events...

...Burt Neuborne, a New York University law professor testifying before the committee, agreed: "I certainly would support a law that would make it clear you couldn't sell your time to people...

...Chairman Thompson sympathized with his Michigan colleague's feeling...

...But when there literally can be $200,000 or $500,000 contributions, it just makes the odds of obtaining attention to the problems of average citizens very long...

...This is not business as usual...

...Look at itthis way: It would have cost you a pledge of $ 175,000 ($100,000 down and $25,000 each of the following three years) to be admitted last February to a Republican tête-à-tête hosted by Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott and House Speaker Newt Gingrich at a resort hotel across the state in Palm Beach...

...The Republicans could get $21 million by the year 2000 from their 120 guests...

...Starting Friday, October 31, you would have had three days to play golf or tennis, stroll the pristine beach, and schmooze in "small, intimate" groups with President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore...

...They are discouraging good people from seeking or holding office...

...As the Supreme Court ruled in upholding Michigan's similar state-level ban on corporations backing individual candidates, such prohibitions aim to prevent "the corrosive and distorting effects of immense aggregations of wealth that are accumulated with the help of the corporate form and that have little or no correlation to public support for the corporation's political ideas...

...Maybe this is too pure to bring into this," interjected Senator John Glenn (D.Ohio ), "but we're supposed to have established in this country [the principle of] one person, one vote...

...Federal election data show that many of the biggest donors give huge sums to both parties...

...The committee's discussions have been lengthy...

...Remember what happened after the Senate cast the first of several votes on October 7 to continue a filibuster against the modest campaign finance reform bill cosponsored by Senators John McCain (R.-Ariz...

...In her recent letter to Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee, Janet Reno explained that, while Federal officials can't accept a bribe or extort money for an "official act," the Justice Department believes it is legal for officials to offer special access to political contributors, because agreeing to meet with or listen to somebody is not an "official act...

...Too rich for your blood...

...An additional danger is extortion...

...the Republicans served breakfast rolls in the Senate Caucus Room...

...Obviously I can't say poverty would end if we pass campaign finance reform," declared Senator Feingold...

...I did everything I could to comply with the law," said Clinton...

...They are converting our most important public officers into essentially fund-raisers...

...Polls by Rasmussen Research indicate that six out of 10 Americans believe President Clinton has altered policies in exchange for such contributions, and nine out of 10 think members of Congress sometimes exchange votes for them...

...Neuborne responded that he would try to draft a law distinguishing between "social" and "business" access...

...Despite some setbacks during initial floor maneuvers in the Senate, Congress seems to be groping for a way to wade out of the soft-money swamp...

...Whatever the Democrats and Republicans claim it is being spent on, most of the soft money ends up helping the officeholders who produced it, reinforcing Congressional incumbents' 90 per cent re-election rate...

...It is another part of the First Amendment, the right to petition government, that is paramount to them...

...I feel strongly that there is something inherently corrosive when access is offered for sale," he said...

...The Democrats figured to raise $3 million from Bill and Al's buddies...

...What are the donors doing...

...Clinton denounced the filibuster, then went out the next day and raised $2 million...

...Almost every member has taken part at some point...

...Andrew Mollison, the Cox Newspapers' Congressional correspondent, is a longtime contributor to The New Leader...

...Campaign contributions from union treasuries have been illegal for half a century, and corporate contributions fortwice as long...

...Soft money was an insignificant factor in the Gerald R. Ford, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan Presidential campaigns...

...At a different session, former Vice President Walter Mondale, a Minnesota Democrat, and former Senator Nancy Kassebaum Baker, a Kansas Republican, offered further evidence that the bipartisan tolerance for access-peddling is starting to fade...

...echoed the country's mood...

...They have been serious...

...For $50,000 and up, you and your guest could have made reservations to join 50-odd other policy wonks for Halloween weekend at a golf resort on Amelia Island, near Jacksonville...

...That's not how Washington works...

...No one could raise sums of that kind if Federal laws—limiting "soft money," or party donations, to $20,000 per person per year, and forbidding the use of union dues or corporate profits to influence national elections—were being enforced...

...Today, all the parties have to do is pretend they are not funneling soft money to individual candidates seeking a Federal office, and they can take as much of it as they want from practically any source in the whole world...

...How is the chief executive officer of a heavily regulated telecommunications firm, or a sugar company that depends on controversial Federal price supports, supposed to respond when he answers the phone and gets a fund-raising pitch from Gore or Lott...

...They provided letters signed by three former Presidents—Gerald Ford, George Bush and Jimmy Carter— endorsing a soft-money ban...

...From a tolerable $45 million in 198788, soft money climbed to $80 million in 1991 -92 and hit a phenomenal $271.5 million in the race between Clinton and Bob Dole, according to Colby College political scientist Anthony Corrado...

...This has also been endorsed by more than 70 former members of Congress...

...And over 100 constitutional scholars from an array of the nation's law schools have signed a statement that the provisions of the McCain-Feingold bill fall within the boundaries of past Supreme Court decisions on the subject...

...They might be correct...

...The process is never-ending, and the party leaders have become shameless in their pursuit of record-setting gifts...

...Most Americans (and apparently some foreign business hustlers) think of large campaign donations as big, fat bribes...

...Washington-USA PEDDLING POLITICAL ACCESS By Andrew Mollison Washington Word has seeped into the nation's capital that everybody outside the Beltway is uptight because top politicians wooed their donors on Federal property during the '96 campaign...

...The closest President Reagan came to the systematic sale of access was his allowing donors of $5,000 or more into grip-andgrin receptions at which they stood alongside him for less than a minute to take a souvenir photograph...

...In late September, as the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee chaired by Fred Thompson (R.Tenn...

...To say nothing of the value of their advice...

...Neuborne, interrupted by skeptical harrumphs from Pilon, concurred...

...These rivers and oceans of money are swamping this system...

...What are Clinton, Gore, Lott, and Gingrich doing...

...That's supposed to mean that your vote has the same amount of influence as everybody else's...

...With good reason...

...conducted a week of hearings on what to do about campaign funding abuses it had identified, Senator Carl Levin (D.-Mich...

...There is only one reason why someone would want to spend 10 minutes with you who doesn't know you from Adam," he told Levin, "and that is because you've got tremendous power over him and his business or his profession or whatever the case may be...

...They are selling access...

...Bowing to the widespread public perception that this was tacky, Washington's biggest decision-makers are now peddling their access in exclusive private resorts...

...The number of checks accepted by the two major parties quintupled from roughly 8,000 in the 1991-92 election cycle to over 40,000 in 1995-96—not counting those made out to state organizations...

...And selling access is perfectly legal, according to no less an authority than the Attorney General...

...These cross-givers are pragmatic flinders—not fervent supporters exercising their courtprotected rights to use dollars to enhance their own party's free speech...

...The alternating cycle of apathy and posturing over campaign finance laws may be ending...

...and Russell D. Feingold (D.Wis...

...Lott described the process as "the American way...

...Another witness, Roger Pilon, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, insisted that wouldn't work so long as the Federal government continues to control "virtually every aspect of every life" in the United States...

...or whether it's in the Legislative branch— to help people form laws, we're saying that others don't have nearly that kind of access and that kind of influence on the future of the country...

...But when we start saying, 'Well, except when you buy access,' and set up a system where somebody can come in— whether it's in the Executive branch...

...But he wondered whether it would be possible to make an enforceable legal distinction between lengthy policy discussions and the relatively innocuous practice of listening patiently one by one to a few dozen $500 contributors who crowd into a living-room reception for a candidate's fund-raising event...

...And the spectacle of this massive amount of money being raised is causing an appalling diminution of public trust...

...But the national consensus, it appears, is that there ought to be a new law to change our way...

...In the first week of November, Lott will preside over a Senate Majority Dinner that is expected to rake in $5 million...

...Practically every horror story that you heard, either directly or indirectly, is a result of soft money," Mondale said...

...Nevertheless, at the Federal level corporations in particular, but unions and wealthy people as well, currently supply the national party organizations with contributions so large that their mere existence is damaging public confidence in government as a neutral ground where as many people as possible get a fair shake...

...He described outlawing the sale of access as a natural extension of a trend that started with the abolition of property-owning requirements for voters, continued through protections for civil servants and bans on poll taxes, and most recently was reflected in the "motor voter" law making it easier for poor people and busy workers to register to vote...