THE FIRST AMENDMENT IS NOT A STOP SIGN AGAINST REFORM'
Schiff, Bob
THE ACLU VS. PUBLIC CITIZEN: A DEBATE ON CAMPAIGN FINANCE 'The Firest Amendment PRO against! reform.' BY BOB SCHIFF Campaign-finance scandals dominate the headlines. Public sentiment for...
...Tax loopholes and corporate-welfare giveaways manage to find their way into legislation with little or no public discussion...
...Money equals speech," they proclaim...
...Even the McCain-Feingold bill, which many reformers characterize as only a weak first step, faces heated and determined opposition...
...among the Baby Bells, the long-distance phone companies, and the cable TV companies that want to compete for each other's business...
...The ad didn't urge viewers to vote against the candidate, just to call him and "tell him we don't approve of his wrongful behavior...
...Citizens For Reform, the tax-exempt group founded by conservative activist Peter Flaherty that paid for the ad, spent $2 million in the two months before the election to air ads in fifteen Congressional districts...
...Why raise eyebrows by having twenty-five employees, including some secretaries and clerks, send in $1,000 checks...
...Just get on the right committee, open your bank account, and watch the money stream in...
...Early next year, an electric-utility executive gives $100,000 to the chairman of the Senate Energy Committee, which is marking up the electricity deregulation bill the next week...
...It's not instantaneous, but the information is available fairly quickly, especially in the final month of the campaign...
...The information may also come too late...
...Candidates pay for such ads out of funds that are subject to the election laws...
...Free marketeers aligned with the ACLU and the Christian Right denounce attempts to reform the loophole-ridden, corruption-breeding system we now live with as attacks on the sacred right of free speech...
...PUBLIC CITIZEN: A DEBATE ON CAMPAIGN FINANCE 'The Firest Amendment PRO against...
...When that deal was exposed, the public outcry forced Congress to repeal it...
...Aptly named for its chief House sponsor, Representative John Doolittle, Republican of California, the bill would wipe out all limits on individual campaign contributions to candidates, PACs, and parties, while requiring all contributions to be disclosed on the Internet within twenty-four hours...
...f^^pponents of campaign-finance re-^¦form, like Senator Mitch Mc...
...According to the Center for Responsive Politics, individuals and PACs associated with the health industry (including doctors, hospitals, nursing homes, HMOs, and drug companies) made more than $37 million in contributions to candidates, split evenly between Democrats and Republicans...
...The most important thing to remember when the First Amendment is held up like a stop sign against reform is that the Buckley decision upheld limits on campaign contributions...
...Major legislative battles already are cash cows for members of Congress...
...Under the Doolittle bill, they will be gold mines...
...We're all now familiar with the $50 billion tax break that Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, Republican of Mississippi, and House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Republican of Georgia, engineered for the tobacco companies...
...Ross Perot and Steve Forbes decided not to abide by them...
...Less than one-third of 1 percent of the population gave contributions totaling more than $200 in the 1996 election...
...The ACLU is a willing accomplice...
...spending in the 1996 elections topped $2 billion...
...At least one made a $100,000 contribution...
...The Republicans are in control and undertaking a massive rewrite of the telecommunications laws...
...It would be one thing if the people with big money to spend on elections were merely civic-minded or disinterested rich people, or even just wealthy ideologues from across the political spectrum, but they're not...
...The simple reason why we need campaign-finance reform is that money influences policy...
...Candidates and elected officials spend inordinate amounts of time raising money, and the pressure to cross the line into improper or even illegal activity can test the resolve of even the most ethical politicians...
...Those provisions—a ban on the unlimited corporate, labor union, and individual contributions to the political parties known as "soft money," and voluntary spending limits for Congressional campaigns, made more attractive by the offer of free and reduced-rate TV time for those who limit their-spending—are worthy and constitutional goals...
...Just funnel the $25,000 or even $100,000 to your favorite Senator through a wealthy executive...
...Thus we've seen the rise of ads that claim to be about important issues, but actually are thinly veiled campaign advertisements...
...The First Amendment is not a loophole...
...Even if a vigilant press does its best to help, it won't be enough...
...By 1996, we had unlimited campaign spending and unlimited contributions again—only this time through the soft-money and phony issue-ad loophole...
...The American Medical Association alone contributed more than $2.5 million...
...There is nuance in this area of the law that the ACLU and Senator McConnell prefer to ignore...
...We actually have a pretty good system of disclosure now...
...Public sentiment for reform is at its highest level since the Watergate era...
...The incentive for corporations to launder contributions through employees will be hard to resist and even harder to police...
...The problem is not disclosure but public access, public understanding, and timing...
...Remember the Clinton plan...
...Take two major policy debates of the last two Congresses: health care and the new telecommunications law...
...By promoting a bill that would make the problem of money in politics even worse...
...During the ill-fated health-care debate, campaign money flowed freely from those with an economic interest in shaping the legislation...
...Here's the theory: Just give the public all the information, and if it thinks candidates are for sale to the wrong people, it won't elect them...
...It also upheld a limit of $25,000 on the total annual contributions that individuals may make to candidates, parties, and PACs...
...Television is the single greatest expense for most candidates...
...But it's not an impenetrable roadblock to reform, either...
...Candidates can spend as much as they want on their own campaigns, the Court held, but contributions from citizens should be limited...
...Nor does a broad cross-section of the public make political contributions...
...That follows on the heels of the $315,000 that Amway gave to the Republicans in the 1996 cycle, and the $2.5 million—the biggest single contribution ever—the company contributed in 1994...
...Simply put, it is constitutional to offer candidates a very tempting inducement—about $60 million in public funds for Presidential candidates in the last election—to limit their spending...
...But I doubt it...
...The money flows again: According to the Center for Responsive Politics, in the 1996 election cycle the cable companies contributed more than $2 million to candidates and parties, the longdistance companies gave nearly $4 million, and the Baby Bells coughed up an astonishing $6.2 million...
...The reforms enacted after Watergate failed," critics say...
...A titanic struggle ensues...
...Another difficult but not insurmountable problem is the growing use of phony issue ads to make an end-run around contribution limits and the prohibition on corporate contributions to federal elections...
...Public perception is important...
...Today, the number of uninsured Americans is more than forty million, and the corporatization of our health-care system continues unabated...
...Tobacco companies' soft-money contributions of $5.7 million to the Republican Party in 1996 and another $1.6 million in the first six months of this year surely greased the wheels for that effort to slip one by us...
...A year later, reeling from your swollen electricity bill, you get on your computer and trace the money, figure out the timing of the contribution and the legislation, and decide to act...
...Amway Chairman Richard DeVos and his wife have already contributed $1 million 'The incentive for corporations to launder contributions through employees will be hard to resist and even harder to police.' PETER KUPER in soft money to the Republican party this year...
...Court decisions and FEC rulings, combined with the ingenuity of candidates and outside groups, have shredded the campaign-finance system passed by Congress in the wake of the Watergate scandal...
...Candidates are often happy when their contributors channel money into "issue ads...
...And how about the $280 million special tax break for Amway Corporation...
...It is no longer laughable in Congress to talk about getting rid of all limits on campaign contributions...
...In the end, opponents of reform won...
...Once very rich people can give unlimited amounts directly to candidates or PACs, voters will have an incredible burden added to their decision-making process...
...The 1976 Supreme Court decision in Buckley v. Valeo, which threw out limits on campaign expenditures by candidates, is their battle cry...
...Sounds good, but it won't work...
...Most of the money the political parties raise goes to pay for TV ads...
...And not much information to go on...
...Triad Management, a Washington, DC-based political consulting firm run by a former fundraiser for Oliver North, helped steer wealthy donors to the group...
...But won't disclosure solve all these problems...
...The Buckley decision also upheld the system by which we have funded Presidential elections in this country since 1976 with taxpayer money...
...Now, more than ever, progressives need to make federal campaign-finance reform a priority...
...The players are different, the legislative issues come and go...
...You can vote against your Senator in 2002...
...The Cato Institute loves this idea: Adam Smith meets the FEC...
...As a result of that fight, consumers found themselves out in the cold...
...Giving up altogether is simply not an option, unless we don't care that the public thinks Congress is up for auction, that voter turnout is at an all-time low, and that corporate money drowns out the voices of average people both in the legislature and on the campaign trail...
...Not everyone has a computer...
...A system of unlimited contributions to candidates is frightening to contemplate...
...Imagine this scenario: The Doolittle bill is law...
...The limits in the Presidential system are voluntary...
...outside groups should, too...
...For example, AT&T's PAC distributed $166,000 to federal candidates on a single day in late 1995, the day after a compromise on the telecommunications legislation was reached...
...It is not just the colossal struggles of big-money interests on major legislative issues that show the need for reform...
...And it affects whether people feel it m worth participating in the political sys-¦tm on election day...
...The Court therefore upheld limits on individual contributors of $1,000 per candidate per election...
...So, in the interest of democratic government, they can be curbed...
...It isn't...
...But campaign contributions can create corruption, or the appearance of corruption...
...Lots of it...
...Connell, Republican of Kentucky, ijove to wrap themselves in the Constitution...
...The Democrats squabbled, the Republicans obstructed, and the legislation imploded...
...The constant search for funding to run campaigns costs us dearly...
...These important components of the Buckley decision, which the ACLU argued against at the time and with which it still disagrees, mean that central provisions of the reform bill introduced by Senators John McCain, Republican of Arizona, and Russ Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, would be upheld by the Court...
...That such a proposal gets a respectful hearing in Congress and on the editorial pages of major dailies shows how far the debate has moved...
...Hundreds of millions more were spent in unreported "issue ads...
...And we had more scandals...
...Not everyone with a computer has access to the Internet, or the technical capability to obtain campaign-finance information and make sense of it...
...Phony issue ads paid for by corporate funds should not dominate and distort the electoral debate...
...Congratulations...
...Congress should try to fine-tune the definition of "express advocacy," based on the real-life experience of the 1996 elections...
...Cable rates went up, and the networks got an enormous government giveaway: The whole digital television spectrum is now theirs for free...
...How do conservatives respond...
...Let's just get rid of all restrictions, disclose everything, and let the public decide...
...But the one constant in our political system is the need for money...
...They argue that every reform proposal aimed at reducing the domination of the political system by big money violates the First Amendment...
...Political contributions flow throughout the election cycle, as legislation is being considered in Congress...
...The Court reasoned that candidates have a right, as a matter of free expression, to spend their own money on their own campaigns...
...And while it is important to keep long-term goals in mind, incremental solutions may offer our best chance to make progress toward more sweeping change...
...In 1996, one ad accused a candidate of beating his wife...
...Maybe Amway would have gotten its tax break, and all major legislative fights would turn out exactly the same if the interested parties didn't make campaign contributions...
...Maybe...
...Buckley itself permits the regulation of ads that expressly advocate the election or defeat of candidates...
...The Senator, who was reelected in 1996, drops a provision from the bill that would have prohibited utilities from passing on to consumers all of the costs from their failed nuclear plants...
...More far-reaching inducements to candidates to voluntarily limit their spending, like providing clean public money for all Congressional elections, would also pass constitutional muster...
...Yet it seems like the opposition to reform this year is bolder, and the odds are getting longer...
...One poll showed 86 percent of Americans believing that campaign contributions influence policy decisions—and that poll was taken before the current scandals...
...Fast-forward to the next Congress...
...And in a 1990 decision, Austin v. Chamber of Commerce, the Supreme Court recognized the power of the legislature to address "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 the public's support for the corporation's political ideas...
...Thirty-seven million Americans with no insurance...
...It affects whether people trust the Congress to do the right ibing...
...A huge proportion of the campaign cash that politicians raise comes from business interests, giving them special access to and influence over the legislative process...
...At least sixty members of Congress who sat on one of the five committees with jurisdiction over the healthcare legislation received more than $50,000 in contributions from these health-industry PACs and individuals...
...Candidate and party Bob Schiffis a staff attorney with Public Citizen's Congress Watch...
...Harry and Louise...
Vol. 61 • December 1997 • No. 12
