Campaign Reform: Leave Bad Enough Alone
the weekly Standard Campaign Reform: Leave Bad Enough Alone On a beautiful fall afternoon in Washington last week, camera angles framing the Capitol dome, a bipartisan group of senators and House...
...They limit their political participation, beyond voting, to occasional campaign contributions...
...Populist campaign finance reform has a basic, intuitive appeal...
...They help incumbents, a lot, since current officeholders don't need quite so much cash to begin with...
...But that's not much trouble, either...
...They threaten a publicly embarrassing procedural challenge if the House leadership fails to promise a floor vote by February...
...But they're still terrible...
...The current campaign finance system dates from 1974...
...In return, the measure would give candidates who agree to comply a wide range of media discounts, spending allowances, and other goodies, including thinly disguised penalties against any opponent who declines the bill's inducements...
...But most Americans do not live in Washington and hold press conferences...
...It's a grubby business, to be sure...
...and established matching funds and tax-dollar financing for major party presidential candidates who agreed to observe spending limits...
...The "reformist" call traditionally comes loudest from the majority party in Congress, for the simple reason that "reform" actually benefits incumbents, and the majority has more incumbents to protect...
...Contribution limits do not "level the playing field" for incumbents and challengers...
...It's that simple, as low-slung Texas billionaires like to say...
...It prohibits out-of-state contributions...
...Campaigns that limit their expenditures would get a 50 percent discount on radio and television ad purchases...
...All the mandatory spending limits in this package were revoked by the Supreme Court's 1976 Buckley decision, which correctly judged them to be "substantial and direct restrictions on the ability of candidates, citizens and associations to engage in protected political expression, restrictions that the First Amendment cannot tolerate...
...So government dissolves into an endless chase after quid-pro-quo, fat-cat donations...
...They already have the name recognition that expensive advertising campaigns are designed to purchase, and their ongoing official activities constitute a permanent-free-media campaign in any case...
...It really isn't that simple, though...
...the weekly Standard Campaign Reform: Leave Bad Enough Alone On a beautiful fall afternoon in Washington last week, camera angles framing the Capitol dome, a bipartisan group of senators and House members gathered with "citizen activists" to decry the "swamp of corrupt campaign money" now engulfing Congress and destroying democracy...
...Congressional campaigns cost "too much," or so the argument goes...
...It leaves them entirely alone...
...What contributions incumbents do need must come from a large number of small donors...
...It shouldn't happen any more than it has already...
...And it's disappointing...
...And once it's finished dining on the First Amendment this way, it eats the Tenth for dessert-by applying the full arsenal of federal campaign regulations to state party activities, including voter registration drives and get-out-the-vote efforts...
...Advocacy groups like Common Cause and Public Citizen, who make their presence felt in politics not so much with cash, but with time, effort, and litigation, love this sort of thing...
...The hard truth is, as George F. Will wryly points out, that every 12 months Americans spend less than half as much on politics as on yogurt...
...It was a new spending record, and it sounds like a lot...
...Now that Republicans are the majority, a jaundiced observer might almost expect some of them to show fresh new interest in the subject, which most people in the GOP previously ignored-or actively scorned...
...This ruling meant, in essence, that federal law may "encourage" candidates for the nation's top job to trade their First Amendment freedoms for cash-a linkage of fundamental rights and funding that would never be allowed for, say, performance artists and family planning counselors...
...And the court also upheld individual contribution limits to all federal candidates...
...The solution...
...David Tell, for the Editors...
...It goes on to limit individual contributions by lobbyists to just $100...
...The reduced postage rates also contemplated would work much the same way...
...And up goes the battle cry: Limit spending, limit contributions, return government to "the people...
...This is a complicated, difficult argument to make in a country that doesn't much care for other people's money, and cares for politicians even less...
...No, not the missing "serious and necessary reform" that Congress has so far resisted...
...That year, Congress limited individual contributions to $1,000 for any candidate in any election...
...It is incumbents, after all, not challengers, who have intact campaign organizations and updated direct-mail and telephone lists...
...The money produces votes only after it is transformed into campaign spending-constitutionally protected political expression...
...The House measure effectively penalizes fundraising in increments over $250- on grounds that "millionaire donors" enjoy excessive influence...
...When you limit donations and spending, you limit speech...
...But it's nothing that couldn't be made vastly worse by more and stricter such "reform...
...And current officeholders are better equipped than their challengers to sustain those expenses, since incumbency involves ready access to the pool of active political donors, access that upstarts don't have...
...An astonishing array of campaign spending and contribution limits that would grant significant new advantages to the incumbents and "public-interest" groups that propose them, while trashing the Constitution's most glorious guarantee: its absolute protection of political speech...
...Have a nice day...
...their air time-their speech rights, in other words-suddenly cost twice as much...
...But if you bother to do the math, you see that it wasn't...
...Incumbents have been in pretty good shape ever since, and the "good-government" goals of campaign reform have taken a brutal, ironic punch in the nose...
...Hope the Republican leadership finds sufficient strength to crush these bills...
...Linda Smith and Chris Shays have joined Democrat Martin Meehan on a similar, even more "reform-minded" House measure...
...They are not "buying" the votes of their fellow citizens with those contributions...
...But taxpayer financing of federal elections is unpopular...
...Mitch McConnell of Kentucky...
...The "anti-reform" effort has precious few courageous defenders in Congress, like Sen...
...John McCain of Arizona is working with Democrat Russ Feingold of Wisconsin on a Senate bill that would set "voluntary" Senate campaign spending limits...
...But they're right...
...For whatever reason, it's happening...
...And the argument for real campaign finance reform-for looser limits and greater disclosure of fundraising activity- is even harder, and maybe impossible...
...But the court upheld the voluntary spending limits embodied in Congress's presidential campaign financing scheme...
...That $600 million is roughly $1.50 a year spent per eligible voter...
...So this year's reformers offer substitute compensations to participating candidates- each of which may well be unconstitutional...
...The cost keeps growing...
...The only spending limits the Supreme Court has ever allowed are "voluntary" limits purchased with federal funding...
...Both bills ban PAC contributions, which is almost certainly unconstitutional...
...These initiatives are probably just the result of ill-considered good intentions...
...The problem is the milder versions of that reform that Congress has already enacted...
...And the even harder truth is that a primary reason why politicians are so obsessed with our yogurt money-and why it works so much in favor of incumbents-is campaign finance reform...
...Reps...
...1974's $1,000 limit has never been indexed for inflation...
...So challengers must begin their fundraising very early, which produces the interminable campaign seasons everybody claims to hate...
...the state, the justices concluded, had a compelling interest in preventing the "appearance of corruption...
...The populist impulse favors campaign restrictions, which is why Speaker Gingrich earlier this year in New Hampshire was tempted carelessly to shake hands with President Clinton on the question...
...It's a harshly punitive strike against opposing campaigns that may refuse these "voluntary" terms...
...placed hard ceilings on various congressional campaign expenditures...
...Would-be congressional newcomers get smothered in the money crib...
...All told, candidates in general elections spent about $600 million in the two-year congressional campaign cycle that ended last fall...
Vol. 1 • November 1995 • No. 8
