EDITORIAL
the weekly Standard Silencing Free Speech in the Name of Reform It has come to this: A respected federal official, Bill Bradley, publishes an op-ed about campaign finance in the New York Times...
...Nowadays, apparently, all it takes to win an honor like that is a pompous, prolix prose style and a smattering of footnotes to disguise your fuzzy reasoning...
...Opponents of the McCain-Fein-gold bill and its House counterpart grumble that the legislation fails to muzzle the two major parties equally, and that objection may prove sufficient to sidetrack the measure for another two years...
...In June, a narrow majority struck down restrictions on certain kinds of spending by state-level political parties (the New York Democratic party, the California Republican party, and so on...
...Americans should model their politics after the more civilized "way in which the members of a college faculty or a fraternal society . . . govern themselves...
...Having messed up big-time right off the bat, Dworkin proceeds to unroll a great lot of philosophizing mumbo-jumbo designed to obscure his fundamental mood: an aestheticized hostility to raw and unfettered campaign debate...
...The American Civil Liberities Union does...
...This campaign "reform" business is totally out of control...
...And since it is always easier for current officeholders to attract such money—and since their day jobs, performed live on C-SPAN, provide them publicity their opponents can rarely match—the electoral advantage of incumbency has never been greater...
...If politicians had much less to spend on aggressive, simple-minded television spots," Dworkin writes, "political campaigns would have to rely more on reporters and on events directed by non-partisan groups, like televised debates...
...President Clinton has endorsed it again, with more fervor this time, in an effort to distract public attention from illegal foreign-money fund-raising the Democratic party appears to have conducted during the 1996 campaign...
...Nothing significant will be lost in the transition, Dworkin claims...
...Voters in six states have just approved ballot measures, most by wide margins, that apply its spirit and many of its features to local campaign law...
...The unhappy result is that candidates now spend less time campaigning and more and more time hunting for more and more benefactors—the "money chase" we all decry...
...The constitutionality question makes "reform" legislators uncomfortable...
...It has some wind at its back...
...In other words, you are penalized for the free exercise of your rights...
...Republican senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky does...
...Otherwise: silence...
...It costs more to do everything today—you could buy a half-gallon of milk for pocket change back then, after all...
...Feingold and company would prefer to proceed surreptitiously, pretending that their initiative holds no implications for the First Amendment...
...The center is named in tribute to the Supreme Court justice who wrote the Buckley decision—the retired William J. Brennan...
...But for some reason the court failed to apply this excellent principle to all forms of campaign spending...
...Europeans are also amazed that we bathe as frequently as we do...
...But citing fears about the "appearance of corruption," the court did allow the government to monitor and cap donations to individual candidates for federal office in any primary or general election...
...And unconstitutional...
...The congressional initiative is popular...
...The Brennan Center's literature describes Dworkin as "undoubtedly the world's most highly regarded legal philosopher and expert on issues of democracy...
...The Buckley decision has distorted politics in ways everyone acknowledges and no one likes...
...Bills were introduced in the last Congress that would eviscerate constitutional protections on political speech...
...But the $1,000 limit on personal contributions remains frozen in time...
...The current Supreme Court is troubled by the inconsistency...
...If you are running for Congress and you simply announce an intention not to comply with the "voluntary" caps, your opponent is granted all manner of benefits—cheaper television time especially...
...David Tell, for the Editors...
...If a state party now has the right to spend an unlimited amount of money, how exactly is that different from allowing unlimited contributions to that party's candidates...
...And the anti-speech crowd is winning cover for this plan from a group of activist lawyers and legal scholars organized by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University...
...Most notably, the court upheld bans on individual contributions over $1,000 and contributions over $5,000 by political action committees (PACs...
...the mood peeks through...
...The court declared it unconstitutional for federal law to limit the amount of money spent by campaigns that refuse public funding...
...This legislation will be reintroduced in the House and Senate in January...
...Campaigns are considerably more expensive today than they were in 1976...
...The percentage of national wealth devoted to election spending has been level for three decades...
...And a penalized right, of course, is not really a right at all...
...An exponentially growing cascade of cash is drowning American politics, he writes, and it is "a disaster...
...And no one utters a peep of complaint...
...One of the organization's principal confederates, Ronald Dworkin, has published a New York Review of Books essay that purports to explain how the First Amendment does not proscribe—and may even require—such restrictions...
...Russ Feingold, the Democratic co-sponsor (with Republican John McCain) of the major campaign-finance measure in the Senate, is quick to say he has "very strong reservations" about Bradley's proposal...
...According to the Federal Election Commission, spending by general-election congressional candidates for the 1996 campaign actually declined from 1994 if you adjust for inflation...
...But true campaign-finance reform shouldn't muzzle anyone at all...
...But in their haste to redress the ugliness and irrationality of the status quo, self-styled reformers are moving headlong in the opposite direction...
...The ruling leaves election law even more incoherent than it was before...
...The current campaign-finance mess dates from the 1976 Supreme Court decision in Buckley v. Valeo, a case that challenged the constitutionality of election laws enacted just two years earlier...
...This ruling made it possible for Ross Perot to spend $60 million of his own money in 1992, and Steve Forbes to spend upwards of $30 million in 1996...
...After all, modern political rhetoric "is now extremely repetitive," and a good bit of it could be dispensed with— by law...
...A few non-profit advocacy organizations do, too...
...But this kind of campaign "reform" is bad and wrong...
...Ironically, the Brennan Center wants the Supreme Court to overturn Buckley and permit strict financial ceilings on campaign advocacy...
...But the problem is deeper still...
...And who now stands opposed to Dworkinism in defense of untram-meled electioneering...
...You certainly don't need to know what you're talking about...
...Indeed, the president of the United States, most Democrats, and an alarming number of Republicans all claim to share Bradley's goal, if not his means...
...It would be nice if more than a handful of national political figures were prepared to say so out loud...
...Few of them endorse Bill Bradley's call for a shrunken First Amendment...
...The Supreme Court did strike down as unconstitutional most restrictions on campaign spending...
...Every European democracy does this," the world's most highly regarded legal philosopher points out, "and Europeans are amazed that we do not...
...He fails here, too...
...Dworkin doesn't...
...All that he really means, though, is that he has very strong reservations about being criticized for such a shockingly explicit move...
...Still, the Supreme Court is at least moving hesitantly in the right direction: toward the First Amendment...
...The legislation imposes "voluntary" limits on campaign spending that aren't really voluntary at all, and assigns the Federal Election Commission powers of prior restraint to enjoin "excessive" campaign advocacy...
...But it left untouched the federal law that forbids unlimited contributions to individual candidates...
...No, it's a myth...
...In sweeping language, it ruled that "it is not the government, but the people—individually as citizens and candidates and collectively as associations and political committees—who must retain control over the quantity and range of debate on public issues in a political campaign...
...the weekly Standard Silencing Free Speech in the Name of Reform It has come to this: A respected federal official, Bill Bradley, publishes an op-ed about campaign finance in the New York Times arguing for a constitutional amendment that would restrict the political speech of his congressional colleagues, their would-be successors, and American voters as a whole...
...What the hell kind of argument is that...
Vol. 2 • November 1996 • No. 11
