For a Doolittle Congress
GARRETT, MAJOR
For. a Doolittle Congress by Major Garrett For many years, conservatives have hesitated to denounce the assaults on the First Amendment that go under the name of "campaign-finance reform." At the...
...Major Garrett, a Washington reporter, last wrote for The Weekly Standard about school choice in Minnesota...
...Fifty-four lawmakers have cosponsored Doolittle's bill, among them GOP leaders Tom DeLay, Bill Paxon, and Gerald solomon...
...Rep...
...Mitch McConnell—a Kentucky Republican who is a veteran of the campaign-finance wars and opposes all new regulations—fears that a majority of senators might back a ban on soft money just to appear to have "done something...
...You'd have the senator from Exxon, the senator from Archer Daniels Midland, the senator from the National Abortion Rights Action League," Miller says...
...The president has chosen McCain-Feingold as his legislative fig leaf, but not many others have...
...And conservatives should recognize that they may now have a bill that can, at long last, put them on the right side of reform...
...At the same time, they have not offered the public an adequate alternative to the Left's repeated attempts to limit political speech...
...Suppose for a moment that Miller is right and that certain candidates would attract only certain kinds of money...
...Neither, he would hasten to add, does the Doolittle bill...
...That may be because so few voters know about it...
...The FEC created soft money to help political parties maintain their viability in an age when candidates increasingly operated as autonomous political corporations...
...If this senator were free from all the other special interests in Washington, might he not feel freer to defy those interests more often than he would under the current rules...
...McCain-Feingold is not going to become law this year, but the 'reformers' are going to make a run at us sometime this year...
...People should be allowed to decide this question for themselves...
...Most reporters remain infatuated with the monstrous McCain-Feingold bill, which would impose "voluntary" spending limits, eliminate soft-money contributions to political parties, require free TV and radio time for campaign spots, and provide free campaign mailers...
...Maybe, maybe not...
...Let's say, for example, that a Louisiana senator attracts hundreds of thousands of dollars from oil and gas interests, but devotes no time to soliciting contributions from hundreds of other policy pleaders...
...All you need to know about this silly bill is that candidates who did not submit to its "voluntary" spending limits would have to include a disclaimer to that effect on all campaign commercials and mail (like the surgeon general's warning...
...In other words, might the "senator from Exxon" represent the people of Louisiana more independently than the Louisiana senator who is now the "senator from a thousand special-interest groups...
...So what will the alternative be...
...And the Federal Election Commission—instead of monitoring Byzantine rules that politicians routinely flout and meting out puny penalties years after the fact—would actually do something useful: supply voters with information about the flow of money to their representative and senators before they cast their votes...
...And with congressional hearings into last year's campaignfinance shenanigans now underway, calls have again risen for "reform" along the McCain-Feingold model...
...Doolittle imagines a world where data on campaign contributions are posted regularly on the Internet, where software companies sell programs that allow people to discern patterns in political giving, and where campaigns use juicy details about donations to their opponents in direct-mail flyers...
...i don't want to participate in a debate between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks...
...In other words, if a candidate decided to spend more money on a campaign than McCain-Feingold deemed appropriate, he would be required to affix a political scarlet letter to every commercial he made and every piece of mail he sent out...
...Sen...
...Doolittle would scrap the existing system of contribution limits, filing requirements, and obtuse distinctions between "soft money" and "hard money...
...For too long," Doolittle says, "the debate on campaign-finance reform has been between the far Left and the Left...
...A world of unlimited contributions and full disclosure would allow money to flow in full public view, something Americans have never seen before...
...This is the first truly conservative approach to campaign-finance reform...
...This goes to the heart of what we are as Americans," says Doolittle...
...She also worries that allowing unlimited contributions would give even more power to the wealthiest corporations and best-funded political action committees...
...At least not now...
...McConnell says that public financing of federal campaigns "doesn't have a snowball's chance" of passing...
...Conservatives should relish such a debate, especially when they can point to the Doolittle bill as the wiser approach...
...It's premature to say we have dodged a bullet," McConnell says...
...John Doolittle, Republican of California, has proposed legislation that would end all limits on political contributions and require swift electronic disclosure of all money raised by candidates for federal office...
...Miller, of Public Campaign, says the Doolittle bill would "only tell us where the money comes from" and not what benefits contributors may have received in exchange...
...Ellen Miller, executive director of Public Campaign, a group that will soon propose legislation to require taxpayer funding for federal campaigns, believes that McCain-Feingold has no political future and that it's time for a national debate on taxpayer-financed campaigns...
...Yet the bill has nevertheless enjoyed the kind of slavering media coverage typically reserved for proposals to raise the minimum wage or to nationalize health care...
...But the bill has received zero media attention...
...Now they have their chance...
...Donations from foreign sources would remain illegal...
...At a minimum, lawmakers might seek an easy way out by calling for a ban on soft-money contributions and forcing broadcasters to provide free air time for political commercials...
...American voters would see this as campaign-finance 'deform.' It would simply open the money spigot...
...A simple ban on soft money would be insufficient, she says...
Vol. 2 • July 1997 • No. 45
