Money 2000 (Page 4)

Issue advocacy traces its origin to the 1976 Buckley v. Valeo Supreme Court decision [see David Cole, page 14]. The decision meant that unless an advertisement expressly called on voters to elect or defeat a candidate for federal office, such ads were now safely outside the realm of regulation. By the late eighties and early nineties, a handful of advocacy groups began to test that theory by airing commercials that attacked Congressional candidates for their stands on issues. The FEC challenged the commercials in court but, with one exception, suffered a string of defeats. With each such defeat, alert campaign lawyers began to encourage groups to expand the use of such advertisements, which quickly became little more than thinly disguised election ads, often running intensively in the days or weeks before the vote. Then, in the mid-nineties, two more things happened: The AFL-CIO spent up to $35 million in 1996 targeting a few dozen House races in the first truly nationwide, multimillion-dollar issue-ad effort; and the two parties, tentatively and then with vigor, began using soft money to run issue ads in support of the '96 presidential campaigns. Yet another court-administered blow came this past August, when an FEC challenge to the Christian Coalition over its electioneering "voter guides" was rejected by a federal court.

In addition to its setbacks in court, the FEC proved itself unwilling to take tough action against the breakdown of the regulatory system. After FEC auditors sought to penalize the '96 Clinton and Dole campaigns for their cavalier use of soft money in support of issue ads, proposing a $17.7 million fine against Dole and a $7 million fine against Clinton, the six FEC commissioners voted 6 to 0 last December to reject their staff's recommendation. That decision shattered the pretense of any restraint, making such ads an all but certain feature of Campaign 2000. It also effectively signaled the end of the FEC's reign.

Meanwhile, politicians like Tom DeLay are speeding through the green lights. DeLay's Republican Majority Issues Committee is undoubtedly the first of many ersatz nonprofits that will collect campaign money from corporations and the wealthy. Leaders of Congress are setting up state soft-money PACs completely outside the FEC's scrutiny and pocketing chunks of cash in amounts of $100,000 and up. Like corporate lawyers scanning the tax code for tax shelters, campaign counsels are devising improved ways to game the system. And corporate donors are lining up to contribute: AT&T gave $527,000 in soft money to the Republicans in the first half of '99 and another $305,000 to the Democrats. While labor unions are also big soft-money donors, this year business and wealthy individuals outspent labor by $42.6 million to $2.5 million by June 30, a 17-to-1 ratio.

Just imagine, says Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21, when Bush's Pioneers early next year are asked to stop collecting $1,000 "hard money" checks and instead to start foraging for $100,000 "soft money" donations. To take advantage of the anything-goes situation, the GOP is reportedly creating what it calls Team One Million, donors willing to give $250,000 a year to the party for all four years of a presidential cycle; the Democrats, joining the race, are creating a group of $350,000-per-cycle givers.

Oh yes, Congressional reform efforts. The House in mid-September passed a campaign finance reform bill, sending it to the Senate, where Trent Lott and Mitch McConnell have assembled enough votes to kill it for the second year in a row. Reformers hope a motley bloc of Republican senators will join McCain and his six GOP Senate allies to create the sixty-vote majority needed to halt the Lott-McConnell filibuster, but no one is budging. The House-passed bill would ban soft money and some issue advertising, though few believe its issue-ad provisions would survive court challenges on constitutional grounds. Meanwhile, to win scarce converts, McCain and Wisconsin Senator Russell Feingold have scaled back the Senate bill, stripping out the restrictions on issue ads. And there is growing talk about increasing the amounts that individuals can contribute per election, from $1,000 to, say, $3,000--which would open the doors to more money. (A reform-minded group of business leaders supports the increases but paired with a ban on soft money.) In the current climate, any reform bill that passes Congress will do little, if anything, to alleviate the problem. "Public outrage is lacking in general in the good-time era, and people have become so cynical that it plays to the benefit of the politicians," says Wertheimer.

Many reformers believe the outrages of 2000 will create true pressure for change, yet even they find it difficult to explain exactly how such opinion will translate into political action. "I don't know why I think it will this time," says Larry Makinson, director of the Center for Responsive Politics, "but I do." But here's the paradox: It's hard to imagine the public getting excited about incremental reform--yet it's even harder to imagine Congress seriously considering measures that would grab the nation's attention, like public financing of Congressional elections. Some reformers hope that work at the state level can aid momentum for change in Washington, and to that end Public Campaign launched a drive on September 29 to enlist 1,000 elected officials in 30 states to endorse public financing of elections. Going state by state, however, implies a long march effort that could easily take a decade or more. Although Maine, Vermont, Massachusetts and Arizona have passed reforms that include public financing for state races, and Oregon and Missouri will likely vote on it in 2000, the many millions of dollars it would take to carry this campaign to big states like California and Michigan just aren't there.

In the end, what's important about campaign finance reform is this: Real reform is going to require a political movement that will raise the issue in terms that Republicans like to dismiss as "class warfare," because that's exactly what it is. Reform means taking a measure of political power out of the hands of the wealthy corporate elite. That's not something most Republicans or Democrats, or even some foundations that support campaign finance reform, contemplate with equanimity. They'd rather see reform that tinkers with the system, preserving the power of the affluent while smoothing out some of the system's rough edges. So far, there is no one on the horizon who looks able to carry the reform movement on his or her shoulders. The hurricane is coming.

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