Beware Campaign Finance Reform

The Hill

April 4, 2001

"Stunningly Stupid!"

Those were the words Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) used last week to describe the by then inevitable Senate vote in favor of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance legislation he has fought for so long.

The description was only partly accurate. Many of those who have been fighting for just this sort of campaign finance "reform" for years aren't acting stupidly at all. They're acting in their own self-interest and honestly believe not that Sen. John McCain's (R-Ariz.) brainchild will clean things up, but that it will help them advance their own political agenda.

These are the folks who have poured literally millions of dollars into the campaign to generate media and political support for the legislation. They are not, however, people who have any principled objection to either the role of money in politics or to the "soft" money they so want to ban. Indeed, many of them are themselves huge contributors of both "hard" and soft money to candidates and causes they support.

Those candidates and causes are exclusively liberal and the candidates they have supported over the last few years have been almost as exclusively Democratic. I use the word "almost" only because a review of the largest such contributors reveals that a few of them have contributed to two Republicans: McCain in the Senate and Chris Shays (R-Conn.) in the House.But let's get back to those the Kentuckian was describing. Their number would include those Republicans who have joined the McCain-Feingold team if one assumes they have the interests of their party at heart or if they believe in policies such as those espoused by Republicans rather than Democrats.

I say this because if the legislation ever becomes law, it will, as McConnell and others have argued, weaken both parties, but in so doing give Democratic candidates for federal office an advantage over those running under the GOP banner. Democrats have an extra party infrastructure that they work with and finance. Literally millions of dollars in hard as well as soft money was channeled into campaigns last year through organizations as seemingly diverse as the Sierra Club, Planned Parenthood, the NAACP and the National Abortion Rights League.

This money had a real impact in a number of races and may be the major reason McCain-Feingold may actually become law. It is an infrastructure the GOP cannot match. Among right-of-center groups, only the National Rifle Association can even pretend to compete with these ideologues of the left. Other groups on the right have little real money and aren't likely to attract the kinds of support these groups get.

Ah, but didn't the Senate include a ban on expenditures by such groups within 60 days of an election? That after all is what incumbents upset at the thought that their critics might be free to say "negative" things about them really wanted. Sure it did, but the ban is unconstitutional on its face and its sponsors know it. That's why the fight over what came to be known as "severability" was so important. They didn't want the Supreme Court's outrage at those parts of what they have wrought to wipe out the whole thing, so they fought successfully to make certain that, even if some parts of what finally becomes law are thrown out, the rest will stand.

Back in 1974, supporters of that year's reforms were equally afraid that parts of what they wanted to impose on the country might be unconstitutional. So they too added a clause to guarantee severability. As it happened, the Supreme Court did find a good bit of what they wanted to do unconstitutional, but let other portions of the law stand. The most insidious result of severability that year was that wealthy candidates who could finance their own campaigns were able to buy seats because their opponents were handcuffed by limits on the money they could raise.

Critics of the 1974 law suggested even before they went to court that this was one possible consequence of what Congress had wrought. They were ignored and we now have folks like Jon Corzine (D-N.J.), Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) and Herb Kohl (D-Wis.) occupying Senate seats that they wrote their own checks to buy.

If the current bill goes into effect, the parties will be weakened, the attempt to handcuff ideological groups will fail, and candidates of the middle (precisely those who are today being seduced into supporting this legislation) will be driven from the field.

When that happens, they can look in the mirror and see just who the senator from Kentucky was really describing.

David Keene is the chairman of the American Conservative Union and a managing associate with the Carmen Group, a Washington, D.C.-based governmental-affairs firm.