Campaign finance reform: R.I.P?
For four decades, advocates for stricter campaign finance rules have been on a long, slow march to make big money in politics less important and more transparent.America has or had a choice between government by and for the people grounded in funding by the people. Conservatives spent billions to change that to the government bought and paid for by special interests. Expect more of the same as the mid-term elections in 2010 usher even more bought and paid for Republicans into Congress. Wall Street to Spend $144 Billion in Pay and Bonuses — Record High and
Now, in 2010, they are seeing the results: Never in modern political history has there been so much secret money gushing into an American election.
By Election Day, independent groups will have aired more than $200 million worth of campaign ads using cash that can’t be traced back to its original source, predicts Fred Wertheimer, president of the non-profit group Democracy 21.
“And this is just the beginning,” Wertheimer said. “Unless we get some changes here to mitigate this problem, I would expect we will see $500 million or more in 2012.”
For Wertheimer, and the other lobbyists, lawyers and academics who push for tougher campaign cash restrictions and often refer to themselves as “the reform community,” this year’s election is not merely a disappointment.
There have been plenty of those in the years since their movement took off amid the abuses of the Nixon era. But always in the past reformers have been able to keep faith that, whatever setbacks they faced, their cause was on a gradual path to victory.
This year feels more like a repudiation of their lives’ work. And it has raised two basic questions that strike at the very core of the ethos of the campaign-finance reform effort: Can the flow of money into elections be limited if the courts have deemed political giving and spending a First Amendment right? Can any system of rules to make money more transparent ever keep up with the legal devices that powerful interests use to keep their influence hidden?
“This is a low point for the campaign finance reform movement – I’ve never seen it lower,” said Craig Holman, a leading campaign finance lobbyist for Public Citizen, a non-profit group that has played a role in most major legal and legislative fights on the issue since the Watergate scandal of the mid-1970s.
“We’re not faring well today. At this point, we’re looking to monitor the level of chaos and scandal that is going to happen in the 2010 general election to try to bring life back into the reform movement going into 2012.”
For their antagonists, conservatives such as columnist George Will who have long derided campaign finance restrictions as unnecessary meddling in the political process, it’s a heady time in which their side is winning the day in the courts, regulatory agencies and even Congress.
“It’s no secret that the reformers are on the run – they’ve gotten pounded in the courts and also have not been very successful legislatively,” said Brad Smith, chairman of the Center for Competitive Politics, a non-profit that opposes many campaign regulations and that has had a hand in several recent important court cases striking down such rules.
Only a decade ago, the campaign finance movement achieved one of its greatest victories: the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, which reformers saw as a foundation they would build upon in the years ahead.
The act, which came to be known as McCain-Feingold for its Senate sponsors, Republican John McCain of Arizona and Democrat Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, was the most sweeping overhaul of campaign finance rules since a suite of reforms enacted after Watergate.
McCain-Feingold prohibited national party committees from accepting huge so-called soft money donations, set new rules barring coordination of big-money advertising campaigns between candidates and outside groups, enacted a so-called “millionaire’s amendment” granting special fund-raising privileges to candidates running against self-funders, and barred corporations and unions from airing hard-hitting issue-based ads known as electioneering communications in close proximity to Election Day.
The law – and major pieces of the precedent upon which it was based – is now in shambles, with reformers left clinging to its last remaining major pillar, the ban on soft money, which was upheld by a lower court this year but is expected to be the subject of future challenges.
The electioneering communication provision and millionaire’s amendment have been wiped away by a Supreme Court that became reliably skeptical of campaign finance regulation with former President George W. Bush’s appointments of John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the court.
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