On Sun, 03 Jun 2001 02:00:24 -0400, "Alexandra H. Mulkern"
<amulkern@Radix.Net> wrote:
Washington Post
It's Not Corruption, It's Politics
By Peter J. Wallison
Sunday, June 3, 2001; Page B01
The Colorado Republican Party can't vote in the U.S. Senate and Colorado Democrat Tim Wirth hasn't been a senator for eight years, but those old adversaries could end up having a more significant effect on campaigns and campaign finance than those who sit in the Senate chamber today.
Any day now, the Supreme Court is expected to rule on a dispute that stretches back to 1986 and a radio ad that the Colorado GOP ran in hopes of derailing Wirth's expected nomination as the Democratic candidate for Senate. If the court finds in favor of the Republicans -- the only ruling that makes sense, either legally or as a matter of public policy -- it would trump the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill. But more important, it would restore political parties to their proper place at the center of the campaign process and go a long way toward correcting many of the ills that now afflict our political system.
The ad took aim at Wirth's record as a member of Congress, attacking him for portraying himself as a strong supporter of defense and a balanced federal budget. The Colorado GOP included the ad -- whih cost $15,000 -- in its operating expenses reported to the Federal Election Commission (FEC) and, therefore, it was not subject to the dollar limitations that Congress had placed on a political party's "coordinated expenditures" with its candidates.
This treatment seemed logical, since the GOP had not yet selected its Senate candidate and therefore could not coordinate with anyone. But Colorado Democrats complained that the cost of the ad should be counted toward the limit, and the FEC agreed. This set off a marathon of litigation and appeals that reached the Supreme Court for the first time in 1996 and centered on a critical constitutional question: whether the First Amendment's free speech clause prohibits Congress from placing expenditure limits on a political party.
A divided Supreme Court ruled in the Republicans' favor -- but went only halfway. The court majority declared, in Colorado Republican Federal Campaign Committee v. FEC, that the government could not put limits ona party's independent spending on behalf of its candidates. But it sent the case back to the lower courts for additional review on the related question of whether Congress could limit the expenditures made by a party in coordination with a candidate.
Now, five years later, the case is back before the top court. The lower courts have ruled that limits on coordinated expendituresare also unconstitutional. By all logic, the Supreme Court should take the same view.
The current campaign finance structure -- bequeathed to us by the post-Watergate reforms of 1975 -- focuses on candidates rather than parties. Individual candidates can spend unlimited amounts on their races, but they are restricted in how much money they can receive from various sources. Individual donors were permitted to contribute up to $1,000 to a candidate per election and Political Action Committees (PACs) up to $5,000. These limited donations for campaign purposes are known as "hard money."
Significantly, however, Congress also limited the contributions thatpolitical parties could make directly to their candidates -- up to $22,500 for Senate races. This low level was supplemented by higher limits on the amount (based on a state's population and indexed to inflation) that a party could spend in coordination with a Senate candidate. But the combined total falls far short of the cost of a modern campaign.
Freezing the parties out of financing their candidates is like giving your kids permanent possession of the car keys -- it makes you less relevant to what happens later. As candidates and officeholders developed their own financing sources, the parties' role incampaigns withered. It is thus no surprise that Vermont Sen. James Jeffords could move easily from Republican to independent. Clearly, he is not worried about how he will finance his next campaign, and the voters of Vermont -- seeing no particular relevance in party labels -- are said to be delighted with their newly independent senator.
While many reformers celebrate the unraveling of party loyalty, hey are missing the connection between this trend and the many troubling developments in our politics during the past 25 years. Because parties have been limited in what they can contribute to campaigns, they have come to prefer candidates who can finance themselves, enhancing the importance of personal wealth. But parties cannot always find wealthy challengers, which has magnified the already substantial advantages of incumbency. At the same time, the constant and debilitating need for ever-larger campaign chests sends increasing numbers of conscientious and capable members of Congress into retirement every two years.
Perhaps most importantly, as candidates and officeholders became more independent of the political parties, many voters have found it difficult to connect candidates to any coherent set of national policies or to believe that it makes any real difference whether they elect a Democrat or a Republican. No wonder then that voter participation is falling off, that increasing numbers of voters ay they vote for the person and not the party, and that single-issue groups are coming to dominate political discourse. Simply put, a badly designed campaign finance system is distorting our politics.
Restrictions on the flow of money to political campaigns would seem inconsistent with the First Amendment's guarantees of free speech, but the Supreme Court has ruled in the past that Congress could impose such limits to prevent "corruption" of the political process.
Thus, one of the key questions in Colorado Republican -- and the question that the Supreme Court must resolve -- is whether it is reasonable to believe that parties can corrupt their own candidates by coordinated spending. On its face, the very idea seems absurd. How can a party, which exists to offer candidates for office, corrupt its candidates by spending money to elect them?
In the context of a party's relationship to its own candidates, corruption surely cannot mean that a party -- through its financial power -- forces a candidate or officeholder to adhere to the party's positions; its positions are in fact the essence of the party, and unless it can obtain adherence by its officeholders to a core set of ideas a political party in a democracy has no meaning.
So the question must be whether a contributor to the party might unduly influence an individual candidate or officeholder. This, too, seems unlikely. After all, no individual can give more than $20,000 to a party in any year, and no PAC can give more than $15,000. At a time when the parties raise hard money contributions in the hundreds of millions of dollars, from hundreds of thousands of donors, it is simply implausible that a contribution of $15,000 or $20,000 would be enough to cause a party to bring pressure on its candidates to support a position the party would not otherwise take on its own.
Yet when the Supreme Court held its oral argument in February, the justices seemed divided. Some dismissed the notion that parties could corrupt their own candidates, while others cited hypothetical situations in which wealthy individuals might gain influence over candidates and officeholders through hard money contributions to parties. It is safe to say that the outcome of the case is still in doubt, with only four justices clearly for affirming the lower courts.
What's not in doubt are the beneficial effects of a Supreme Court decision that would free the political parties to finance their candidates. The parties would quickly assume a central role in the campaign financing process. Political parties are naturally more efficient fundraising vehicles than candidates; party fundraising taps a wider market and is less costly per dollar received. Parties are also more likely to be frugal in their spending. The party's interest is to make the most effective use of the money it raises -- to elect the largest number of its candidates for the dollars spent -- whereas the individual candidate often wants to spend the maximum amount that can be begged or borrowed in an effort to produce an impresive victory margin.
If the parties acquire the power to finance their candidates fully, we would see a change for the better in our electoral system. It would be in the parties' interest to choose their candidates on the basis of ability rather than personal wealth. If elected, these candidates would be able to focus on their jobs rather than on fundraising for the next election. Challengers would receive the financing they need to take on incumbents, and the advantages of incumbency would decline.
Moreover, the parties would have a new incentive to link their candidates to specific policies, as the Republicans did in the 1994 congressional elections. That year, historic numbers of incumbents were defeated by voters who made a connection between a party's program and the change they wanted to see in Washington. If voters saw that such change is possible, turnout would improve, single-issue politics would wither and ideological differences would be mediated at the party level.
The McCain-Feingold "reforms" would do nothing to address the real flaws that are disfiguring our political system. Instead, by depriving the parties of the "soft money" they receive for non-campaign purposes, McCain-Feingold would only weaken them further and accentuate the problems we already have. If parties were not limited in the hard money they can spend to elect their candidates, they would put efforts into raising it. Soft money would lose its allure. The New York Times has editorialized that the lower courts' rulings in Colorado Republican -- if upheld by the Supreme Court -- will shred the current campaign finance system. Yes, but that's only one of the potential benefits.
Peter Wallison, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, was counsel to President Ronald Reagan in 1986 and 1987.
Community email addresses:
Post message: lpaz-repost@onelist.com
Subscribe: lpaz-repost-subscribe@onelist.com
Unsubscribe: lpaz-repost-unsubscribe@onelist.com
List owner: lpaz-repost-owner@onelist.com
Web site: www.ArizonaLibertarian.org
Shortcut URL to this page:
http://www.onelist.com/community/lpaz-repost
Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/