Dec. 5, 2003
Supreme Court Weighs Corruption, Free Speech
By J. Barlow Herget
RALEIGH - If you’ve ever dealt with a teenager, you are qualified to understand campaign finance reform. Like teenagers, politicians will always find a way to get around the rules.
You tell a teenager to be home by 11 o’clock, and he explains when he tiptoes to his room that he thought you meant 11 o’clock a.m. If he or she is banned from watching R-rated HBO movies, he argues that he didn’t watch them at home; he saw them at a friend’s house.
I’m old enough to remember the Watergate scandal and Richard Nixon’s secret and criminal campaign operation. I also remember supporting the campaign reforms that followed Watergate.
A primary goal of those reforms was to curb the unseemly large and illegal sums of contributions flowing into presidential campaigns. Those reforms became the model for many state campaign rules such as those here in North Carolina.
Of course, we know now that politicians will be politicians the way teenagers are teenagers. It didn’t take long for campaign strategists to find a loophole that permitted wealthy contributors to give money not to candidates directly but to national and state political parties.
That “soft money”, with a fig leaf attached, became the source for much of the presidential and Congressional campaign spending of the past 25 years. People such as Enron’s Ken Lay who were looking for favors from government regulators gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to their candidates as federal elections grew more and more costly.
The McCain-Feingold Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act of 2002 returned to the workshop to fix the system. The fix has now led to the courts. The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in September and is expected to rule in December on the constitutionality of the law.
The most heralded reform is the law’s ban on soft money contributions to the national political parties. In part to compensate for that loss, the law raises the limit individuals can contribute, from $1,000 to $2,000.
Since Watergate, there also has been another corruption in political campaigning. It is the “stealth” campaign that uses attacks by unnamed, usually wealthy supporters acting through sham organizations with names like “Friends of Motherhood and Apple Pie.”
The McCain-Feingold Act did not outlaw these stealth campaigns, contrary to what you might have heard on shout radio, but it did regulate them. These groups can still run ads.
But if they run the ads in the 30 days before a primary election or the 60 days before the General Election, they must disclose who contributed to the campaign and they must limit contributions to the $2,000 amount that the candidates receive. As Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold noted, “We’re not saying people can’t run ads. They can run any ads they want. They just can’t take a million dollar contribution to do it.”
It is this government regulation on soft money contributions and advocacy groups that is the subject of hot constitutional debate. Specifically, is this law one that abridges the freedom of speech?
For some of us, it is difficult to believe that curtailing their contributions to $2,000 abridges the free speech of the Ken Lays or George Soros of this world. They can always do what the rest of us cannot afford -- get a soapbox and tell the world what they think.
Regardless of the Supreme Court’s decision, recent events demonstrate how the best-laid campaign reforms can still run you into a wall. Since Watergate, reforms have tried to reduce the influence of money in elections.
President Bush, playing by the new rules, nonetheless has raised $100 million and probably will collect $200 million, a new record, by the end of the 2004 campaign. And former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean has fired-up Democrats with a strong, anti-Bush message and encouraged 500,000 supporters to give over $25 million to his campaign, with much of it coming over the Internet.
(Democrat Dean is following in the fund-raising footsteps of North Carolina’s own Republican Sen. Jesse Helms. Helms in the 1970s-80s used the then new technology of direct mail to solicit thousands of conservative followers nationwide for millions in relatively small donations for his re-election campaigns.)
Sen. John McCain, who visited here in October, understands that his namesake law will not cure the corruption of large amounts of money in our elections. It is a step on the road, and by reducing the influence of soft money and by opening the books on contributors to stealth groups, McCain-Feingold is a big step.
Barlow Herget is a former member of the Raleigh city council and host of "State Government Radio Newsmakers."
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