Money flows around campaign finance reform, experts say
By STEVEN THOMMA - Knight Ridder Newspapers
Date: 03/24/01 22:15
WASHINGTON -- Campaign finance reform is intended to eliminate corruption and curb the power of special interests.
But the first major attempt since 1974 to reform America's campaign finance laws could strengthen special interest groups, reduce voter participation, weaken political parties and make the country harder to govern.
Experts and experience also suggest that the measures proposed by Sens. John McCain, an Arizona Republican, and Russ Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat, are likely to make incumbent politicians even more powerful and secure than they are now.
"If the history of reform tells us anything, it's that it doesn't work at getting big money out of politics," said Bruce Schulman, a historian at Boston University. "And it always has unintended consequences, because people find creative ways to evade the rules."
The dismal history of political reform does not mean it is not needed, only that the flow of political money has a way of carving new channels every time someone tries to block it.
McCain acknowledges that the sweeping reform he envisions might not work precisely as he hopes. But if the law does not work as intended, he said last week, Congress can come back and fix it.
"Do I believe that any law will prove effective over time? No, I do not," he said. "Were we to pass this legislation today, I am sure that at some time in the future, hopefully many years from now, we will need to address some new circumvention.
"So what? Is that such a burden on us or our successors, that we should simply be indifferent to the abundant evidence of at least the appearance of corruption? ... I hope not."
McCain and others see campaign cash as a corrosive influence that gives the wealthy too much voice in influencing laws and federal policies.
They say corporate fat cats and labor bosses who can hand over $100,000 checks gain disproportionate influence over issues such as how to design a patients' bill of rights, how to expand Medicare and pay for prescription drugs, or which taxes to cut.
The Senate scheduled two weeks of debate on the McCain-Feingold bill. One week's worth of debate, expected to be the most contentious, has been completed.
The legislation would ban the unregulated and unlimited flow of money to the national political parties. That would close a loophole in the 1974 law, which restricted individual contributions to federal candidates to $1,000 per election but did not limit donations to political parties.
This so-called soft money was intended to finance get-out-the-vote efforts and other party-building activities, but Republicans and Democrats routinely use it to pay for TV ads to help specific candidates, as well.
One of the first unintended consequences of the McCain-Feingold proposal, then, would be to limit the two major parties' ability to recruit likely new voters and get them to the polls. The parties spend about $20 for phone calls, research and personal contacts for each new voter they turn out.
Cutting off soft money contributions might curb the use of such money for TV ads, but it also would probably force the parties to cut by 20 percent spending aimed at drawing out new voters, according to a study by Stephen Ansolabehere, a political scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
"It's a little like throwing the baby out with the bath water," he said.
The study also found that Republicans and Democrats probably would have to cut by 2 percent spending on boosting Election Day turnout.
The McCain-Feingold legislation also could make both major parties much more dependent on well-organized interest groups such as unions or religious organizations to help turn out voters. That would give such groups even more political clout.
That would be compounded if, as many analysts predict, the U.S. Supreme Court threw out a second major element of McCain-Feingold that would prohibit corporations and labor unions from financing political ads close to an election. It also would require other groups to identify the contributors who finance their political ads. Analysts say such restrictions would infringe on the constitutional right of free speech.
If McCain-Feingold succeeded in curbing the flow of cash to the political parties, the money would flow instead to special interest groups, which would still be free to buy TV ads.
"There would be an awful lot of money freed up," said Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia. "Wealthy individuals will still want to influence politics and government. If they can't give it to parties, they'll give to interest groups or run ads themselves."
The news media could be another unintended winner from the McCain-Feingold bill. If the law muffled the voices of political parties by limiting their ability to finance TV ads, it would increase the relative volume of the media voices that reach millions of Americans.
"Fewer voices will be heard in the public square," said John Samples of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington. "And the voices that now dominate, the existing media, will be all the louder."
Cutting off unregulated donations to parties also could make incumbent members of Congress even more secure. The two major parties now use soft money to support both incumbents and challengers, but interest groups bet mostly on incumbents. That has left the two major parties as the only major source of cash for many challengers who are not rich enough to finance their own campaigns. If McCain-Feingold deprived the parties of this money, it would be likely that even fewer incumbents would be challenged.
The proposed legislation also could gum up the workings of government.
Though the two major parties have lost the allegiance of many Americans, they still control the machinery of politics and help marshal hundreds of ethnic, racial and religious groups into two broad coalitions. Even so, the American system of government is already prone to gridlock, and if political power splinters under McCain-Feingold's financial constraints, decision-making could bog down even more.
"The parties help stabilize an inherently unstable political system," Sabato said. "Anything that weakens those institutions makes democracy more unstable in the United States."
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