At a January 30 National Press Club luncheon in Washington, House and Senate minority leaders Richard Gephardt and Tom Daschle announced a major 1997 legislative priority for their respective Democratic caucuses. National politics, Gephardt mournfully noted, have never been “more alien to the lives of average Americans, more distant, and ultimately more disengaged.” Our discourse has “degenerated into a poisonous spectacle of negativity and half- truths and outright falsehoods.” It is all too much, this raucous debate.
So Rep. Gephardt and Sen. Daschle now propose that there be less of it. Specifically, and explicitly, they propose to abridge the First Amendment and grant the federal government sweeping and strict authority to regulate American political advocacy: Who may speak, when, where, for how long, and for what purpose. Why? In order to persuade public opinion that Congress is boldly determined to pursue campaign “reform,” so-called. “Let’s shock the people,” Gephardt recommends. “Let’s amend the Constitution.”
Okay, we’re shocked. Shocked, first, that the congressional Democratic party would formally commit itself to such a frontal assault on political speech, which the Constitution has for 210 years insulated from government restraint and penalty. And we’re shocked, next, that the country’s newspapers — whose own First Amendment interests are implicated, as well — haven’t responded to this putrid idea by running Gephardt and Daschle out of Washington on a rail.
Perhaps the nation’s editorial pages do not take these gentlemen’s initiative seriously as a practical matter. Fair enough. Chances are virtually nonexistent, as Gephardt and Daschle themselves admit, that Congress will act directly to disembowel the First Amendment this year. Or perhaps our observing scribes are inclined to ignore the proposal for its tooobvious ulterior partisan purpose. The Democratic party currently faces the largest campaign-financing scandal in decades. Its congressional leaders argue that they are somehow not really guilty — indeed, that the Constitution made them do it, by sustaining a bipartisan electoral system that has become thoroughly infected by money.
It bears repeating here that this spin is more than simply transparent. It is a lie. At issue in the latest Democratic fund-raising controversies are not what President Clinton calls “loopholes” in an “outdated” regime of federal election law. The White House and Democratic National Committee stand (convincingly) accused of soliciting and accepting financial contributions from foreign nationals, soliciting and accepting financial contributions from concealed sources, and soliciting and accepting financial contributions using government employees on government time in government offices.
These are not constitutionally protected enterprises. They are crimes, each of them, right now, under existing federal statutes. Why the United States needs a constitutional amendment — or any other legislative “reform,” for that matter — to prevent the Democratic party from violating laws already on the books is a question Rep. Gephardt and Sen. Daschle cannot answer.
But with a promise of vigorous support from the president, they will push such legislation again this year. The nominally bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 1997 was introduced in the Senate January 21, along with companion legislation in the House. It is the same “McCain-Feingold” bill that died in a Senate cloture motion last year. Only worse: A new provision attempts to neutralize a June 1996 Supreme Court ruling that established a right to unlimited political advocacy by state-level political parties.
Previous editorials in THE WEEKLY STANDARD have analyzed the McCain- Feingold measure. Suffice it to say that the bill would place severe constraints on any federal campaign activity that costs money. It would expand the realm of campaign-related speech subject to those constraints to include “any suggestion to take action with respect to an election,” even by a nonpartisan public-interest group. And it would authorize the Federal Election Commission to make unilateral guesses about when such “suggestions” are about to occur — so that the commission might quickly muzzle the talk with a restraining order.
McCain-Feingold is ugly, foolish, and blatantly unconstitutional on any number of levels. And at this point, at least, its prospects are little better than those for the Gephardt-Daschle First Amendment gambit. This year’s larger Republican Senate majority is more hostile to the bill than ever. And it has an implacable enemy in Kentucky senator Mitch McConnell, who will once again, if the need arises, kill McCain-Feingold — and preserve American liberty — with a filibuster threat.
Still, campaign-finance reform will remain a front-page issue for many months. Democrats will use the scandal-charged atmosphere created by their own misdeeds to advance such reform. They will charge opposing Republicans with defending “sleaze.” And they will hope that in the resulting debate, their misdeeds are gradually forgotten. So for reasons of partisan selfinterest — and so that the essential principles involved don’t get lost in the smoke — Republicans had better give some serious strategic consideration to precisely how they intend to kill the McCain-Feingold bill.
It’s not clear that the problem has even occurred to the GOP as yet. Kentucky senator Fred Thompson’s Governmental Affairs Committee has been charged by the Republican leadership with investigating fundraising corruption in the 1996 campaign. He wants a large staff and budget and a period of several months in which to prepare, with public hearings not beginning until at least June. He has sworn he will let the chips fall where they may; no credible allegation of corruption — against Democrats or Republicans — will go unscrutinized. And he also hopes to examine “our campaign-finance system” writ large, quite apart from questions of actual past illegality, and “seek out ways in which we can improve it.” Sen. Thompson has some “ways” in mind, of course. He is one of only two Republican sponsors — with Arizona’s John McCain himself — of the McCain-Feingold scheme.
No good will come if the Thompson hearings are transformed into an extended pep rally for speechquashing campaign reform. It would be nice if Republicans proposed campaign reforms with real merit. The current $ 1,000 limit on individual contributions to federal candidates hasn’t changed a dime since 1974. It should be doubled, at least, and indexed for inflation, which would instantly cut the time candidates spend snuffling around for cash by more than half. The public-funding program for major-party presidential candidates should be abolished. That program’s “voluntary” spending limits, after all, are what encouraged the Democratic National Committee to hunt so aggressively for “soft money” last year — to its current embarrassment.
And it would be doubly nice, and much more important, if Republicans announced right away, up front, this month, that they cannot accept and will not allow to pass anything remotely resembling the McCain-Feingold bill. Campaign-finance reform is not so “popular” as we are usually told. It is a low priority in most public-opinion surveys. Bill Clinton, remember, besieged by revelations from last year’s campaign, now enjoys the highest approval ratings of his presidency.
Republicans have nothing to lose, in short, from no-compromise opposition to campaign-finance reform, as that idea is generally understood. And the country and its Constitution have everything to gain.
David Tell, for the Editors
