Last Tuesday’s Senate action on campaign-finance legisation has been widely reported as a stinging defeat for bipartisan “reform.” Not so fast. The bill in question, which failed by 29 votes, was Senate Joint Resolution 18, a constitutional amendment to repeal the nation’s 200-year-old guarantee of unrestricted political speech, a k a the First Amendment.
The campaign “reform” movement is now split on tactics. One camp, “the pretenders,” still insists that the movement’s desire to limit advocacy is perfectly consistent with the Bill of Rights. The other, the “broad-daylight” camp, blithely admits the truth: that those limitations flatly violate the Constitution
So it was that S. J. Res. 18 was advanced, in broad daylight, to abridge the First Amendment You need 67 votes to pass such a thing. “Reform” forces could only muster 38. Among those 38 were 34 of the Senate’s 45 Democrats. And four of the Senate’s 55 Republicans voted with them: Thad Cochran of Mississippi, Jim Jeffords of Vermont, Bill Roth of Delaware, and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania.
Here’s what’s truly depressing. Nine of the 61 senators voting against S. J. Res. 18 and in favor of the First Amendment are actually “pretenders.” They’re co-sponsors of the still-pending Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 1997, otherwise known as S. 25 or McCain-Feingold. This is the same, thoroughly unconstitutional legislation that S. J. Res. 18 was supposed to make possible. Seven of these nine fakers are Democrats. Two — Arizona’s John McCain and Tennessee’s Fred Thompson — are Republicans.
So, properly tabulated, last Tuesday’s vote means this: More than 90 percent of Senate Democrats are on record endorsing an evisceration of the First Amendment. (Only Dale Bumpers, Ted Kennedy, Jay Rockefeller, and Bob Torricelli have yet to make their intentions clear.) Six Republicans are with them. In all, there are 47 members of the Senate, almost half, who cannot be depended on to uphold a bedrock American liberty.
