In the Obama era, incremental conservative progress that gets signed into law is a rare thing.
With the coming CR/Omnibus funding bill spending levels set, the big fight between Republicans, Democrats, and Republicans is over policy riders. The left wants riders, but not the right’s riders, and vice versa.
But now, the fracas between establishment Republicans and the House Freedom Caucus (HFC) is on display again, this time over… fewer campaign finance regulations?
Indeed, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the GOP’s most consistent crusader against campaign finance regulations, has a plan to reduce the government’s role in regulating political speech.
As Politico reports:
Joining the HFC is Big Grassroots, 50 conservative leaders, who have circulated a letter opposing McConnell’s proposed rider and other policies.
Former Virginia attorney general and president of the Senate Conservatives Fund Ken Cuccinelli framed it this way:
According to a Roll Call report, the HFC has made the McConnell rider one of their four top priorities in the CR/Omnibus debate. Joining McConnell’s proposed rider is their opposition to an Obamacare provision that would bail out insurance companies, funding for Planned Parenthood, and Syrian refugee policy. The Conservative Action Project letter, has twice as many priorities: the aforementioned, and opposition to the Iran nuclear deal, sanctuary cities, the President’s executive action on amnesty for illegal immigrants, a proposed EPA regulation regarding “waters of the United States” and the Paris Protocol global warming framework.
While Christmas is the giving season, it’s not clear whether Majority Leader McConnell or Speaker Ryan will give the House Freedom Caucus any presents from their wish list. McConnell’s caucus is far less divided, and Ryan, who pledged to play nice with the HFC, has to consider whether giving in on only one or two options would free up many, or any, HFC votes.
It likely won’t, though, as most of the members of the 40-or-so member group will likely vote no on the bill, as is tradition.
Opposition to gutting a major provision of campaign finance reforms from the HFC and Big Grassroots is bizarre, but understandable. It’s an incremental, yet not universal, change in the right direction: an argument conservatives have used for years when pushing for limits on late-term or partial-birth abortions.
Incidentally, Politico reports the HFC is “planning to offer a policy rider that focuses on curbing abortion.” What, exactly, they propose isn’t yet known.
Here, however, a conservative policy win is a loss for the most conservative among the conservatives. That’s because when campaign finance regimes were dreamed up over recent decades, they were drawn to reflect the reality of the times: Groups like Heritage Action, FreedomWorks, and the Senate Conservatives Fund were not big players. Now, they are.
The opposition letter from the Big Grassroots groups reads, in part:
Put another way, the groups are framing McConnell’s incremental reform to reduce government influence in campaign finance laws in somewhat cynical terms, in that McConnell is going out of his way to “subordinate” their voices.
It is accurate to say that the two political parties, the bedrock of the foundation for electing federal candidates in all of modern political history would benefit from the change, and the multi-candidate organizations, a recent development that’s here to stay, would not. The multi-candidate organizations, not wrongly, want their cut, too.
Yes, McConnell does have a history of fighting with non-establishment groups or non-traditional politicians. Just ask Jim Bunning and Rand Paul about the 2010 election. It’s easy to frame McConnell as an establishment operator purely out to squash challenges from the right, but the reality tells a different story.
A longtime appropriator and the kingmaker of the Kentucky GOP, McConnell has adapted. After his chosen horse lost to Rand Paul, he befriend him and later, his former primary challenger Matt Bevin, endorsing Bevin’s successful bid for governor and Paul’s bid for President. Paul’s flailing presidential campaign not withstanding, he is also still running for re-election to the Senate in Kentucky next year. A change in the Kentucky GOP rulebook helped him circumvent a Kentucky law preventing candidates from appearing on the ballot twice, which was unlikely to happen without McConnell’s support.
McConnell is a true believer in fewer campaign finance laws to a religious degree. Yet, unlike the HFC, McConnell is skilled in the art of the possible. Lifting the cap on coordination between multi-candidate organizations and candidates is a non-starter for Democrats, who are still hell bent on ramping up regulations to curb independent expenditures. (Google any Democratic candidate and Citizens United.)
It’s hard to know for sure unless you try — a staple argument of Big Grassroots and the HFC — but McConnell betting on his rider is a tell that he thinks the Democrats might go for it, and thus might be possible in the current political environment. When it comes to negotiating with Democrats and getting conservative policy signed into law, McConnell is a shark and the HFC / Big Grassroots are not.
After all, that’s their purpose: principled fights which often are on the losing side. Not an ignoble goal.
Only here, they’re contradicting a potentially attainable conservative chink-in-the-armor victory because, well, it doesn’t explicitly help their bottom line.
