In 2002, triumphant Sens. John McCain and Russ Feingold predicted that their Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act would put an end to big money in American politics.
What the legislation known as McCain-Feingold has wrought just eight years later is an underground network channeling unprecedented and untraceable millions into political campaigns.
Politico today has an excellent overview of the last four decades of campaign finance reform that finds the campaign reform act dismantled by the courts and its authors under political siege.
The analysis attempts to answer two basic questions that have dogged campaign finance reform from the very beginning of American campaign finance. Is the money spent on political speech as protected by the First Amendment as the speech itself? And can lawmakers ever craft a system of rules that can prevent campaign money, like water, from flowing where it will? The answers, at least in the short term, will hardly satisfy reformers.
The debate echoes similar discussion in Texas back in 2005, when this writer looked at the climate for more disclosure of the donors behind election season advertising -- a bill to make the funders more transparent failed to get out of a House committee. The story, which appeared in the Austin American-Statesman, showed that the use of 527s in the 2004 presidential election was bipartisan, but hardly equal -- remember Swift Boat?
"Once relatively obscure, 527s raised more than $400 million, about 10 percent of the $4 billion spent on presidential and congressional races in 2004, compared with about $150 million raised in 2002, Scott Thomas, chairman of the Federal Election Commission, told the Senate rules committee earlier this month. Just 25 individuals contributed $142 million of that total, and 265 donors gave at least $100,000 each, Thomas said. ...
"The Campaign Legal Center in Washington, led by Trevor Potter, former chairman of the Federal Election Commission, is at the forefront of calls for reform.
"'In our view a handful of wealthy people got around a law by saying they were just discussing issues, not candidates,' said Mark Glaze, director of the center's government ethics program. 'They were able to do it because a complacent Federal Election Commission was unwilling to apply the law.'"
The nonprofit reform group Democracy 21 predicts that in this election cycle more than $200 million will have been spent on political advertising paid from sources that cannot be traced. Without any changes in the law, that figure could top $500 million in 2012.
Craig Holman, campaign finance lobbyist for Public Citizen, the nonprofit group at the center of the legal fight for campaign finance reform for 40 years, tells Politico, “This is a low point for the campaign finance reform movement – I’ve never seen it lower. We’re not faring well today. At this point, we’re looking to monitor the level of chaos and scandal that is going to happen in the 2010 general election to try to bring life back into the reform movement going into 2012.”
The very rise of the campaign finance reform movement suggests that the public tolerance for chaos and interpretation of scandal flows and inevitably ebbs. Having failed as regulation, McCain-Feingold at least serves as a reminder of an apparently insatiable need people have for seeing their political ideas succeed. At a considerable cost.
Contact Mark Lisheron at 512-299-2318 or mark@texaswatchdog.org.
Photo of a checkbook by flickr user heidielliott, used via a Creative Commons license.
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