The Fake Fight on Campaign Finance

Heralded by a chorus of pieties from the liberal press, the McCain-Feingold bill passed the Senate on April 2 and has now moved to the House, where the former roach exterminator from Texas, Tom DeLay, has vowed to kill it. He'd be shrewder to let the bill pass.

Why? Well, the McCain-Feingold bill wasn't that much to begin with. Indeed, it resembled nothing so much as Hilary's health care proposal, a nominal reform measure that might well create new and hidden opportunities for political chicanery and corruption. The bill did have a few teeth. But most of those were extracted well before Senate passage and the addition of new exemptions making it easier for millionaires to give more to the candidates of their choice.

NPR, The New York Times, the Washington Post, and other elite opinion-makers have already announced that the passage of the bill by the Senate signals a new era in reformist politics, as if the Congress was enacting a kind of purification ritual, cleansing it of past sins.

Some of those sins are quite recent, as with giveaways piling up in the tax bill, handouts to energy companies, rollback of the ergonomics rules. And on and on. It's simply inconceivable that the very same congress that approved the bankruptcy bill (as dictated by lawyers for the credit card companies) by a grotesquely lopsided margin only a few weeks ago is somehow now genuinely interested in shielding itself from the corrosive influence of the rich and the big corporations.

McCain and Feingold largely sat silent as their bill was ravaged by the lords of the Senate, such as Pete Domenici, Republican from New Mexico, who offered an amendment to raise the hard money contribution limit from $1,000 to $2,000 and increase the total annual hard money contributions per individual from $25,000 to $37,500. Domenici couched his argument in populist rhetoric. He said the boost was needed to help candidates compete with self-financed multimillionaires. The amendment passed easily. It was co-sponsored by Illinois' Dick Durbin, now the leading liberal in the Senate.

"Raising hard money contributions limits for candidates facing wealthy self-funded opponents simply tightens the iron grip of special interests' hold over our political system," says Nick Nyhart, director of Public Campaign. "This cure is worse than the disease. As it is, a tiny group of donors are funding our politicians. In the 2000 elections, just one-eighth of one percent of voters gave a campaign contribution of $1,000 or more to a candidate. Allowing them to give three or six times as much will only increase the power of this underrepresented group who want legislative favors in return for their contributions." These contributors are largely white, male, and wealthy. To maximize their influence and evade hard money restrictions, corporate executives have learned to bundle their donations by recruiting family members and colleagues to each give the maximum contribution. To see how this works we have only to look at the money behind the passage of the bankruptcy bill. Last year, credit card giant MBNA gave $365,725 in bundled hard money contributions to members of the Senate Judiciary Committee alone. This committee had jurisdiction over the crafting of the bankruptcy bill that served to bail out MBNA and screw its credit card customers. MBNA also gave the Bush campaign $240,700 in bundled contributions. Under the new measure, MBNA could double or triple these numbers.

The main selling point of the McCain-Feingold bill is its cap on soft money contributions to political parties. But the soft money caps are more than compensated for by the hikes in hard money limits. Corporations gave about a half billion dollars to the parties in the last election cycle. But the new hard money limits will allow contributions to increase to $760 million.

The bill escaped the clutches of that newfound defender of the First Amendment, Senator Mitch "Money Talks" McConnell, the Kentucky Republican, who had single-handedly derailed the bill in past sessions. "McConnell could have mothballed the bill procedurally, but he didn't try," a Republican staffer tells us. "The marching orders were to put up a fake fight, excise some of the most unpalatable sections, then give McCain his triumph."

McCain himself seems weary with the entire endeavor. Perhaps his struggle with cancer has dampened some of the old fire. As for Feingold, he has used the Bush presidency to complete his transformation from perhaps the most principled member of the Senate to Pecksniffian piety, as evinced by his role in undermining any effective Democratic opposition in the Senate to the nomination of Ashcroft as Attorney General. Feingold is Gene McCarthy without the wit and the spine. For example, he voted against an amendment offered by Paul Wellstone that would have permitted states to underwrite public financing of federal campaigns. Feingold claimed that the measure would have violated the bi-partisan nature of the bill.

Bush would be shrewd to buck the Cro-magnons in his party, such as DeLay, on this one and sign the bill if it reaches him. After all, it deprives McCain of his signature issue and thus almost certainly staves off a primary challenge from the Arizona wild man in 2004.

Ultimately, the McCain-Feingold bill favors incumbents and serves to further insulate the two conjoined parties from independent challenges. The message isn't lost on Green Party organizers. "The Senate rejected public financing of campaigns, discounted postal rates and free air time for candidates," Carol Miller of the New Mexico green Party, tells us. "This so-called reform bill actually serves to protect the current corrupt system from reform."