By: Mary Mostert, Analyst, Banner of Liberty (www.bannerofliberty.com)
March 27, 2001
In 1974, the US Congress passed a bill called "The Campaign Financing Reform Act of 1974" was hailed as a "major advance in the effort to end corruption in campaign financing." It provided to:
(a) limits on political contributions to candidates for federal elective office by an individual or a group to $1,000 and by a political committee to $5,000 to any single candidate per election, with an over-all annual limitation of $25,000 by an individual contributor;And: (b) limits on expenditures by individuals or groups "relative to a clearly identified candidate" to $1,000 per candidate per election, and by a candidate from his personal or family funds to various specified annual amounts depending upon the federal office sought, and restricts over-all general election and primary campaign expenditures by candidates to various specified amounts, again depending upon the federal office sought.
In 1976, in Buckley v Valeo (424 US 1) the U.S. Supreme Court had struck down limits on expenditures by ruling that while the "Act's contribution provisions are constitutional," the expenditure provisions violate the First Amendment." and that the "ceilings imposed accordingly serve the basic governmental interest in safeguarding the integrity of the electoral process without directly impinging upon the rights of individual citizens and candidates to engage in political debate and discussion." The decision further stated:
(b) The First Amendment requires the invalidation of the Act's independent expenditure ceiling, its limitation on a candidate's expenditures from his own personal funds, and its ceilings on over-all campaign expenditures, since those provisions place substantial and direct restrictions on the ability of candidates, citizens, and associations to engage in protected political expression, restrictions that the First Amendment cannot tolerate.
The McCain Feingold Bill, to a large extent, as written by McCain, simple ignores that ruling and is determined to stop the contributions of so-called "soft money" by all. Under it, for example, contributions for ads to support or oppose any legislation could be banned. To get around the Supreme Court's ruling, the Senate, largely ignored by the general public and the media, is coming up with various options.
Yesterday, for example, Sen. Hollings, Democrat of South Carolina, proposed to simply change the constitution to do away with the troubling Freedom of Speech provision in the First Amendment. His amendment, SJ. Res 4, read as follows:
Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled (two-thirds of each House concurring therein), That the following article is proposed as an amendment to the Constitution of the United States, to be valid only if ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several States within 7 years after the date of final passage of this joint resolution:
Article --
``SECTION 1. Congress shall have power to set reasonable limits on the amount of contributions that may be accepted by, and the amount of expenditures that may be made by, in support of, or in opposition to, a candidate for nomination for election to, or for election to, Federal office.
``SECTION 2. A State shall have power to set reasonable limits on the amount of contributions that may be accepted by, and the amount of expenditures that may be made by, in support of, or in opposition to, a candidate for nomination for election to, or for election to, State or local office.
``SECTION 3. Congress shall have power to implement and enforce this article by appropriate legislation.''.
By a scant 56-40 this amendment, which would have put a sitting congress in control of federal elections thereby assuring their re-election, was defeated. Only two wayward Republicans, Senator McCain and Senator Spector, voted in favor of scrapping the Bill of Rights where political campaigns are concerned. The thirty-eight Democrats who voted for a Constitutional Amendment that would have changed the Bill of Rights included both New York Senators, Schumer and Hillary Clinton, and both California senators, Feinstein and Boxer. To his credit, Senator Russ Feingold, Democrat from Wisconsin, voted against the Hollings attack on the First Amendment.
In the debate on the Hollings Amendment, Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, a Democrat who has been in Washington for 49 years reminisced about the good old days in 1958 when he first ran for the Senate:
"The current system is rotten, it is putrid, it stinks. The people of this country ought really to know what this system is giving to them and what it is taking from them. This system corrupts political discourse. It makes us slaves, makes us beholden to the almighty dollar rather than be the servants of the people we all aspire to serve.
..."We ran that campaign--two Senators--for $50,000. That is all we had, $50,000. We didn't have television in those days. Oh, there were a few black and white sets around. But we didn't have these expensive campaign consultants. We didn't know anything about these kinds of negative campaigns. ......One of the great ironies of the current campaign financing system is that it puts more distance between candidates and the people they hope to represent. Campaigns of today are technologically sophisticated. They rely increasingly on mass media. The whole point of current campaigns has become raising enough money to pay to more people, more times, over the airwaves."
Senator Byrd is right about his analysis of current campaigns. I often explain to younger people that the biggest problem in gaining the interest of the average America voter today is the very situation Sen. Byrd describes - the campaign consultants, speech writers, the search for a "news byte" that will be picked up in the evening news. It all costs money and it is mainly managed and created not by political candidates, but the "professionals" such as Dick Morris, who really don't care which political philosophy wins, so long as he ends up with money and a job. Morris, and other "consultants" view their entire role as one of manipulating the "stupid" public.
And how did we end up with the system Senator Byrd correctly identifies as "putrid?" We ended up with it because Senator Byrd in his 49 years in the Senate and other politicians voted to install it so they could either attack their enemies or reward their friends.
During the debate yesterday Senator Orrin Hatch, Republican of Utah, shared the results of legislation in other countries that are not limited by the First Amendment. He said, in part:
"In order to try to squeeze all that opinion out of politics, the Japanese Government limits the number of days you can campaign, the number of speeches you can give, the types of places you can speak, the number of handbills and bumper stickers you can print, and even the number of megaphones you can buy. They allow each candidate to have one megaphone. So I think we can pretty safely say that over in Japan, unfettered buying, anything like the first amendment, they have squeezed all that money right out of politics.What has been the result? The number of Japanese citizens who have `no confidence in legislators' has risen to 70 percent and voter turnout has continued to decline."
Today the Senate will debate the amendment by Sen. Chuck Hagel Republican from Nebraska, who has tried to devise a solution that would limit expenditures, which the Supreme Court said was OK to do, while easing up on allowable campaign contributions.
Keep tuned in. It's not over yet. The First Amendment, which McCain and friends hope to demolish, is still standing at this point.
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