March 16, 2001

Forget tax cuts, and whether or not Strom Thurmond will leave office before the end of his term. The most important issue facing the new Congress is campaign finance reform. Without it, this democracy is in grave danger of becoming a commercial oligarchy, serving only a constituency of wealthy campaign contributors.

The timing is auspicious for hearings on the bipartisan McCain-Feingold Campaign Reform Act scheduled to begin next Monday. The bill would ban "soft money," the unlimited donations made directly to political parties. According to the Federal Election Commission, both Republicans and Democrats set records in last November's election, amassing nearly $500 million in such contributions. Fueled by a groundswell of public outrage at such excess, and with the 60 votes necessary to break a Senate filibuster, campaign finance reform is poised to become law.

But not without a struggle. Neither President Bush, who was the beneficiary of more campaign contributions than any candidate in history, nor the fundraisers at the Republican National Committee, which received $67.6 million from corporations and industries, are about to abandon those cash cows.

Even Democrats, once champions of campaign finance reform, are expressing doubts over McCain-Feingold now that its passage seems imminent. In recent years, Democrats have benefited from the same unlimited soft-money contributions as their GOP counterparts although Republicans still lead in hard money donations--contributions of up to $2,000 per election that go directly to candidates. During the 2000 campaign, Republicans raised $447 million to the Democrats' $270 million.

While Democrats waffle, the GOP has gone on the offensive, launching a two-pronged attack on the McCain-Feingold bill. The first strategy has been to introduce a red herring, something that looks like reform but is actually its opposite. This clever bit of sophistry comes in the form of a Senate bill introduced Feb. 10 by Sens. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., and Mary Landrieu, D-La.

The Hagel-Landrieu bill raises the ceilings on individual and PAC donations so high as to make limits meaningless. Currently, individuals are limited to donations of $20,000 a year to a national party committee, $1,000 to a candidate for a primary campaign, $1,000 for the general election and an annual total of $25,000 for all candidates combined. Instead of banning soft-money donations by individuals, unions and corporations to political parties, Hagel-Landrieu triples those limits, raising the cap on those donations to $60,000 annually.

Hagel-Landrieu also allows senators, representatives and candidates for these offices to raise unlimited sums of money to be channeled into state parties for use in their campaigns. This provision reinforces the practice of circumventing federal limits by having candidates raise money for state parties. McCain-Feingold, on the other hand, places an outright ban on raising soft money for use in any federal election and imposes strict ceilings on money used in state elections.

The second attack on McCain-Feingold is a call for "paycheck protection," which would require each union member to sign a card agreeing to allow the union leadership to use a percentage of that individual's dues for political action.

"Paycheck protection" is actually a misnomer because, under current law, union members' paychecks are already "protected." No portion of a member's dues or paychecks can be used for political purposes without the member's prior authorization. Union members are already free to ask for a refund from the union if money is used for political purposes without consent.

The unions refer to the president's ploy as "paycheck deception," a crude attempt to silence the most powerful voices on the left, without any equivalent restriction on soft-money contributions from corporations.

Corporations currently outspend unions 15 to 1, according to figures compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., a co-sponsor of the Campaign Reform Act, calls paycheck protection a "poison pill" whose only purpose is to sabotage effective reform legislation.

Although soft-money proponents claim political donations are a form of free speech, the Founding Fathers made no such provision. The First Amendment to the Constitution states that Congress shall make no law "abridging the freedom of speech," but nowhere does it equate free speech with money. In fact, by placing a dollar amount on our ability to make our voices heard, unrestricted soft money silences free speech.

Without an overhaul of our current campaign finance laws, politics will become just another name for institutionalized bribery, undermining the very essence of representational democracy.

March 16, 2001 is a syndicated political columnist living in Vermont. She can be reached at pmproj@progressive.org. (Editor's note: This op-ed is written for the Progressive Media Project and is available to all newspapers subscribing to the Knight-Ridder/Tribune wire service.)

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