The remark was cynical in the extreme since Bush’s lieutenants on Capitol Hill had actively worked against the legislation–or it was Bush’s way of alerting Republican stalwarts there was still time to kill the bill by claiming it didn’t go far enough? Either way, Bush’s comments had so much spin they were the political equivalent of a triple axel.
After the president spoke, opposition forces egged on by the White House and the Republican National Committee labored through the night trying to pass a series of “poison pill” amendments designed to weaken Shays-Meehan to the point where it would be ineffective. The amendments were also designed to alter the bill enough from the Senate’s McCain-Feingold version that a conference committee would have to reconcile the difference, giving opponents an opportunity to permanently bottle-up the legislation.
By the time the final vote tally was taken, it was 2:45 in the morning, and the results were close to a rout of the opposition. Never had so many members of Congress–198 Democrats and 41 Republicans–acted against their immediate self-interest by voting to lessen the amount of money flowing into the political system. Only one amendment survived, and it mimics the Senate bill by increasing the amount candidates can raise from individuals from $1,000 to $2,000 per election.
The mood in the Capitol the morning after is one of great uncertainty. Something big just happened, the first significant reform in the way politicians raise money since the post-Watergate measures adopted a quarter century ago.
Yet opponents still have one more weapon in their arsenal, and his name is Mitch McConnell. The Kentucky senator has said for years that he would do whatever it takes to defeat reform, and he is now vowing to filibuster the bill when it comes before the Senate if the reformers try to circumvent a conference committee. Sens. McCain and Feingold claim they have “precleared” the changes made by the House, and that a conference committee to reconcile the House and Senate bills is unnecessary.
If McConnell makes good on his threat, the reformers would need to get a filibuster-proof 60 votes; McCain-Feingold passed the Senate with 59 votes. Still, Connecticut Republican Christopher Shays, who took on his own party to push through the bill, has been saying all week, “I’d rather be us than them.”
President Bush must be dreading having to invite his rival, John McCain, the godfather of campaign-finance reform, to a bill signing at the White House. Without McCain capitalizing on his campaign popularity and championing reform last spring, the Senate would have never taken up the bill, much less passed it by a healthy margin. Twice before, in 1998 and 1999, the House had passed campaign-finance reform with 250 votes. These were “free votes” in congressional parlance because members knew the legislation would never make it through the Republican-controlled Senate. When McCain broke the logjam, the stage was set.
Then came September 11 and campaign-finance reform was off the agenda. It might never again have surfaced during the Bush presidency if Enron had not come along. With two thirds of the Senate and half of the House receiving political donations from Enron, the image of a government bought and paid for by a potentially criminally corrupt corporation sent members scrambling for cover.
Shays-Meehan, like McCain-Feingold, bans soft money, the huge unregulated sums donated by corporations, labor unions and individuals to political parties. The legislation also curbs advertising paid for with soft money during the final 60 days before an election (30 days before a primary), which raises free-speech issues and is sure to spark a constitutional challenge. Reformers did manage to insert a “severability” clause, meaning if one element of the bill is struck down by the courts, the rest will stand.
House Speaker Denny Hastert declared the fight over reform “Armageddon,” yet Democrats will be hurt more by the changes–at least in the short term. The Democratic leadership in Congress strongly backed the bill, but Democratic Party chairman Terry McAuliffe worries that fund-raising will become much more difficult without access to soft money. It was the one area where Democrats, while still behind Republicans, were catching up. (Remember Clinton’s infamous coffees and the selling of the Lincoln Bedroom?)
The truth is nobody knows the true impact of the ban on soft money. It took three or four presidential elections after the Watergate reforms before the loophole on soft money was fully exploited. The two major parties collected a half-billion dollars in soft money during the 2000 election. It probably won’t take as long this time for clever accountants and lawyers to figure out new ways to get money into the system.
But the time has passed both substantively and politically for defending the status quo. Louisiana Rep. Billy Tauzin is no fan of government-mandated campaign-finance reform, but says he’ll adapt to whatever changes get made. “My bottom line is you make the rules, and I’ll follow them.” But he also predicts that savvy politicians will find a way around government regulations. He recalls how as a young legislator in Louisiana he determined that he would try to outlaw the gill net, a particularly abhorrent kind of net that fish swim into and get their gills caught. Because it snares everything, it kills a lot of fish other than the species a fisherman is looking to catch. “Every time we changed the law, the fishermen would change the net just enough so it didn’t meet the definition under the law,” he says. Tauzin once brought in a 2,000-foot gill net and threw it over the legislators. “I almost got arrested by the fire marshal, but I made the point of how horribly devastating this net was. I went through that for 20 years [trying to outlaw the net]. When I think of campaign finance reform, I think of those fishermen out there building a new net.”
