March 19, 2001

6:24 AM

Campaign finance reform gets 2 weeks of debate in the Senate starting today. It has become a battle between the McCain-Feingold bill and the Dubya-D-40 backed Hagel-Landrieu bill. Will anything meaningful get passed? Will it matter if it does?
posted by quirked (18 comments total)

Probably not, and no. Lots of people think so-called campaign finance reform is a good idea on the surface; after all, "reform" is always good, isn't it? But when they start to figure out what these bills are all about, and the number of rights they would take away, they'll start turning against it, and loudly. If it ever gets anywhere in the first place. This is the fifth year in a row the McCain-Feingold bill has been introduced, and it's never gotten anywhere before. The only reason it seems to have the slightest bit of extra traction now is because McCain got a slight bit of GOP presidential nomination support last year, which he, and the news media, are misinterpreting as some sort of mandate. To which I say: John, you lost. Ain't no mandate in losing.
posted by aaron at 10:46 AM on March 19, 2001

Oh, almost forgot. The bills are almost certainly unconstitutional. Free speech is free speech. Anything that might pass will get killed by the Supreme Court in the end.
posted by aaron at 10:49 AM on March 19, 2001

Bribery is not a right
posted by Octaviuz at 10:54 AM on March 19, 2001

Campaign contributions are not bribery, any more than it's bribery when I call my congressman's office to bitch about something after I voted for him.
posted by aaron at 11:07 AM on March 19, 2001

If they really want to take money out of politics, they should start by taking politics out of money. (from nolobby.com)
posted by frednorman at 11:26 AM on March 19, 2001

As a politically interested person myself, I fully intend to donate money to political causes at some point in the future. I think, however, that there should be low caps on individual's contributions (if this is free speech then everyone should have the right to talk just as loudly), an elimination of contributions by organizations and public monies as the primary source of campaign funds. This would allow each candidates voice to be equally heard, the voters could decide based on their content not their volume.
posted by Octaviuz at 11:33 AM on March 19, 2001

So at what point do "political favors" become "services rendered"?

Conservatives have been hounding the Clintons on accepting campaign money for pardons. But what I find a lot more disturbing are policies being pushed by Dubya that will benefit large contributors to his campaign.

For instance: "bankruptcy reform" that will make it harder for credit card holders to seek bankruptcy protection courtesy of MBNA, Dubya's biggest contributor; a reversal on Dubya's energy policy, thanks to $3.8 million in soft money from the coal industry; and a rollback of workplace ergonomic regulations that will benefit companies like UPS, which donated $1 million.

So why, pray tell, is Clinton in the wrong and Dubya in the right? What really is the difference between personal and corporate favors for campaign contributions?
posted by rklawler at 11:34 AM on March 19, 2001

First, I thought I would do my part to add to this discussion with this little bit of procrastination-produced-parody.

Just trying to spread the meme a bit further (if someone with more Photoshop-experience wishes to produce a better version of this graphic, perhaps with altered text in the features bullet-list, and perhaps a cap that looks like Dubya's head, but with the red straw sticking out of his nose (for example), feel free).

As for the issue at hand, I'm generally with aaron... more regulations are only further hampers to our freedom of speech. If you will recall, the Bush campaign tried to force the guy behind gwbush.com to file FEC disclosures as a PAC because his expenses to create and maintain that parody site were over $1000. The more regulations that are in place, the more tools the government will have to use against political speech it does not like. Almost any political speech, especially in regards to actions of Presidents, could be construed as campaign speech, and thus regulated under election contribution law. It's a slippery slope, folks. We need less regulation, not more.


posted by daveadams at 1:45 PM on March 19, 2001

Campaign contributions, while they may not look very nice, are almost never direct quid pro quo offers, and very hard to prove even in the rare cases that they are.

So the difference is really just that Dubya's policy decisions are a lot more difficult to spot than Clinton's pardons.

And your examples would be almost impossible to prove, since they're about things that for which most elected officials had proven, on-the-record strong opinions about well before Bush took office.

But of course. The campaign contributions were poured in well before Bush took office. ;)
posted by rklawler at 2:05 PM on March 19, 2001

It would only allow the candidates' voices to be heard as much as the news media wanted them to be heard.
A fact which seems to slip the minds of both viewers and broadcasters is that the airwaves belong to the people of the USA and are leased to the media be the FCC.
In my plan (which is not the product of my own genius but has been proposed by greater minds than my own), radio and television stations would be required to set aside equal blocks of time for free campaign advertising (they would not be allowed to put the Taxpayers' Party on at 2:39 AM) this both solves the problem of equal access and reduces the amount of money needed to run for office.
As for the concentration of the news editors, while they are expected to be fair and impartial, the Bill of Rights gets in the way of mandating how many minutes and seconds they should dedicate to each candidate. (This is a good thing, I'm rather fond of the freedom of the press.)
posted by Octaviuz at 2:32 PM on March 19, 2001

not be, by the FCC
The spellchecker obviously doesn't understand what I'm trying to get across.
Wait...
Doh!
posted by Octaviuz at 2:36 PM on March 19, 2001

The robber baron piggies are just transparently carving off more pieces of the public pie for themselves, and you idiots are bickering over who's the least slimy, Bush or Clinton.

I don't understand how a person can, in good conscience, defend the ability of big corporate entities to pour huge amounts of cash into the political system.

What good comes of it? How can you deny the bad that comes of it? Why do you insist that greed plus more greed in the end produces moral goodness?

The idiocy is staggering.... The stench of the blind religious fanaticism burns my airbreathing passages....
posted by TheShovel at 2:45 PM on March 19, 2001

Almost any political speech, especially in regards to actions of Presidents, could be construed as campaign speech, and thus regulated under election contribution law. It's a slippery slope, folks. We need less regulation, not more.

While free speech is arguably our single most important right under the constitution, this isn't a case of some people not being allowed to express their political opinions. They're spending millions of dollars to broadcast these opinions to millions of potential voters. This money involved makes politicians too susceptible to special interests. If it were just free speech, I would agree that it shouldn't be regulated. But this isn't about expression; millions of dollars are at stake. This much money needs to be carefully regulated.
posted by Loudmax at 10:17 PM on March 19, 2001

Aaron: Let me get this straight. You posted an anti-bankruptcy post last week. And now you're taking up for their ability to shower anyone with cash, on either side of the aisle? Money will always find a way, you can argue, but . . . do you have any other ideas? Or are you just going to yell and scream bloody murder to yourself and people on mefi, etc. about such deeply flawed bills as the bankruptcy one when they pass, as they are sure to, in the very near future?

Not a few people had been taking advantage of bankruptcy laws, sure, by the way. Even though rates of filing for bankruptcy have gone down over the past year, they'd risen considerably in previous years. So the bankruptcy case was not strictly quid pro quo. It was a case where one could seriously argue that something needed to be done. The big money gets involved and skews the process (or makes a preemptive strike, in pressing for legislation in a certain hot policy area before others do.)

A related area that could stand some legislation: Getting poor folks hooked on loathsome high-interest credit and ruining their lives through check cashing schemes, etc. Alan Greenspan briefly brought this to the American public's attention a year or two ago, saying it needed to be studied. There are far too many Americans who've funded middle-class-to-lavish lifestyles through such unfathomably sleazy operations. I doubt campaign finance reform would fix the problem in and of itself. But why does no one take up the case against these glorified loan sharks that they with anything remotely resembling seriousness? Why are credit card forms sent out en masse to college students? Why do I get a different card offer every week? This sort of crap wasn't considered kosher 15, maybe 10, years ago.
posted by raysmj at 10:18 PM on March 19, 2001

The idiocy is staggering.... The stench of the blind religious fanaticism burns my airbreathing passages....

Very persuasive, there, Shovel.
posted by kindall at 10:41 PM on March 19, 2001

Also for the record, don't know about Bush's backing (the linked story says nothing about it, except that he's talked to the two primary sponsors), but Mary Landrieu, although "flexible," is hardly a raging conservative. Hagel, in turn, is a moderate conservative, very blah, grey, etc. Sounds like a bill that's an attempt to get around the possible Constitutional problems with McCain-Feingold. The thing to watch is amendments.
posted by raysmj at 10:51 PM on March 19, 2001