McCain-Feingold is not real reform since there is no public financing. In some ways, it will make it worse by encouraging all funding to be through large individual contributions. "Soft money" is the way working class people aggregate their contributions. The first PAC was the CIO's back in the 1930s.
My basic attitude is that progressives should abandon traditional public financing and appropriate the rhetoric of the Right in promoting "good government" vouchers - give every voter a voucher of $100 to send to the party or political committee of their choice. This would inject $20 billion per year of democratic funds into the political process that would counteract corporate money power.
-- Nathan newman
----- Original Message ----- From: "Carl Remick" <carlremick at hotmail.com> To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Sent: Tuesday, March 27, 2001 2:43 PM Subject: Democrats: Death continues
[From Salon]
Poison Paul?
Passed by the Senate, Paul Wellstone's amendment to McCain-Feingold could kill tough campaign finance reform this year. Do the Democrats really want to clean up politics?
By Jake Tapper
March 27, 2001 | Washington -- Before McCain-Feingold was even introduced last week, members of the bipartisan team of senators backing campaign finance reform warned that the greatest threat would not come from the devils they knew -- President George W. Bush, say, or outspoken foe Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. -- but from the devil they didn't know.
But would they have guessed it would be the most liberal senator in the country?
Late Monday, at roughly 7 p.m., after some reporters had already filed their stories for Tuesday's papers, a coalition of 27 Democrats and 24 Republicans supported an amendment to the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill offered by Sen. Paul Wellstone, D-Minn. Opponents of McCain-Feingold like Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., and Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., joined with self-proclaimed campaign finance reform champions like Wellstone and Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., to pass the amendment, which extends a ban on a certain type of political TV advertising.
But the amendment, McCain-Feingold strategists say, is constitutionally dubious, and its support was produced by senators with only one intention: to sandbag their bill.
"We were sucker-punched," said a McCain-Feingold strategist Monday evening. "It's a completely cynical attempt to kill the bill without fingerprints, so Democrats can feign piety."
The Wellstone amendment would expand the part of the bill -- penned by GOP Sens. Olympia Snowe of Maine and Jim Jeffords of Vermont -- that bans certain independent groups from running TV ads within 30 days of a primary election, and 60 days of a general election. The Snowe-Jeffords provision had exempted certain groups from the ban, nonprofit groups classified by the IRS as C-4's, ones permitted to engage in electioneering activities -- as ruled by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1986 case Massachusetts Citizens for Life vs. the Federal Election Commission. Wellstone's amendment thus takes the Snowe-Jeffords provision into territory that has already been judged to be constitutionally questionable.
This makes the bill vulnerable to a pending "non-severability" amendment -- which Bush has requested -- that would dispose of the entire McCain-Feingold bill should any part of it be thrown out by Chief Justice William Rehnquist and his brethren.
So what, exactly, was Wellstone thinking when he put forward his amendment? Wellstone spokesman Jim Farrell was quick to defend his boss's amendment. "This is a reform measure," Farrell said. "It closes a major loophole. The soft money is just going to shift to sham issue ads if we don't close the loophole."
By allowing C-4s to remain exempt from the ban on sham issue ads, Farrell says, soft money would allow "the NRA and the Christian Coalition and, to a lesser extent, the Sierra Club to come into an election three weeks out and drop a million dollars. This amendment stops that from happening."
McCain-Feingold supporters counter that, whatever Wellstone's intentions, adding C-4s to the bill is "gonna make it real hard" for it to stand up in court. "Most lawyers will say it's not constitutional." He further noted that this isn't the first time that Wellstone's purist stand on an issue worked at odds against a reform bill. McCain saw Wellstone and the left flank of the Democratic caucus vote for an amendment to McCain's 1998 omnibus tobacco bill offered by Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H. Gregg's amendment removed all liability limits for tobacco companies, a boondoggle for trial lawyers and left-wingers like Wellstone that made final passage impossible. Which was, of course, Gregg's point.
Meredith McGehee, legislative director of Common Cause, said that similar "mischief" was going on here, noting the support for the Wellstone amendment by Lott and McConnell.
"People on the other side are very opportunistic and they know if they're patient they'll get an opportunity. And Wellstone gave them an opportunity, and he knew and he didn't care. He can do what he believes but he got used," McGehee said. She noted that on there are members of Congress on the House side who share Wellstone's principles, but who "understand that you can pontificate, or you can legislate, and they choose to legislate."
"It's guys like Wellstone who hurt the cause of reform far greater than Mitch McConnell," the McCain-Feingold strategist said. "The purists are what Lenin called 'useful idiots.' They end up doing more damage to the cause of reform than the most vicious opponents."
[Full text: http://www.salon.com/politics/feature/2001/03/27/finance/index.html]
Carl
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