Gagging on Political Reform

The Federal Election Commission and its "good government" allies are crushing free speech.

Allison R. Hayward & Steven Hayward from the October 1996 issue

(Page 5 of 5)

The existing regulations have done very little to reduce the actual influence of big money in politics. Instead, the political reforms of the Watergate era have made campaign financing into an even finer art, largely dominated by insider practitioners in Washington. If anything, the post-reform climate has enhanced the ability of special interests to influence Congress, demonstrating again that the law of unintended consequences is the most frequently enacted of all laws (though whether this effect was in fact unintended may be open to a healthy skepticism). Meanwhile, genuine grassroots citizen groups face substantial hurdles to effective participation. The result is a distinct chilling of political speech, if not a direct attack on the First Amendment.

A few keen observers of this situation, such as the University of Virginia's Larry Sabato, recognize that campaign reform is a manifest failure and that we should ease or remove existing campaign finance regulations. In their recent book Dirty Little Secrets , Sabato and Glenn Simpson advocate what they call "deregulation plus," which would involve significantly increasing--if not abolishing--contribution limits, along with strengthened disclosure rules. We should, they argue, "[l]et a well-informed marketplace, rather than a committee of federal bureaucrats, be the judge of whether someone has accepted too much money from a particular interest group or spent too much money to win an election."

Conventional wisdom runs the other way: Reformers want a vast expansion of the government's power to regulate politics. Although campaign finance reform recently died (again) in Congress, it is sure to return for an encore engagement, cheered on by Common Cause, the Center for Responsive Politics, Ralph Nader's Public Citizen, and other goo- goos who are often the darlings of a goo-goo media.

Reformers would like to ban "soft money" and "bundling," and sharply curtail independent expenditures. Since independent expenditures are protected under the First Amendment and can't be banned outright, the reformers propose a scheme of public financing under which a candidate would receive extra public funds to match any independent expenditure on behalf of his or her opponent.

Reformers also seek a blanket ban on PACs, which would almost surely be unconstitutional. Even more ominous, the goo-goos have proposed giving the FEC injunctive powers, so that it could step in during an election campaign and stop unregulated political activity, such as ACT-UP's boycott or a Christian Coalition voter's guide. This would amount to setting up a political police. In the words of Jan Baran, a Washington attorney who represents a variety of clients in election law matters (he argued the Colorado case before the Supreme Court): "The political police have never been benign anywhere. Why do we think we can be any better at it than any other society? Are we somehow special?"