Campaign finance deformed
Free Thinking

By Richard McPike

Free speech is the core component of American democracy, the one trait of our system so fundamental that if it is compromised the whole concept of "America" falls apart. Americans are an opinionated lot, and we have the power to not only hold these opinions, but voice and act upon them because of this sacred right. Free speech is the lifeblood of a free nation. To act against it is to act against the best interests of our people.

Sadly, that is exactly what the House of Representatives did last week. Motivated by a desire to deflect fallout from the overblown Enron scandal, the House passed perhaps the worst bill to move through Congress since the Clinton tax hike of 1993, the Meehan-Shays campaign finance reform bill.

Advocates of campaign finance reform talk a good game. They claim that fundraising is out of control in our political system, that soft money is drowning our democracy and that our government is at the beck and call of corporate interests that are hostile to the good of the people. They paint terrifying pictures of a coming "Corporate States of America" where we are ruled not by a government for the people, but by a government of the executives, by the corporations and for the stockholders.

And what is their strategy to prevent this rapidly approaching political apocalypse? If the bill the House just passed and its John McCain-supported counterpart in the Senate are any indication, they want to gag the very people they claim to be protecting.

Make no mistake; campaign finance reform is a free speech issue. Ever since a raft of legislation rushed through Congress and the White House in the wake of Richard Nixon's political implosion, there has been a steady erosion of the right of American voters to financially express their support of political candidates.

Giving money to a candidate is a form of speech, and it's far more effective than staking a sign in your yard or slapping a sticker on the back of your car. By giving money to a campaign you aid the candidate by providing him or her with money to run radio and television ads that can reach far more people than any yard sign, no matter how busy a street you live on.

But since the '70s the amount of money voters can give to candidates has been choked by an absurdly low limit (roughly $1,000 per election cycle) that has not scaled with inflation. If you factor in the decline in the value of the dollar over time, those donations are now worth less than half of what they were when the law was passed.

And as the value of these donations have dropped, our campaign system itself has become more expensive, with compressed schedules, higher reliance on expensive television advertisements and climbing travel costs driving the bills for even modest campaigns ever higher. So those who want to support candidates have had to find another way to infuse their preferred party with cash, and such an opportunity was found through loopholes in the now-infamous "soft money" clause.

Soft money donations let individuals and groups give virtually unlimited funds directly to political parties for "party building purposes," such as get-out-the-vote drives. The majority of monies collected by both parties for this year's Congressional battle have been soft, not "hard" donations, which are limited to the Ford-era restrictions mentioned above.

It is this soft money that the bills now rocketing through Congress would effectively ban. That's all well and good. Soft money is a second-rate solution to a problem that shouldn't exist. But simply barring soft money and slightly raising limits for hard money donations is not the proper solution to this situation.

The proper answer is to end the need for soft money by removing all restrictions on individual giving. Since donating to campaigns is invariably tied to voting, we should allow registered voters, and only registered voters, to donate whatever they like to the campaigns they support. Since corporations and unions can't vote, their so-called "corrupting" influences should be removed from the equation by barring their donations all together.

By doing this, we can return the voice in our elections to the people, and take away the megaphones that the soft money laws have given to unions and corporate groups. Yes, it can be argued that allowing unlimited donations would give the rich a louder voice than the poor, but that's the case even today, though the increased volume for the wealthy is currently hidden in the Byzantine campaign finance system.

And don't think that this would disproportionately favor Republicans, either. There are plenty of rich Democrats out there, particularly in Southern California.

But which groups would benefit is not the issue at hand. Voters deserve to have their voices fully heard, both at the polling booth and the checkbook. Taking unions and corporations out of the picture and allowing unlimited donations from registered voters would clean up the system and put the power in election financing back with the individual voter.