Campaign Finance Reform Gets Votes It Needs
By Kelly Field
WASHINGTON, Jan. 24-Two area Congressmen helped give the campaign finance reform bill the push it needed to make it to the House floor yesterday. Both New Hampshire Republican Charles Bass (2nd) and Massachusetts Democrat Richard Neal (2nd) signed a discharge petition to force a vote on the bill.
Bass signed the petition after meeting with House Speaker Dennis Hastert yesterday to encourage the Speaker to consider the bill under regular procedures. Hastert refused.
Bass and Neal were joined by Wisconsin Republican Tom Petri and Florida Democrat Corrinne Brown and) in bringing the total number of signatures to the required 218. Brown had already pledged her vote, and Neal, who generally opposes the use of the discharge petition, had long promised to be the 218th vote, if needed.
“The American people deserve a full debate about how campaigns are financed,” Neal said as he signed the petition.
House supporters have been working since July to collect the 218 signatures required to compel a vote. In all, 20 Republicans bucked their party’s leadership to sign the petition.
“The speaker laid down the challenge for us last July,” co-sponsor Marty Meehan (D-5th) said at a press conference yesterday. “The challenge was to get 218 signatures for a discharge petition to bring campaign finance reform to the House floor under a fair rule.”
Meehan said the collapse of Enron Corp. heightened public awareness of the power of money in politics, causing their “tolerance for this soft-money system” to grow thin. Enron, its employees and its political action committee donated more than $5.77 million to campaigns over the past 12 years, much of it in unregulated, unlimited “soft money.”
Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21, a a campaign finance reform group, agreed, saying, “The Enron scandal has returned the nation’s attention to just how dangerous the campaign finance system in Washington is and how essential it is to reform this system.”
If passed, the bill would institute a virtual ban on soft money and prevent certain “issue” ads by interest groups from running in the last 60 days of a campaign. The Senate last year passed a somewhat more stringent companion bill.
The Sierra Club heralded the completion of the petition, saying that current law allows oil and natural gas interests to dictate environmental policy.
“We believe there is a strong link between campaign contributions from polluting industries and environmental attacks,” said political director Margaret Conway, citing President Bush’s advocacy of opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve to drilling as an example.
Campaign finance reform is opposed by the AFL-CIO, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers, who say a ban on issue ads would violate their constitutional right to free speech. The AFL-CIO spent about $9.5 million on issue ads in the 2000 elections, and the Chamber of Commerce spent about $5.5 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Published in The Eagle-Tribune, in Lawrence, Mass.
