Meehan Celebrates Passage of Campaign Finance Reform
By Kelly Field
WASHINGTON, March 20–Nine years of hard work paid off for Congressman Marty Meehan, D-Lowell, yesterday, as the Senate voted, 60-40, to pass a campaign finance reform bill he called “the most significant rewrite of our election laws in a generation.”
“This is the final nail in the ‘soft-money’ coffin,” said Meehan, who sponsored a companion bill the House passed on Valentine’s Day. “It has been a long battle. There were many times I thought this moment would never come.”
Meehan first introduced a bill to fundamentally reform campaign finance reform in 1993. Over the years, his bill underwent several revisions to make it more bipartisan and less objectionable to opponents. The Shays-Meehan bill, which passed yesterday, would ban unlimited, unregulated soft-money donations to the national political parties and prevent interest groups from running so-called issue ads in the final days before an election. Though “issue ads,” unlike “campaign ads,” cannot mention candidates’ names, they can strongly and indirectly urge a vote for or against a candidate.
The bill would also increase the amount individuals can contribute to campaigns from $1,000 to $2,000 per election, or $4,000 per election cycle.
The legislation will now go to President George W. Bush, who is expected to sign the bill soon. Opponents to the Shays-Meehan legislation, led by Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky, vow a court challenge over the constitutionality of the issue ad limitations in the bill.
“We fully intend to fight this all the way to the Supreme Court,” said Ian Welters, communications director for the American Conservative Union, one of the groups that oppose the legislation. “This bill would outlaw or criminalize speech that every American has always believed to be protected.”
The National Rifle Association, which has given generously to the political parties in the past, also objected to the issue ad restrictions.
“This creates a black-out period on issue advocacy,” said Chuck Cunningham, the NRA’s director of federal affairs. “It leaves six weeks in which citizens and their organizations would be vulnerable to bad legislation because they’ve been silenced.”
Meehan countered that so-called “issue ads” are often little more than thinly veiled campaign ads and said that he expects the bill to withstand any legal challenges.
“I know our day in court is coming, and I welcome that,” said Meehan in a speech at Georgetown University on Tuesday, where he was introduced by student Charles Daher, son of Lawrence businessman Charles Daher. “But I think the limits are going to be upheld by the US Supreme Court.” He said the Court has allowed rare restrictions on speech in cases of “compelling government interest” and cited laws banning child pornography or requiring truthful advertising and product labeling.
Public Citizen President Joan Claybrook acknowledged that “armies of political lawyers will surely try to carve out new loopholes,” but she predicted that “the Court will sustain the measure approved today.”
But Charlie Cook of Cook’s Report, an expert on congressional elections, was less optimistic, saying that “there are only two ways to reform campaigns: clean up the Constitution or kill all the lawyers. They are going to find the holes; it’s like water running down the hill. The advocacy ad [provision] has no chance of surviving a constitutional challenge.”
Supporters of campaign finance reform contend that the Shays-Meehan/McCain-Feingold bill will restore confidence in democracy by limiting the ability of wealthy individuals, corporations and unions to “buy access” and favorable treatment from politicians through soft-money donations to the political parties. They say the ban on soft money would make parties and candidates more responsive to individual voters by forcing them to rely more on smaller “hard money” donations from individuals and political action committees to get out the vote and get their messages across on television.
“The [current] system has fostered cynicism about politics [and] has had an insidious impact upon our democracy,” Meehan said on Tuesday. “Parties spend all their time romancing big donors.”
Common Cause president Scott Harshbarger said of the Senate vote, “Americans have won an historic victory to help bring our government back to the people.”
But some opponents-interest groups excluded-argue that the bill would do more to empower interest groups than to reduce the amount of money in politics. They say the bill would weaken the parties and shift control to special interests, which can still raise-and spend–as much money as they want.
“This bill doesn’t take money out of politics, it just takes the parties out of politics,” McConnell said during debate yesterday. “Make no mistake about it, soft money will exist and it will thrive under Shays-Meehan.”
Daniel Manatt, associate director of the Campaign Finance Institute, said that he doubted “anyone could say with a straight face that it will reduce the overall amount of money. Clearly, there are many ways to spend money on politics.”
If upheld, the law would go into effect on November 6, the day after the congressional elections. Yesterday, at a news conference before the vote, Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21, praised Meehan, calling him an “incredible leader.”
“He challenged the power structure,” Wertheimer said. “Some of his colleagues didn’t like it, but he never flinched, not even when people tried to take his congressional district away from him. He never flinched.”
Three New England Republicans: Sen. Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island and Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine joined eight other Republicans and Independent James Jeffords of Vermont in voting for the measure.
Published in The Eagle-Tribune, in Lawrence, Mass.
