Interest Groups Look for “Party-Building” Alternatives
WASHINGTON, March 17–Campaign finance reform is to campaign contributors what a dam is to a river: If you dam the river, it will eventually find a way around the dam.
The latest dam is the House-passed Shays-Meehan campaign finance bill that would ban “soft money” – the unregulated contributions to national political parties. The reform measures now await debate in the Senate, which passed a largely identical bill last year.
Politically persuasive interest groups, along with corporations and wealthy people, have been the principal donors of soft money to the parties because they could give large sums of money to try to influence lawmakers without being limited by regulations surrounding direct contributions – or “hard money” – to those lawmakers, which are given through political action committees (PACs).
If Shays-Meehan becomes law, they will either prowl for loopholes or enjoy the prospects of politics without the cash incentives.
More likely the new law will prompt interest groups to raise more money and spend it on their own advocacy advertising rather than contribute to the national parties. And it might cause them to increase their contributions to state parties, which would not be barred from accepting soft-money contributions under the proposed reform provisions.
What reform measures will finally emerge this session remains uncertain, but some argue that no matter the outcome, tenacious campaign donors will find a way around the reform dam.
“People won’t lay down and play dead,” said Jeff Weinstein, president of the Maine chapter of the National Rifle Association.
If the bill passes, groups such as the NRA, Sierra Club and AFL-CIO, all of which are active in Maine, are expected to look for alternative ways to influence public affairs, including raising and spending more on their own advertising and giving substantial sums of soft money to state political parties. The result could be massive interest-group fundraising, undisclosed contributions and First Amendment court battles.
The NRA, which opposes the proposed reform provisions, is already developing ways to get around the soft-money restrictions.
“People like us will likely reconfigure our fundraising and direct mail in light of more restrictions on soft money and less restrictions on hard money,” NRA chief Washington lobbyist James J. Baker told National Journal, a Washington based weekly focused on federal policy and politics.
The AFL-CIO is also increasing its PAC activity. “I think this will force us to get more union members to contribute to their union PACs,” political director Steve Rosenthal said in the in the same magazine article.
Currently, individual donators are restricted to giving $1,000 to a congressional candidate for each primary and general election, and PACs are restricted to giving $5,000 per election. These numbers would double if the pending campaign reform bill becomes law.
Hard-money contributors already use a loophole in the system called bundling, which allows individual contributors to pool their regulated donations and send them to a candidate at the same time. Bundling is effective because a block of contributions makes a larger impression on a candidate than single contributions from individuals and PACs.
American University history professor Allan J. Lichtman said bundling is a viable tool for interests groups. He added, “You may see interest groups doing more independent advocacy and spending their own money rather than giving it to parties.”
Independent advocacy occurs when interest groups, who are not affiliated with candidates but support them, pay for their own ads instead of donating the money to national parties. The national parties are officially limited to using this soft money for party-building activities such as get-out the vote campaigns and issue advertising that supports or attacks congressional candidates without mentioning the candidates’ names.
If interest groups were to replace national parties in these activities, they could become the new receptacles for large – and unregulated – individual and corporate donations.
Steven Weiss of the Center for Responsive Politics, contends, however, that banning soft-money would reduce the pressure on potential donors to give large amounts of money to influence legislation. Soft-money contributions totaled more than $500 million in the 1999-2000 election cycle.
“A lot of interest groups and corporations want to ban soft money because they’re being shut down by politicians” if they don’t give a lot of money, said Celia Wexler, a senior policy analyst at Common Cause, a nonprofit, nonpartisan lobbying organization.
On the other hand, if interest groups become the new receptacles for issue-ad donations, donors would no longer have to be identified.
Campaign finance reform would “create an interest in activism, quietly,” the Maine NRA’s Weinstein said, adding that he Some interest groups that support campaign finance reform say they won’t necessarily look to its passing as a way to increase issue advertising.
“Issue ads are a small part of what we do here,” said Dianna White, the Sierra Club’s deputy political director. “We’ll continue to do our grassroots activities,” such as marshaling its members to urge action on Congress through e-mail messages, mailings, posters and door-to-door visits.
In the past, soft money donated to national parties have financed issue ads, which are used partially to attack other candidates or policies. But because the Sierra Club depends more on grassroots activities to promote its cause rather than issue-ads, it sees no problem with another question that the Shays-Meehan bill and the companion McCain-Feingold bill in the Senate raises: whether restrictions on such advertising infringes on the First Amendment.
One of the provisions would bar issue ads 60 days before an election and 30 days before a primary. Interest groups, who object that this provision impedes their right to express their views on issues, plan to sue. American University’s Lichtman calls this “the most vulnerable part of the bill.”
“The courts have obviously, in many ways, intertwined the spending of money with free speech,” he said. “Depending upon how the court interprets the First Amendment, it could limit aspects of this bill – particularly … any attempt to control the content of advertising, which this bill does.”
Finally, while national parties would be barred from accepting soft-money contributions, state parties would not. The rationale is that soft-money contributions were originally intended for such party-building activities as encouraging people to vote. Soft money would play the same role on a state level if the campaign finance reform bill passes. Interest groups, therefore, could be expected to contribute soft-money to the state parties.
But even this also has its problems. The state parties that receive soft-money contributions from interest groups could turn around and give it right back to the national parties.
“The DNC [Democratic National Committee] practice is to transfer money to the state parties, and, within a matter of days, the state parties make payments to the DNC’s media consultants, usually in exactly the amount of the DNC’s transfer,” wrote Lisa Rosenberg in an essay written for the Center for Responsive Politics.
Shays-Meehan advocates, such as the Sierra Club’s White, admit that while the legislation is “an important first” step in reforming campaign finance, “it’s not a perfect bill, and it won’t be the end of reform.”
Published in The Bangor Daily News, in Maine.
