A Hard Line on Soft Money

It is difficult to find a silver lining in the collapse of Enron. But strewn about the shredded documents and lost retirement savings, one positive outcome is emerging—a new push for campaign finance reform.

The Shays-Meehan bill has picked up steam in the House of Representatives as investigators have uncovered ever more massive political contributions from Enron. Two hundred and eighteen members of the House bucked the Republican leadership and signed a petition to force a vote on the measure, which would ban millions of dollars in soft money that currently flows to national political parties.

Though similar bills have passed both the House and Senate before, they have not done so in the same legislative session. Now, with this newfound coalition in the House and with a Democratic majority in the Senate, Rep. Martin T. Meehan (D-Mass.) and Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) finally have their chance to push this legislation through Congress. As they do, they should resist as many amendments as possible to stay true to the McCain-Feingold bill—the Senate version—and thereby protect it from entering a conference committee, where it may never again see the light of day.

In addition to banning soft money, Shays-Meehan would close a current loophole in election law that allows special interest groups and corporations to buy an unlimited amount of issue advertisements just before elections, as long as they avoid directly advocating voting for a certain candidate. The thinly-veiled message of these ads can sway an election at the last second without giving candidates a chance to respond.

Speaker J. Dennis Hastert and other members of the House leadership prefer a competing measure which would allow individual donors to give $75,000 to each of the major parties’ three national committees in addition to unlimited money for state political parties. But this plan would do next-to-nothing; it is only a feel-good measure designed to look like reform. It would keep an incredible amount of unregulated money in politics, by pushing the problem that currently plagues national political parties to the state level and thereby ignoring the source of the problem—the money itself.

Money has always been intermixed with politics, and the Shays-Meehan bill alone would not change that. Indeed, with soft-money gone, the importance of hard (regulated) money contributions will rise dramatically. It appears that this will benefit Republicans, who now run about even with Democrats in soft-money donations but have a significant edge in the hard money arena. Nonetheless, that is a small price to pay for reducing the amount of money polluting politics and for increasing the accountability of candidates for money they receive.