March 27, 2007
McCain-Feingold Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:55 AM EST McCain-Feingold, which was supposed to clean up American politics by taking away or at least greatly reducing the taint of money, is five years old today. Has it worked? Not that I can see. McCain-Feingold passed Congress because—whatever its allegedly high-minded purposes—it’s an incumbent’s protection act. In the nature of things, incumbents will always have an easier time raising money and getting media attention than challengers, so equally restrictive rules must always favor incumbents. And it hasn’t even reduced the amount of money campaigns cost. When the presidential candidates report first-quarter donations next month, no one expects them to be anything but new records (except, apparently, for John McCain himself, whose fund-raising is stumbling). Many of the major candidates have already opted out of voluntary restrictions under the pressure of necessity. Another purpose of McCain-Feingold was to reduce negative campaigning. As John Kerry found out with the Swift Boat Veterans ads, that purpose, as well, has been an abject failure. What McCain-Feingold has unequivocally done is to reduce free speech. One of its provisions forbids advertisements by citizens groups within 30 days of a primary and 60 days of an election. In other words, everyone except the candidates and the established media has to shut up before an election. Arthur Sulzberger’s opinions are fine, John Q. Public’s are not. The Supreme Court upheld this provision—to the astonishment of nearly everyone—in one of its more shameful recent decisions. One can only hope it will see the error of its ways soon. Fortunately technology is making McCain-Feingold increasingly irrelevant. Only in the 2004 election did the Internet begin to exert a powerful, and so-far unregulated, influence on politics. It will have a much more powerful effect next year. And it won’t be restricted to the well-heeled, as television is. The spoof of the classic Apple Computer 1984 ad, targeting Hillary Clinton, that was all over YouTube last week and then spilled over into television as a news story, was cooked up by an individual on his own time. Thanks to the Internet, one needs increasingly only to be clever to get wide public attention. Many argued five years ago, correctly it appears, that there is no way to fairly and successfully regulate the flow of money into politics in a democratic society. Instead, we should make the reporting requirements much more strict and immediate. A New York Times editorial yesterday reported how the Senate currently reports political contributions: “Instead of quickly downloading [actually it’s uploading] their campaign financing data directly to the Federal Election Commission, like everybody else, senators print out their records on paper and snail-mail them to the Senate secretary. These pages have to be scanned into digital images that are then e-mailed to the election commission, where—wait now—they have to be printed and collated. This paper treadmill—perhaps 10,000 pages—is next sent to a private contractor to be tediously typed at a cost of $250,000 back into a computer, of all things. From there, the information is e-mailed back to the election commission for, yes, posting on the Internet.” By the time the money is reported, of course, it has already been put to use and, after the election, the campaign can always do the oops-clerical-error routine and return the money when it no longer matters. If it were up to me, I would remove all limits on contributions by American citizens (to the candidates, parties, and citizen groups) and simply require that every candidate and officeholder report contributions, in whatever amount, on their websites the very same day the check is deposited in the bank, along with full disclosure of who gave it and, for amounts over, say, one thousand dollars, that person’s business affiliations. The media—not to mention the other candidates—can be relied upon to keep close tabs on who is giving what to whom and reporting on it. Then the American people can decide for themselves if a candidate or officeholder is being unduly influenced. Since I’m a democrat, I have every confidence that the people are more than capable of making intelligent judgments on the matter.
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