A Spoiler's Crusade: Senator John McCain and "the system" - campaign-finance reform

National Review, Feb 19, 2001 by Richard Lowry

At the weekly strategy lunch Senate Republicans hold in the Mansfield Room of the Capitol, John McCain always sits at a table with the same two senators, Chuck Hagel and Fred Thompson. Hagel and Thompson are among the proud, the few, who haven't been turned off by McCain's self-righteousness, or temper, or stubbornness, or some combination of all three-the traits that have made him, at least in the Senate chamber, perhaps the least popular "most popular politician in America" ever. McCain often sits with his back to the rest of his colleagues. "He's bigger than the GOP," says one Republican senator sarcastically, "bigger than Bush."

And getting bigger. Before George W. Bush had even given his victory speech following the Florida imbroglio, McCain was on CNN making one of his there-will-be-blood-on-the-floor pledges to push campaign-finance reform. Before Bush had even introduced his initial education-reform package, McCain was badgering majority leader Trent Lott to give him 21 legislative days immediately, to debate campaign finance. McCain settled for two weeks, but he insisted that they come in March, not after Easter, as Lott suggested in order to give the Senate enough time to consider Bush's education package and budget.

John McCain, who at his best on the campaign trail last year held town-hall meetings that were mini patriotic revivals, is becoming as small as his cause. This contemporary Teddy Roosevelt (as his boosters would have it) is disrupting the passage of a substantive reform agenda-education, tax cuts, social services-in a rush, among other things, to refine the definition of what constitutes "coordination" between candidates and political groups. Campaign-finance reform is for politicians what the milk compact is for dairy farmers. It is an adjustment to a set of arcane rules that never should have been written in the first place and that no one outside of the directly affected interests feels compelled to pay attention to, let alone understand. As an intellectual matter, it is a travesty, a bad answer to the wrong question; as a political matter, it is a dud, a nonissue hyped into seeming salience by the press; and even as a matter of McCain's own stated goals, it is a contradiction, a check on exactly the active citizenship he seeks to promote.

The McCain-Feingold bill has a pedigree. It was first introduced in 1995, as a reprise of the Boren-Mitchell bill that those two Democratic senators had perennially introduced prior to retiring in 1994. The crown jewel of the bill was a limit on spending by congressional candidates-deemed the only way to squeeze special interests out of politics. This provision had the disadvantage of probably being unconstitutional, as the Supreme Court had ruled that candidate spending is an essential free-speech right. So, McCain-Feingold evolved until it assumed its current form, with limits not on candidates, but on party "soft money" fundraising and on expenditures by outside groups-deemed, again, the only way to squeeze special interests out of politics.

In light of its history, the bill can be seen as an attempt to limit and regulate something in the hopes of reforming-candidates? parties? what?-something else. In fact, the same reformers who formerly wanted to enmesh candidates in constraining regulations now sell their plan as a way to protect and empower individual candidates. "Growing numbers of members running for reelection feel they're losing control of their campaigns," McCain chief of staff Mark Salter has explained.

The foremost target of the current McCain-Feingold bill is the parties. They raise "unregulated" soft money, dollars that can't be spent directly on the promotion of federal candidates, but can be spent on "issue advocacy"-ads that don't expressly urge the election of a federal candidate-and various party-building activities, from voter registration to supporting state and local candidates. Soft money is considered problematic both because it supposedly is unregulated-in truth, various FEC rulings affect it-and because it involves fantastic sums.

Soft money is an artifact of the Supreme Court's landmark Buckley v. Valeo decision (1976), which tossed out most of the post-Watergate election reforms. The Court made a distinction between contributions and expenditures. Limiting how much a candidate could spend would effectively limit the amount of his speech, thus constituting an impermissible infringement on his First Amendment rights. Direct contributions to a candidate, on the other hand, if too large, might create an appearance of corruption, a fact that has to be balanced against the free-speech rights of the contributor. This jurisprudence created the current two-tiered system, by upholding a stringent $1,000 limit on direct contributions to candidates ("hard money") and allowing a free-for-all with everything else (soft money).

Reformers argue that the huge soft-money contributions create exactly the kind of appearance that worried the Court about direct contributions. The problem with this is that, since soft money goes to the parties and not to individual candidates, no one can answer the question of who exactly (Jim Nicholson?) is being corrupted. This is why McCain has to argue that "the system" is rotten in a general, unspecified, yet-to-be-spelled-out way, and that "everyone" is corrupt, all the way from the starched-up Orrin Hatch to the mobbed-up Jim Traficant. But saying everyone is corrupt is really a way of saying no one in particular is corrupt. McCain's nemesis, Sen. Mitch McConnell, illustrated this point when he suggested that all senators-not just members of the Ethics Committee-report any evidence of corruption as soon as they find it. McCain has yet to come forward.