The Gaggers and Gag-making: Hypocrisy among the campaign-finance reformers

National Review, March 11, 2002 by Bradley A. Smith

It's a common scene in Washington. Lobbyists representing powerful, well-financed special interests sit behind closed doors with members of Congress drafting legislation. Outside Washington, their dollars finance TV ad campaigns in the districts of wavering House members, hoping to pressure them into supporting the bill. Highly technical and complex legislation is then unveiled in the middle of the night, and most members of Congress have no time to read it before debate begins the next morning. Efforts by grassroots groups to amend the bill to protect their members are rebuffed, and though the bill contains provisions that even its sponsors admit are probably unconstitutional, such objections are shunted aside.

You may think this is a description of a special interest trying to benefit from some arcane budget bill, but in fact it is a description of the Shays-Meehan campaign-finance-regulation bill that passed the House in the wee hours of February 14. The passage of Shays-Meehan shows that those who think campaign-finance reform will reduce the influence of money in politics are mistaken.

Supporters of campaign-finance regulation like to portray themselves as an underfunded, scrappy grassroots coalition. However, a study conducted last year for the American Conservative Union by election-law attorney Cleta Mitchell found that groups dedicated to promoting campaign-finance reform spent over $73 million over the three-year period from 1997 through 1999. By comparison, the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP), one of the most prominent campaign-finance-reform organizations, lists total political spending by the "mortgage banking" industry at under $12 million, and by "Health Services and HMOs" at under $14 million, for the four-year period from 1997 through 2000. Even the dreaded drug manufacturers contributed just $28 million over that four-year period, or 40 percent of that spent in just three years by groups promoting campaign-finance regulation. Yet the campaign- finance regulators always portray these industries as colossally and harmfully big spenders.

Actually, Cleta Mitchell's study understates the spending by campaign- finance-reform groups. It does not include spending by many of the groups' affiliated 501(c)(4) committees, and misses some significant groups completely. To give just one example, it does not include spending by the National Voting Rights Institute (NVRI), which describes itself as "a prominent legal and public education center in the campaign finance reform field." NVRI, which argues that private campaign contributions violate the Constitution, is frequently quoted in the New York Times and other major papers. Meanwhile, the CRP overstates industry giving, as it includes in its figures individual contributions by any person employed by a company in the industry, and in certain cases even contributions by the employee's spouse. Thus, if the non-working spouse of an Enron employee earning $45,000 a year gave $200 to the campaign of George W. Bush, the CRP reports that as both an "Enron" contribution and a contribution from the "energy/natural resources" industry.

Arguably, money is the only thing that has kept the issue of campaign- finance regulation alive. With public-opinion polls consistently showing that campaign-finance reform is of little interest to the public, most of the groups advocating reform rely on six- and even seven-figure grants from giant foundations such as Ford, Carnegie, and Joyce for funds. With the notable exception of Common Cause (which has a budget of about $10 million a year), these groups usually have few individual supporters. Such individual support as they do have comes almost entirely in the form of large gifts from a handful of politically liberal multi-millionaires, such as George Soros and Silicon Valley entrepreneur Steven Kirsch.

These groups respond that their money does not represent "special interests." But their scorekeeping belies this claim. Surely if a $200 contribution by the wife of a mid-level Enron employee is "special interest" money, so are the six-figure expenditures made to promote campaign-finance reform by investment banker Jerome Kohlberg. Similarly, the Pew Charitable Trusts, to take just one example, have given considerably more in grants to advocate campaign-finance regulation than Enron gave in soft money to advocate energy deregulation. And these foundations and groups have other interests that are advanced by silencing their opposition. Pew, for example, also advocates environmental regulation and funds Planned Parenthood. If it can quiet political opposition from business and National Right to Life, it benefits. While one might describe foundations such as Pew, or organizations such as CRP, as disinterested entities concerned with the public welfare, one might just as accurately describe them as unaccountable organizations with lots of money and no members. Even Common Cause, the one reform group with a membership base, is small fry compared with other groups. With some 200,000 members, it describes itself as a "citizen's lobbying organization." But it describes the National Rifle Association, which has over 4.2 million members, as a "special interest." Indeed, many corporations represent hundreds of thousands or even millions of individual shareholders and employees. Why aren't they "citizen's lobbies"?