CAmpaign deform act - campaign finance reform - Editorial

THE U.S. Senate of late is no stranger to posturing in the service of dubious public policy (cf. the minimum-wage debate, the Kennedy - Kassebaum health-care bill, etc.). But the new campaign-finance-reform legislation pushed by Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.) and Sen. Russell Feingold (D., Wis.) represents a departure even for this election-year Senate.

The impulse behind the McCain - Feingold bill is twofold. First, it assumes a public clamor for campaign-finance reform that Washington ignores only at its peril. But agitation for campaign-finance reform occurs only in the salons of Washington itself. Real people could not care less: only 1 per cent, according to a recent Tarrance Group survey, think it should be the top concern of Congress. And 6 of 10 voters believe that any reforms will inevitably be botched. Second, the bill assumes that there is ''too much'' money in American politics, and that its influence is a priori corrupting.

But money has an indispensable role in politics, which is to help a candidate and his party get out their message. This is why the Supreme Court ruled in Buckley v. Valeo in 1976 that political contributions and campaign spending are tantamount to political speech. Given the importance of such speech, it is hardly unseemly that some $700 million was spent on the 1994 House and Senate races, about half as much (as George Will likes to remind us) as Americans spend annually on yogurt. This level of spending is roughly in accord with historical patterns: in 1968, campaign spending amounted to 0.3 per cent of GDP, now the figure is 0.5 per cent. In any case, the influence of money tends to be exaggerated. Big spenders, like Tom Foley, Jack Brooks, and Mario Cuomo in 1994, often lose. And studies show that factors like ideology and geography have more influence on politicians once they are in office than the dollars that helped get them there.

McCain & Co. ignore all this in a ham-handed effort to ''clean up'' politics. Their bill imposes ''voluntary'' spending limits on Senate campaigns and confers benefits on candidates willing to abide by them (higher contribution limits, lower postage and TV-advertising rates). The limits almost certainly abridge First Amendment rights and would mostly help incumbents. The bill would ban PACs, a provision so flatly unconstitutional that the legislation comes with ''fallback'' provisions. It would diminish the potency of the two major parties by placing new, intrusive controls on so-called ''soft money'' spent on generic party-building activities. It places issues-advocacy groups like the Christian Coalition under a new, constitutionally suspect regime of regulation. And finally, it grants sweeping new powers of prior restraint to the Federal Election Commission.

''In the free society ordained by our Constitution,'' the Supreme Court wrote in the Buckley decision, ''it is not the government, but the people -- individually as citizens and candidates and collectively as associations and political committees -- who must retain control over the quantity and range of debate on public issues in a political campaign.''