SOFT MONEY, HARD CHOICES

It seems that the Senate has finally gotten serious about serious issues. As of this writing, debate is still going on the McCain-Feingold campaign finance bill. The debate has moments of high drama, like the contest between Republican Sen. and former presidential candidate John McCain and McCain’s good buddy Chuck Hagel, who has offered a competing proposal.

There are also moments of base and cynical betrayal, like Democratic Sen. Paul Wellstone’s introducing an amendment to ban certain types of TV ads altogether, an amendment so blatantly unconstitutional it is the equivalent of putting a gun to the head of the bill and pulling the trigger. Wellstone’s amendment bans certain independent groups — but not others –– from running TV ads within 30 days of a primary election and 60 days of a general election. Anyone with the sense God gave a gray squirrel knows that’s going to violate not only the First Amendment but the Fourteenth as well (that’s the one about where everyone gets equal protection under the law). Either Wellstone is a complete idiot for not realizing this, or he’s trying to add a killer amendment that will destroy the whole bill. For the record, I don’t think he’s an idiot.

President Bush has made some lukewarm indications that he’ll sign the bill, but he wants a "non-severability" clause. What that means in non-legalese is that the parts of the bill can’t be separated if they’re challenged on constitutional grounds. If part of the bill is declared unconstitutional, the whole thing goes in the dumper. No lawyer worth a hoot would ever make any agreement non-severable –– unless of course, he wanted the agreement to fail.

Non-severability and killer amendments like Wellstone’s are ways for politicians to look as if they’re supporting campaign finance reform while guaranteeing that it fails. The culprits include both Republicans and Democrats, since they’re running neck and neck in the race for soft money.

The core of the debate concerns soft money, which is unregulated. Soft money is money that’s not given to a specific candidate. It’s the money that unions, corporations and wealthy individuals give to political parties and to other groups that support them. When campaign finance laws limited the amount of hard money that could be given straight to the candidates, the fat cats merely shrugged their shoulders and shifted their emphasis to soft money.

The idea is that soft money is to be used for activities that "build the party," like registration drives. More often, however, this is the money that pays for political ads run by "independent" groups that target specific candidates just before an election. These are the so-called issue ads, the ones that, while they don’t necessarily endorse a particular candidate by name, and don’t explicitly say "vote for Congressman Hufnagle" or "vote against Senator Feldberg," they do say things like "Senator Feldberg took taxpayer-financed junkets to Club Med while voting against providing milk-money subsidies for poor children." The fact that these ads run the day before the Hufnagle vs. Feldberg election, of course, is more than just a coincidence. It’s really a campaign ad for Hufnagle, right?

Well, maybe. While I’ve always found cynicism about the motives behind advertising –– political or otherwise — to be a useful way of viewing the world, I’m not sure you can enshrine it as law and still uphold the Constitution. How do you distinguish real ads debating the issues with the stuff that everybody can tell is just a thinly disguised campaign ad without falling back on Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s famous quote about obscenity: "I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it"?

This may be the toughest question in America today. On the one hand, people, even rich people, should have the right to back the politician or cause of their choice. The best way to get the message out is by getting on TV, which costs money. On the other, that TV money is like crack cocaine to politicians: before long, they’re so addicted to it that they spend most of their time trying to hustle more, sucking up to anyone with cash and peddling themselves like hookers in the process. But how do you limit the amount politicians can take without limiting the amount people can give?

I don’t think you can. As shown by the recent hypocritical posturing on both sides of the aisle, neither party really wants to limit their access to all that sweet dough. The only hope I can see is in the disclosure requirements contained in McCain- Feingold and some of its proposed amendments. One amendment, for example, provides that a group spending more than $10,000 or more on ads referring to a particular candidate during an election "must disclose its identity, the cost of the communication, and the names and addresses of all contributors of $1,000 or more to the sponsor of the communication."

This is a step in the right direction. If it’s inevitable that politicians are going to be bought, I want to at least know by whom.

COPYRIGHT 2001 BY JERRY D. RHOADES, JR.