Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, March 10, 1994 TAG: 9403120008
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A13 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Ray L. Garland
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The bill that was finally killed on a voice vote in the House of Delegates would have established a limit of $10,000 on personal contributions in statewide races and $2,000 in contests for legislative seats. Political-action committees, corporations and labor unions could have given more.
But the bill had a loophole through which you could have sailed the Queen Mary. It placed no restrictions on donations to political parties or their legislative caucuses. Since these contributions aren't reported, this has been a vehicle of choice for those not wishing to be seen taking sides.
Had the bill limiting contributions to individual candidates been passed, it would likely have served to increase the use of this backdoor method of campaign financing. Plainly, it wouldn't have done much to limit campaign spending or served to bring it more into the light of day.
How little real effect it might have had can be illustrated by a small scenario. Under the bill, a corporate chief and spouse could contribute $4,000 to a candidate for the General Assembly. His or her corporation could give $5,000; and the PAC representing the business another $5,000. Then, they could make unlimited contributions to the state Republican or Democratic parties and their legislative caucuses. They could request the money go to assist a specific candidate. While such requests wouldn't be legally binding, the reality is that in most cases, earmarking of funds will be honored.
In the aftermath of Watergate, Congress tried to limit campaign contributions. The Supreme Court had other ideas, based understandably on First Amendment rights. In Buckley vs. Valeo, the court held you couldn't limit what a candidate could spend of his own money. It also held that you couldn't restrict "independent" expenditures for or against candidates by individuals or groups operating on their own.
That point was at issue in the assembly's debate this year. Sen. Brandon Bell, R-Roanoke County, tried unsuccessfully to amend the bill to remove the limits on contributions in the case of a legislative candidate whose opponent had put more than $25,000 of his own money into a race. That is, when one candidate's contribution to his own campaign exceeds $25,000, the candidate without large personal funds is free to raise whatever he can.
Bell's amendment was defeated on a virtual party-line vote. Democrats argued it would violate the ruling affirming a candidate's right to spend unlimited amounts of his own money. How it would do that isn't clear to me, but it's questions like this that illustrate the problem of addressing the entire subject in a fair and sensible way.
Public indifference to campaign-spending reform seems based on a hard kernel of realism: "You can't take the politics out of politics." If the post-Watergate federal election "reform" can be taken as an example, the public is right. It would be difficult to devise a more colossal fraud.
Until we are prepared to amend the Constitution granting the legislative branch the power to declare that elections aren't a free-for-all, and place severe restrictions on who can do what, almost every effort to reform the system is doomed to open a rat hole worse than the one you claim to be closing.
There's still some sentimental money in politics, but most of it is very unsentimental. Contributions are now invested with the sole purpose of protecting what somebody has or hopes to get; or to prevent harmful depredations by agencies of government. President and Mrs. Clinton have been incensed by some attacks on their national health bill. But the legislation as submitted would put a lot of insurers and their agents out of business, and saddle all employers with 80 percent of the cost of coverage. For those affected, that's a trillion-dollar question, and they would be fools to submit without a fight.
In that sense, campaign contributions are integral to a system that might be a lot less democratic without them. In a country increasingly driven by media hysteria, property rights in particular require the armor of being able to square even Democrats with infusions of campaign cash as required.
While no way has yet been found for the people to delegate responsibility for the maintenance of reasonably honest politics and intelligent public policy, any serious effort at campaign-finance reform should include the following:
Public (taxpayer) funding of all valid candidates who decline to accept contributions from any other source, including their own pocket.
Full disclosure of all funds spent in behalf of the election or defeat of any candidate, from whatever source.
Sizable fines and possible terms of imprisonment for violating such laws, including disqualification from office for any candidate found to be a party to such violations.
"Publish and be damned," the Duke of Wellington said when his mistress threatened to reveal certain intimacies to the press. ``Disclose and draw your own conclusions'' should be the watchwords of our politics. Anything more complicated than that is likely to lead us into thornier thickets of practiced evasion and regulatory excess.
\ Ray L. Garland is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.
Keywords:
GENERAL ASSEMBLY 1994
by CNB