Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, September 1, 1995 TAG: 9509010050
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A12 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
There on the left was Jesse Jackson, decrying ``money politics'' and saying it's got to change. There on the right was House Budget Committee Chairman John Kasich, R-Ohio, arguing that ``Americans who do not have lobbyists in Washington should not fare worse than those who do.'' There in the . . . well, we're not sure quite where he is, but his followers have been labeled as belonging to the ``radical middle'' . . . was Perot himself.
Campaign-finance and lobbying reforms, Perot said, are urgently needed to ``restore confidence in the two parties and confidence in the U.S. government.'' No need for a blue-ribbon bipartisan commission to study the matter because the public, the political parties and Congress already know what the problems are. Someone needs simply to get under the proverbial hood and fix them.
Who?
Who, us? We're just poor little backbenchers, trying to stay afloat in a ``polluted lake.''
Republican Rep. Linda Smith, a freshman congresswoman from Washington state, didn't put it exactly that way. What she told Perot's United We Stand America conference in Dallas was this:
She and fellow GOP newcomers were swept into office in 1994 on promises of, among other things, campaign-finance overhaul. But they quickly came up against ``a system that just will eat you up. I want to tell you what was scary to me as I watched these idealists one by one face something that they could not get around: Their opponents had been raising PAC money, and many of these challengers had to go with a big debt to Washington. And guess who was at the door to pay the debt? The special interests.''
Can we have a break here? We're not suggesting it isn't tough to buck the establishment. It's exceedingly tough, especially for those who are now part of the establishment. Even so, our sympathy is tempered by reports that these freshmen legislators are aggressively, doggedly, hunting down the special-interest cash cows and milking them. One group seems quite as interested in taking as the other is in giving.
Overall, according to the Federal Election Commission, House members of both parties raised $43.8 million in a recent six-month period - a 38 percent increase over the comparable period in 1993, and the highest total in the 20 years that records have been kept.
And it was freshmen lawmakers who accounted for most of that increase. What's more, GOP freshmen - the idealists Smith described - not only raised significantly more than Democratic freshmen. Ten GOP first-termers managed to make the top-50 list of House money-raisers.
``These freshmen are reaping huge sums of special-interest money from the system they were elected to change,'' complains, with good cause, Common Cause President Ann McBridge. ``Simply put, freshmen representatives came to Washington to shake it up; they're staying to shake it down.''
When is the public going to get really sick and tired of this? Soon, we hope. Money continues to distort and corrupt policy-making. As Congress focuses on pleasing special interests and upper-bracket lobbies, the public's contempt for national politics and the political parties grows. With no end in sight to cashroots replacing grassroots in politicians' priorities, the situation gets worse every year.
Perot is a strange bird who should never be elected president. But he's right when he says we don't need another blue-ribbon study commission to show what the problem is. Nor do we need pity-patter from lawmakers who claim they oh-so-sincerely want campaign-finance and lobbying reforms, but are helpless victims of an evil empire.
The lawmakers created the empire. They can reform it. Virginians must ask their representatives to stop making excuses and start putting the public interest above cash-flow needs.
by CNB