ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, June 27, 1996 TAG: 9606270050
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-9 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
SOURCE: Associated Press
Creating a new loophole in two-decade-old limits on election spending, the Supreme Court freed political parties Wednesday to shell out as much money as they want to get their candidates elected to Congress.
The only catch: Candidates can't help plan how the party's money is spent on their behalf.
How that will work in the real world of politics is unclear. The parties scrambled Wednesday to figure out how to take advantage of the change and what effect it might have on the November elections.
``One thing seems sure - the cost of elections just went up,'' said Joan Claybrook, president of the nonprofit watchdog group Public Citizen.
The court's decision in a Colorado case addressed only congressional races, but the logic could carry over to similar limits on party spending in presidential contests.
``The principle is the same,'' said Jan Baran, attorney for the Colorado Republican Party. ``It's just a matter of time before the principle is litigated over presidential elections as well.''
The Colorado GOP had sought a more sweeping decision that would have allowed parties to spend unlimited amounts of cash on candidates. Four of the nine justices said they favored that, but the court put off deciding the larger issue.
Instead, by a 7-2 vote, the court said the Colorado Republican Party's freedom of expression was violated when the party was cited for exceeding federal spending limits in a 1986 U.S. Senate campaign.
As long as a political party spends money independently of any candidate's campaign, the court said, federal limits on contributions in congressional races do not apply.
The justices said the free-speech protection guaranteed by the First Amendment prohibits any limits ``to the kind of expenditure at issue here - an expenditure that the political party has made independently, without coordination with any candidate.''
Under a 1971 law, a state political party or a party's national campaign committee can spend only a certain amount of money, based on a state's voting-age population, in any race for the Senate or House. Those limits now are about $30,000 for House races and from $58,600 to $1.3 million for Senate campaigns.
Wednesday's ruling did not throw out those limits, but said they only apply to spending that is coordinated with a candidate's campaign.
Haley Barbour, chairman of the Republican National Committee, called the decision ``a step in the right direction toward a truly free and open political debate.''
His Democratic counterpart, Don Fowler, was less enthusiastic. Fowler said the Supreme Court had left the task of restricting special interests' influence up to Congress, where ``Republicans continue to stonewall the process.''
The ruling apparently leaves it to Congress, which writes election laws, and the Federal Election Commission, which enforces them, to decide how to define independent vs. coordinated spending.
Current law requires people or groups making ``independent expenditures'' on a candidate's behalf to forgo almost all contact with the candidate or his campaign.
Because of that, Martin Frost, chairman of the national committee that raises money for Democratic congressional campaigns, said the ruling wouldn't change 1996 elections. Political parties have been coordinating their spending with candidates for months, he said, and that would preclude them from claiming independent spending for the fall elections.
He said, however, the ruling would have ``a profound effect'' in 1998.
Republicans, with a big reserve of cash on hand for the elections, labeled the ruling ``a big win'' and said they would begin making independent expenditures right away.``We are prepared to take full advantage of our dominant financial position,'' said John Heubusch, executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee.
Advocates of campaign finance reform said the ruling further weakens federal election law already riddled with loopholes - most notably the ``soft money'' rule that allows parties unlimited spending on get-out-the-vote drives and other party-building activities that are not targeted toward affecting any one election.
LENGTH: Medium: 82 lines KEYWORDS: POLITICSby CNB