Campaigns and Elections by Dennis W. Johnson;

Author:Dennis W. Johnson; [Неизв.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA
Published: 2019-08-06T21:00:00+00:00

What did the McCain-Feingold Act do to fix campaign-finance problems?

But some reform-minded lawmakers have tried for years to update the 1971 Federal Election Campaign Act, as amended in 1974. There have been plenty of hearings, speeches, and reports, but nothing of substance has come out of Congress. Many lawmakers, particularly Republicans, balk at campaign-finance reform, knowing that cutting off supplies of money can only hurt their re-election chances. Senator Mitch McConnell (Rep.-Kentucky) was candid when he spoke in 1999: “Take away soft money and we [Republicans] wouldn’t be in the majority in the House and the majority in the Senate and couldn’t win back the White House. . . . Hell is going to freeze over first before we get rid of soft money.”7

But the reform-minded lawmakers persisted. In 2002, under the leadership of John McCain (Rep.-Arizona) and Russ Feingold (Dem.-Wisconsin), Congress enacted the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA), often referred to as the McCain-Feingold Act. McConnell’s hell did freeze over. Soft money was banned: it could not be raised for national political parties; its use by state parties was restricted, and federal candidates and officeholders were restricted in how they could raise or spend soft money. Right away, millions of dollars of campaign funds were made unavailable, and labor unions, corporations, advocacy groups, and wealthy individuals lost a critical tool for influencing elections.

A second BCRA reform prohibited issue-advocacy “electioneering” expenditures by corporations and labor unions in the sixty days before a general election or within thirty days of a primary. This meant that labor unions, corporations, and other groups couldn’t run issue-advocacy advertisements during that window of time. But there were problems with this reform. First, “electioneering communication” was a fuzzy term; it wasn’t clear exactly what it meant. Second, the prohibited communication was limited to cable and broadcast television advertising; it did not include newspapers or the expanding world of online communication. We were just in the early stages of using websites, text messaging, and blogs—and members of Congress didn’t consider these communication vehicles important enough to include (or more likely, they didn’t understand the potential of online communication).

A third reform was to increase the amount of hard (regulated) money that individuals could give to candidates, political parties, and PACs. Inflation had eaten away at the $1,000 limit for individual contributions to candidates set in 1971. A $1,000 donation in 1976 was worth just $318 in 2002. Now BCRA allowed an individual to give $2,000 per candidate over a two-year election cycle, and for a total of $95,000 over the same two-year cycle to individuals, PACs, and political parties. These limits would also be indexed, so that in 2008, for example, the individual limit would be $2,300, and not $2,000.

Immediately after BCRA was passed, Mitch McConnell, the National Rifle Association, the California Democratic Party, and others sued in federal court to try to overturn it, arguing that the ban on soft money was a restriction of freedom of speech as protected by the First Amendment. In a deeply divided decision, the US Supreme Court, in McConnell et al.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.