Citizen McCain by Elizabeth Drew

Author:Elizabeth Drew
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Chapter 10

“Chris, it’s not Denny, it’s Tom DeLay.”

THE WEEK that the bill was to come before the House didn’t begin well for the reformers. Hastert had set the debate for the Thursday after the July 4 recess, July 12. The House leaders hoped to dispense with it in one day, to prevent pressure to pass it from building, as it had in the Senate.

On Monday, McCain, Feingold, Shays, and Meehan held rallies for the bill in New York, at Theodore Roosevelt’s boyhood home, and in Boston, at Faneuil Hall. New York was chosen because of its large media market, and Theodore Roosevelt’s home because McCain often points out that it was under TR, in 1907, that corporate contributions to federal candidates were made illegal. Boston was less necessary in terms of getting the bill through the House, but Meehan, enmeshed in a nasty redistricting fight, had asked McCain to hold an event there, and that was good enough for McCain. The events didn’t get much attention because the news organizations were focused on the scandal involving Gary Condit, the congressman from California who had had an affair with an intern who had later disappeared, and on a shark attack on an eight-year-old boy off the coast of Florida.

• • •

The Republicans were working their members hard, especially the freshmen, reminding them of the leaders’ financial help. Two powerful unions, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, and the UAW, had come out against the bill. The NRA was targeting Democrats from pro-gun districts and warning that a vote for Shays-Meehan would be held against them. The National Right to Life Committee was telling members that the vote on Shays-Meehan would be counted (negatively) on their scorecard of members’ voting records.

And, despite the fact that the Shays-Meehan bill was supposed to be completed before the July 4 recess, Gephardt, still scouting for votes, was continuing to propose changes, which led to a new crisis within the reform movement. Daschle, too, wanted some last-minute changes. It could be argued that these people should have had their effort pulled together by this time, but that’s not the nature of Congress. It tends not to focus on things until it absolutely has to. Moreover, Daschle had just taken over as Majority Leader and was preoccupied with other subjects. This wasn’t the only matter on Gephardt’s agenda, either. And if a significant number of the Black Caucus members are holding out for as much as they can get before pledging their vote, as was happening, the appeasement process goes on. But the appeasement can’t take place in a vacuum.

Gephardt, reaching for as many Black and Hispanic Caucus votes as possible, wanted to raise the aggregate amount of hard money that people could contribute in a two-year election cycle to well above the Senate’s figure of seventy-five thousand dollars. But many reformers were unhappy to see the amount go to six figures, as Gephardt was proposing. Also, to mollify the Black Caucus, Gephardt wanted to allow federal party officials to raise the soft money under the Levin amendment.

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