Let Soros Speak!
GOP cynicism and 527s.
Rich Lowry
National Review Online
Even George Soros has a right to participate freely and fully in American politics. Republicans apparently have a hard time grasping that concept.
And so in the House they have passed new, onerous regulations on the so-called 527 organizations that liberal groups used to pour massive resources into the 2004 elections, with left-wing billionaire Soros alone donating millions of dollars.
The Left uses the phrase “driving while black” to describe what it considers a systematic campaign by police to stop motorists for the noncrime of being black. Republicans have created their own category of nonoffense, “organizing while Democratic.”
Four years ago, Republicans railed against the McCain-Feingold bill to ban large “soft money” contributions to the political parties and prohibit broadcast ads that named a candidate within 60 days of an election. Back then, they professed ardent love for the First Amendment and worried that the legislation would tamp down on — by limiting spending on — entirely legitimate political activity. We now know they meant none of it.
The festival of GOP cynicism on this issue was kicked off by President George Bush. Vetoing something called campaign-finance “reform” would have been politically painful, even though his advisers thought the bill was constitutionally dubious. But what’s mere unconstitutionality compared with political convenience? Bush signed the bill on the assumption that the Supreme Court would do his constitutional duty for him and strike it down. But the last place to expect reliable constitutional interpretation is the court. Its jurisprudence is a witches’ brew of eye of newt, toe of frog and anything else that might be at hand — and, lo, it decided that political expression really wasn’t so central to the First Amendment after all.
Fortunately, there was a “loop-hole” in McCain-Feingold. The beauty of a free society is that it brims with loopholes. In this case, it was 527 organizations (the name comes from the section of the tax code they exist under). 527s could accept unlimited contributions and spend them on grass-roots activity and ads, as long as nothing they did expressly advocated the election or defeat of a candidate (doing it obliquely was OK).
Democratic lawyers first realized the potential of the groups, and liberal donors quickly filled their coffers. Republicans had to decide whether to jump-start their own 527s, or to argue that they were illegal under McCain-Feingold. They choose the latter; if you can’t beat them, ban them.
This is why the same congressional Republicans who said that McCain-Feingold went too far, now want to extend its reach and limit individual donations to 527s to $30,000 a year. Of course, Democrats have matched them hypocrisy for hypocrisy. They once excoriated big, unlimited donations, but now defend them. Their opportunism has landed them on the correct position.
That someone can drop wads of cash on a political cause — spurring fevered advocacy door-to-door and on the airwaves — is a tribute to the vitality of our political system. I might think George Soros is nutty, but one man’s loon is another’s true believer. It is important that significant avenues of political activity exist outside the regulated channels of the two parties, because it brings fresh, and often inconvenient, points of view to the table. The highest-impact 527 in 2004 was “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.” The GOP wasn’t going to touch John Kerry’s Vietnam record. It took an outside group to do it, giving voters information from which they could conclude that either John Kerry is untrustworthy or the right wing is vile.
With 527s under assault, liberal groups are moving on to the next “loophole,” 501(c)4s. McCain-Feingold shifted much political activity out of the two parties and into 527s. The new legislation would only chase political activity out of the 527s and into the 501(c)4s. Then, those entities eventually will be targeted too, creating a premium for the newest loophole. As long as our political system remains truly open, there will always — thankfully — be another one of those.
— Rich Lowry is author of Legacy: Paying the Price for the Clinton Years.
(c) 2006 King Features Syndicate
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