flappy, did you see this?
Razing McCain
The left rediscovers the First Amendment.
BY PAUL A. GIGOT
Friday, March 9, 2001 12:01 a.m.
Let us now praise the AFL-CIO.
I never expected to write those words. But John Sweeney, the most liberal labor leader since Eugene Debs, may soon deserve kudos for helping to defeat campaign-finance "reform."
For years the myth has persisted that only a GOP Senate filibuster stood in the way of truth, justice and Sen. John McCain's obsession with purging money from politics. The locus of this GOP evil was said to be Sen. Mitch McConnell, or as his admirers at Common Cause called him, "Darth Vader."
But now there are 50 Senate Democrats and Mr. McConnell has promised not to filibuster. This means reform could even pass during the rare, free-for-all Senate debate planned to start on March 19. So an amazing thing has happened. Support for the First Amendment is suddenly busting out all over on the left.
The ACLU showed up with the NRA at a McConnell press conference last week, the strangest pairing since Lyle Lovett and Julia Roberts. The Alliance for Justice, notorious for bashing conservative judges, recently sent a letter to liberals torching the details of the McCain proposal. Then there's Big Labor, which has released two pages of arguments that sound remarkably similar to Senator Vader-McConnell's.
Reformers have tried to dismiss all of this as self-serving cynicism. The New York Times has called the AFL-CIO "misguided," which must be a first. McCain aides are griping on background about turncoats. They realize that this liberal opposition now puts Democratic support for their Holy Grail in doubt. Look for more nasty columns next week.
No doubt these folks have a point about liberal self-interest. Mr. Sweeney somehow never found his critical voice when "reform" was defined as merely a ban on so-called soft-money. That's because corporations can afford to hand out more of these large, unregulated donations to political parties than can unions. Mr. Sweeney also didn't mind swinging the reform club against Republicans during the last election.
But just because liberals are self-interested doesn't mean they're always wrong. So I called up Laurence Gold, the AFL-CIO's expert on campaign-finance, to hear a case that deserves wider airing.
His first stop is the First Amendment, which is supposed to protect political speech. Mr. Gold says that the McCain-Feingold proposal would bar the AFL-CIO and other lobbies from airing a TV ad, "within 60 days of an election, if it mentions a human being who happens to be a candidate. It's patently unconstitutional."
Let's say Congress decides to vote on raising the minimum wage after Labor Day of 2002. Labor might want to influence the debate by advertising in the districts of undecided members. That sure sounds like democracy. But McCain-Feingold restricts the money that can be spent on such ads. Imagine the gall of trying to influence politicians close to . . . Election Day.
In private, reformers will admit that this may be unconstitutional. But they're willing to jump off this cliff anyway because they know a soft-money ban by itself won't accomplish much.
That's because they know that purging money from politics is like trying to stop water rushing downhill. Dam one stream and another quickly forms. Ban soft money to political parties, for example, and donors will look for other ways to influence politicians.
They might donate to the NRA, Planned Parenthood or the Sierra Club. This is how small contributors can pool their resources to buy a bigger megaphone. Advertising by such ideological, non-party groups has increased in recent years, but pass the McCain bill and it will explode. So the reformers have to scramble to close this river that their own reform would unleash.
The other labor beef is over McCain-Feingold's new rules on "coordinating" with politicians. If labor had even token contact with a candidate in the past, any future aid--even nonpartisan voter registration--would be barred. "This can criminalize all kinds of politics," says Mr. Gold.
All of this means that the Senate debate won't be the free pass that McCainiacs once thought. Supporters might even have to defend the merits of their bill, instead of throwing general smears about the "corrupting" influence of money.
GOP opponents, led by Mr. McConnell, will have the advantage of consistency. They can use the same arguments they always have, backed up by new liberal allies. (The Kentucky senator has shown his bona fides to labor by supporting two Teamsters accused by a Democratic attorney general of breaking campaign rules of dubious constitutionality in his state.)
Democrats, on the other hand, are going to be entertaining to watch. Most are on record voting for reform. But that was before they caught up to Republicans in raising soft money, which they did last year. Democrats wouldn't have won as many Senate seats without it.
So they're insisting that any reform must go beyond soft-money to include McCain-Feingold's limits on other advertising too. But that puts them at odds with Big Labor and the rest of their own liberal base. No wonder so many Democrats are squirming behind the scenes.
"We can't sit idly by and let some of these things sail through," says the AFL-CIO's Mr. Gold.
No you can't. Let the fun begin.
Mr. Gigot is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.
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