Exploiting Enron
Washington draws the wrong lesson.
By NR Editors, from the February 25, 2002, issue of National Review
February 12, 20021, 8:00 a.m.
Of all the lessons that might be drawn from the story of Enron's tangled accounts and bankruptcy, perhaps the oddest is that it is imperative to ban political ads. Yet that is the lesson that Washington is drawing. The Enron scandal is said to make passage of the McCain-Feingold bill urgent. One of the bill's major provisions would prohibit groups from running ads that mention candidates in the 60 days before an election. What this has to do with Enron is anyone's guess. But the scandal has indeed brought the legislation closer to enactment than ever before.
It's not clear that Enron's political influence had as profound and baleful an impact as the campaign-finance "reformers" believe. All its influence did not prevent the company from going under, or even get the Bush administration to lift a finger as it sank. True, Bush took some positions that served Enron's interests — championing energy deregulation, for example — but he did so out of conviction rather than a desire to curry favor with Enron. For the same reason, Clinton "sided with Enron" on global warming (the company thought it could profit from a treaty against it, while Clinton backed the treaty for ideological reasons).
Even if the reformers were correct in identifying Enron's influence-buying as a grave problem, their legislation would hardly solve it. They see donations by Enron executives as a form of influence-buying by the company. Yet McCain-Feingold, at least in the version passed by the Senate last spring, actually raises the amount individuals are allowed to donate to candidates. That liberalization is the result of an amendment to the bill and is, in our view, a good thing: That politicians spend too much time raising money is a legitimate complaint, and they spend so much time on it precisely because current law forces them to raise money in small increments. But under the law the reformers are now demanding, Enron executives would have been able to donate more to politicians and thus — by the reformers' own standards — the company would have had more influence.
The Enron scandal, in short, does not strengthen the substantive case for McCain-Feingold. Nor should nervous congressmen conclude that Enron makes it politically imperative to support it. Polls always find that most people "support campaign-finance reform," but also that they do not care much about the issue. Nobody wins or loses elections on the issue. There is no reason to think any of that has changed just because the media have been hyping Enron's bankruptcy as a political scandal.
In any case, a congressman's duty is to the Constitution, not the polls. That duty cannot be delegated to the courts; a congressman must judge the constitutionality of a bill and vote accordingly. The ban on election advertising strikes at the core of the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech. Congressmen have sufficient reason to vote down McCain-Feingold on that basis alone — and if they fail in their duty, President Bush will have sufficient reason to veto it.
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