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Politics : The Donkey's Inn -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mephisto who wrote (3377)	3/22/2002 3:05:21 PM
From: Mephisto	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 15516

US throws out 'odious' party funding system : Reluctant Bush may be the first beneficiary of resisted change Matthew Engel in Washington Friday March 22, 2002 The Guardian The US Senate has given final backing to a bill designed to reform the financing of election campaigns, in an effort to reduce the role of big money. The bill has already been passed by the House of Representatives and now President Bush will, albeit grudgingly, sign it into law. Reformers have been trying to push through various versions of the bill since the mid-1990s. Officials ordered a supply of camp beds for senators in case the bill's opponents carried out their threat to filibuster against it throughout Wednesday night. In the end, though, the opposition gave in quietly. The bill was passed by 60 votes to 40, with 11 Republicans deserting their party leadership to support it and two Democrats defecting the other way. Vast sums are needed to buy the TV time necessary to win a major American election. This can come only from being mega-rich - like the New York mayor, Michael Bloomberg, or Jon Corzine, the Goldman Sachs billionaire who in effect bought his way into the Senate from New Jersey as if it were a country club- or by accepting huge sums from outside interests. This has made it increasingly difficult to throw out incumbents, who are far more attractive to donors than challengers. Nevertheless Congress came round to support change. As the Washington Post editorial said yesterday: "Many voters cared about, and were repelled by, the increasingly odious system. Some office holders wearied of the endless pressure to raise money; some businesses began to complain about a kind of political extortion under which they felt pressured to give, in order to protect their interests." The main thrust of the change is to ban "soft money" donations paid to national political parties, which escape the restrictions imposed on direct payments to candidates after the Watergate scandal of the early 1970s. What alarms the Democrats is that, according to the Centre for Responsive Politics, the two parties raised roughly equal amounts of soft money in 2000 but the Republicans got $466m (£326m) in hard money and the Democrats only $275m. Under the new rules, individuals will be able to give $2,000 (£1,400) to a candidate, rather than $1,000. Not many altruistic Americans actually want to give this kind of money to a politician. As Ellen Miller of the magazine American Prospect pointed out: "Most of this money comes in large bundles from the 'economically interested': executives and business associates who've been arm-twisted into supporting a corporation's electoral favourite. Under the new legislation, these bundles will only grow larger." The vote was a triumph, above all, for Senator John McCain, who made the issue the centrepiece of his spirited but unsuccessful contest against Mr Bush for the Republican presidential nomination two years ago. The biggest loser is another Republican senator, Mitch McConnell, who has fought reform for years, promising that such a bill was "not going to pass, ever". The president, sensing the way the wind was blowing, moved steadily towards the "yes, but" camp. He issued a statement saying: "I support commonsense reforms to end abuses in our campaign finance system. The reforms passed today, while flawed in some areas, still improve the current system overall." The final impetus for change came from the Enron scandal, which made it harder for politicians to oppose the bill without seeming tainted. Enron's profligate donations to candidates were merely an extreme manifestation of the cash-influence nexus at the heart of American politics. Both sides are deeply enmeshed in it, although the Republicans have not yet been caught in anything quite so brazen as President Clinton's habit of inviting big donors to stay in the Lincoln Bedroom of the White House. The new rules - due to take effect after the midterm elections in November - are complex, and there are powerful arguments that, as so often when politics and money are intertwined, there will be unintended consequences. It is also suspected that the system will favour the Republicans, who have more rich individuals on their side, rather than the Democrats, who were its main supporters. The first big beneficiary may well be President Bush, when he seeks re-election in 2004, which is one reason why he has dropped his opposition. The skirmishing over the passage of the bill is likely to continue for some time. Mr McConnell will take his campaign to the courts, focusing in particular on the attack on "issue ads", which will now be heavily restricted two months before an election. These have often been used by corporations, unions and interest groups as a back-door way of influencing votes without mentioning a candidate's name. Opponents argue - not wholly implausibly - that the ban violates the constitutional protection of free speech. guardian.co.uk