Big hearing for a big case. I think the 1st Amendment will be used to strike down most of this law. TWT.
High Court Hears Arguments on Campaign Finance Law
By DAVID STOUT - [The New York Times] [Sponsored by Starbucks]
September 8, 2003
WASHINGTON, Sept. 8 - The long-running battle over campaign financing arrived in the Supreme Court today, getting an extraordinary four-hour hearing at which the nine justices were alternately told that Congress either far exceeded its powers with new legislation or was only trying to clean up an ingrained perception that the political process is corrupt.
Kenneth W. Starr, the former independent counsel who became a household name during his investigation of President Bill Clinton, told the justices that the new law "goes too far" and that it "intrudes deeply into the political life of the nation." Mr. Starr represents Senator Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican who is the new law's chief Congressional opponent.
Not at all, the law's backers countered.
Seth P. Waxman, counsel for the sponsors of the law, argued that if the court struck down the law, as its opponents are asking, it would be surrendering to a "a counsel of despair" over ever reforming the campaign-finance system.
The first half of the four-hour argument was devoted to the ban on "soft money" contributions to the national parties, and to curbs on the transfer of money from the national parties to their state and local committees.
The solicitor general, Theodore B. Olson, described the law as a right and logical response to "the relentless pursuit of big contributions" that has tainted the political process in the public mind.
Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, widely seen as potential swing votes, were closely watched, not only by lawyers on both sides but also by the law's Senate sponsors, John S. McCain, Republican of Arizona, and Russell D. Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, who sat in the audience.
Today's session was extraordinary in several respects. The justices were sitting in the first special court session since the summer of 1974, when the Supreme Court heard arguments on whether President Richard M. Nixon should be compelled to surrender his tape-recordings.
Moreover, the justices devoted quadruple the usual time it allots for an arguments. With a break for lunch, the justices were hearing eight lawyers dissect or defend a 61-page statute whose basic ideas have already inspired countless debates.
In a sense, today's arguments began to form about three decades ago, when the Watergate scandals brought unsavory disclosures of powerful people and interest groups giving enormous amounts of money to politicians, and perhaps wanting something in return.
The excesses of the Watergate era set off such waves of revulsion that Congress enacted limits in 1974 on how much people could donate to candidates for federal office, and how much the candidates could spend.
Whether money is viewed as "the mother's milk of politics" (in the words of Jesse Unruh, onetime Speaker of the California Assembly) or poison, or both, the issues are far from clear-cut. Foes of the campaign-finance law, led by Senator McConnell, argue that its restrictions are unjustified and unconstitutional, violating Americans' rights to free speech and free association.
Supporters of the law counter that it is necessary to repair widespread skirting of old regulations, and that turning down the money spigots will not dry up the parties but rather force them to broaden their bases of donors.
And, of course, one politician's "fat cat" is another's scrupulous patriot, and "special interests" can mean big business or big labor, or something else entirely, depending on one's perspective.
No one really disputes that modern campaigns, especially those for the White House, are tremendously expensive, and that the well-heeled candidate has a big advantage.
In 1976 the Supreme Court ruled that, while it was constitutional to curb donations to candidates, it was an unconstitutional infringement on free speech to limit what the candidates could actually spend.
This ruling, in Buckley v. Valeo, either gutted the 1974 reform legislation, or reimposed a degree of sanity, depending on who is arguing. (The case took its title from Sen. James L. Buckley, a one-term Conservative Party legislator from New York, and Francis R. Valeo, Secretary of the Senate at the time.)
The ruling stirred the creative juices of politicians and lawyers. They came up with subtle ways to let people and organizations give money to benefit the parties of their choice, without officially giving money to benefit specific candidates, at least theoretically.
Such unrestricted money from corporations, unions and individuals became known as "soft money," and many critics said it continued the long-time contamination of American politics. The flood of soft money continued unabated into the 1990's.
But in 1995, two senators with not much else in common teamed up to introduce legislation to really limit the influence of money in politics. They were Mr. McCain, the Republican, and Mr. Feingold, the Democrat.
Senators McCain and Feingold first introduced their legislation in 1995. But time and again their bill, and companion legislation in the House, failed to gain traction.
Mr. McCain and Mr. Feingold (and their chief allies in the House, Representatives Christopher Shays, Republican of Connecticut, and Martin T. Meehan, Democrat of Massachusetts) gained crucial support in 2002, following the collapse of the Enron Corporation and the accompanying spotlight on corporate shenanigans and political donations by corporate interests.
Campaign-finance legislation finally passed both Houses by comfortable margins early in 2002, and President Bush signed it.
The legislation's main features were to ban soft money and curb advertising by unions, corporations and nonprofit groups. Offsetting those limitations were increases in the amount of "hard money" that individuals could contribute directly to candidates, to $2,000 from $1,000 per election, with increases for inflation.
The law took effect after last November's elections. In May, a panel of three federal judges struck down the law's ban on soft money but said the parties could not use it to pay for televised "issue" advertisements in the weeks before Election Day.
The panel stayed its ruling, meaning that the law remains in effect until the Supreme Court rules. There has been considerable speculation that the justices would like to decide the case by the time the 2004 campaigns begin in earnest. The high court could leave some provisions of the McCain-Feingold law intact while undoing others.
nytimes.com |
