Feinstein, Boxer Seek Loophole for Emily

Running on a shared agenda of change, Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein vowed last year to shake up the old boys club and shatter special-interest politics if they were elected to the U.S. Senate.

Yet next week, when the world’s greatest deliberative body resumes debate on campaign finance reform legislation, some voters may be surprised to find the two California Democratic senators acting a bit like entrenched incumbents. Boxer and Feinstein are waging a vigorous battle on Capitol Hill to protect the controversial fund-raising methods of a political action committee that funneled $854,000 into their Senate campaigns.

What special-interest group are the senators fighting for? It’s EMILY’s List, an influential Washington organization that supports only Democratic women candidates who favor abortion rights. In the last two years, EMILY’s List raised $6.2 million, including more money for House and Senate races than any other political action committee.

“It isn’t lost on me that the first time a group . . . is able to raise more money for pro-choice Democratic women than any other group, (people want to) put them

out of commission,” Feinstein said.

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EMILY’s List was founded in 1985 by Ellen Malcolm, the IBM heiress who has ascended to the forefront of the women’s political movement in Washington. Her outfit rose to national prominence in 1992 during the so-called Year of the Woman, when 25 of the 55 women candidates it endorsed emerged victorious at the polls, a phenomenal winning percentage.

The group’s acronym emphasizes its clout in gathering large sums of cash contributions for women candidates: EMILY’s List stands for “Early Money Is Like Yeast (it makes the dough rise).”

Under current law, political action committees are prohibited from contributing more than $10,000 per election cycle to any candidate. To circumvent the limit, EMILY’s List engages in the practice of “bundling.” This works by soliciting individual contributions of up to $1,000 and requesting that donors send the money to EMILY’s List rather than the candidates of their choice. EMILY’s List lumps the checks together and turns over huge sums to women candidates.

By doing so, EMILY’s List collects the political credit for providing far more money to candidates than it would otherwise get. Last year, the organization passed along about 63,000 individual contributions. Spokeswoman Ann F. Lewis said the organization would be far less successful in raising money if its members were saddled with the extra paperwork of mailing checks and forms separately to each woman candidate they were interested in supporting.

Critics say that such bundling is a way to move millions of dollars in contributions that are difficult to trace and easily hidden through inadequate reporting.

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Boxer and Feinstein, who serve as honorary advisers to EMILY’s List, favor overhauling campaign finance laws by putting a lid on spending, reducing the influence of PACs and restricting the practice of bundling, while at the same time carving out an exception for groups like EMILY’s List.

The two California senators have joined forces with three other Democratic women senators in pushing for a so-called EMILY’s Loophole. They want a bundling exemption that would apply only to independent PACs--those not financed by corporations, unions and other economic interest groups.

Boxer and Feinstein argue that groups like EMILY’s List deserve special treatment because they encourage the participation of small donors in the political process, promote the campaigns of outsiders--98% of the candidates EMILY’s List supported last year were non-incumbents--and do not lobby like big-business PACs.

But the notion that EMILY’s List does not engage in lobbying is “fallacious,” said Ellen Miller, director of the Center for Responsive Politics. “The reality is EMILY’s List chooses candidates who agree with them and lobby (the candidates) by the very fact that they hold a carrot out,” Miller said. “The carrot is the money.”

Thus, Miller says, it should come as no surprise that Feinstein, Boxer and other women candidates who benefited from the financial support of EMILY’s List are now “carrying their water” on Capitol Hill.

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Sweeping campaign reform legislation introduced by Sen. David Boren (D-Okla.) and Majority Leader George Mitchell (D-Maine) would put strict limits on bundling in an effort to reduce the influence of special-interest money.

Boxer said she and other women senators are meeting on a near-daily basis to plot strategy on how to insert the loophole in legislation. But the prospects for passing sweeping reform legislation this year are not promising.

“It seems like there is enough interest in a filibuster that we may not get anything out,” Boxer said. “Even though that would result in EMILY’s List being retained, it would be very sad because we wouldn’t have made any progress on any other fronts.”