Senate Ends Filibuster on Election Reform

The Senate, urged on by President Clinton, broke a long Republican filibuster Wednesday and cleared the way for passage of legislation as early as today that would radically reform the financing of congressional campaigns.

But the breakthrough that gave the Democrats the extra votes they needed to overcome the GOP senators’ delaying tactics came after a compromise with moderate Republicans that angered many of the bill’s staunchest supporters.

The compromise, which strips most forms of public financing from the measure, was immediately denounced as a sham by some of the public interest groups that had lobbied hardest for the reforms. They said that, in its current form, the bill would do little to eliminate the influence of special interest money in political campaigns.

There was no immediate White House reaction to the compromise. Clinton, who earlier in the day renewed his attacks on Republican opponents of the bill, had been a strong proponent of the public-financing provisions. They would have provided matching contributions, as well as discounted broadcast time and special mailing rates for candidates who limited their campaign spending according to a formula based on the size of the voting populations in their state.

The compromise, negotiated to win seven key Republican votes, would eliminate most of those provisions and provide public funding only to candidates who accept the limits but face opponents who exceed them.

Sen. David L. Boren (D-Okla.), the chief sponsor of the Senate bill, conceded that the White House had not been “fully informed” of the compromise before the Senate decided, 62 to 37, to end the three weeks of debate.

Boren and other Democrats defended the compromise as the best that could be achieved. They predicted that Clinton would accept the legislation and that Senate passage would follow easily.

The legislation’s prospects after that are less clear, however. The House, where Democrats are deeply divided over many of the reforms, has yet to debate the measure, and Republican opponents, contending that the compromise struck Wednesday is unconstitutional, are promising to challenge the bill in the courts if it becomes law.

“We’ve lost this round but the bill still has a long way to go,” said Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), the leader of the Senate opposition to public financing and spending limits. “In my opinion, this bill is DOA in the courts.”

The legislation, as it exists in the Senate, seeks to end the inflationary chase for special interest money in federal elections by banning campaign contributions from political action committees, tightening the restrictions on so-called “soft money,” which is used for unregulated election activities, and by closing a loophole that allows special interest groups to evade contribution limits by collecting many small individual donations and “bundling” them into larger checks.

The heart of the reform, however, is a controversial mix of incentives and disincentives designed to persuade Senate candidates to limit their campaign expenditures in general elections to amounts ranging from $1.2 million in small states to $5.5 million in California, the largest state. Clinton also had proposed limiting spending in House races to $600,000. But that proposal was not included in the Senate version of the bill.

Because the limits have to be voluntary to get around a 1976 Supreme Court ruling that mandatory spending limits are unconstitutional, backers of the reforms included the carrot of public financing as an inducement to candidates to accept the limits.

Republicans, however, bitterly opposed public financing for campaigns and, over the course of their three-week filibuster, even Democratic support began to wither under the GOP’s constant characterization of taxpayer funding as an “entitlement program for politicians” that would further enrage voters already fed up with what they perceive as wasteful government spending.

In the end, working with Republican moderates who opposed public financing but still accepted spending limits, Boren and Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell (D-Me.) came up with a formula that retained some public financing but relied more on penalties to ensure compliance with the spending limits.

Under that formula, Senate candidates who exceed the spending limit for their states would be subject to a corporate rate tax on all their gross campaign receipts. The revenue raised by the tax would in turn be funneled into a federal fund to provide extra public financing to opponents of the non-complying candidates.

Under this complex formulation, a complying candidate could receive tax-exempt matching funds in three equal installments, totaling as much as 100% of the original spending limit in his or her state, while the non-complying candidate would have to pay a tax of up to 35% on all the campaign contributions that he or she raised.

In addition, candidates who did not comply would be obliged to run a disclaimer at the end of their advertisements stating that they had refused to accept voluntary spending limits.

These, along with other inducements and penalties in the bill, left Republican opponents charging that the spending limits were voluntary in name only and therefore an abridgment of the right to free speech as defined in Buckley vs. Valeo, the Supreme Court decision that struck down mandatory spending limits as unconstitutional.

“This bill is even more unconstitutional than it was before. . . . In order to minimize the tax money involved, it now has a number of punitive provisions to bludgeon a candidate into shutting up,” McConnell charged.

Supporters, however, predicted that the bill would withstand a constitutional challenge and defended the compromise as the only way to get real campaign reforms past Republican opposition in the Senate.

“You cannot get anything passed through the Senate without at least some Republican votes and that means you cannot have (large-scale) public financing,” said Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.).

“This bill doesn’t include everything I would have liked but . . . it does include the essence of reform--spending limits,” Mitchell said. “This vote today is a major step toward comprehensive reform.”

Breaking Republican ranks to vote to end the filibuster were GOP Sens. David Durenberger of Minnesota, James M. Jeffords of Vermont, Nancy Landon Kassebaum of Kansas, John McCain of Arizona, John H. Chafee of Rhode Island, William S. Cohen of Maine and Larry Pressler of South Dakota.

Most of them were among a group of moderate Republicans criticized by Clinton again on Wednesday for opposing the bill, even though they voted for similar legislation that was vetoed last year by then-President George Bush.

“What possible reason can they give, other than pure politics, for filibustering a bill that they voted for last year?” Clinton asked rhetorically.

The White House criticism of Durenberger--who had helped forge the compromise--especially seemed to irk Democratic sponsors of the bill. They were engaged in delicate negotiations with the Republican moderates and had gone out of their way to praise the moderates’ role in drafting the compromise.