Campaign Finance Reform Bill Faces an Uphill Battle

April may be the cruelest month for poets, but for congressional reformers, February and March may be the months to worry about.

When they return to Washington on Jan. 25, lawmakers will again be confronted with one of the most difficult issues plaguing the current session of Congress: campaign finance reform.

Legislation to revamp the way congressional election campaigns are financed was passed by the House and the Senate last year, and sponsors of the two very different bills are hoping to reconcile them in a conference that could begin in February.

But melding House and Senate versions of campaign finance reform into a single piece of legislation that stands a chance of becoming law will be difficult.

Part of the problem is that many lawmakers--while they would tell constituents otherwise--are not eager to reform the way they raise money for their own election campaigns.

“Everyone is all for reform--as long as it doesn’t mean giving up any of the advantages of the system that got them elected in the first place,” one House aide said.

But an even larger concern arises from a dilemma that has long bedeviled the highly partisan debate over the way politicians raise and spend money.

Because the Supreme Court ruled in 1976 that mandatory spending caps on political campaigns are unconstitutional, the only way to persuade politicians to limit campaign spending is through voluntary inducements.

To most reformers, including public interest groups like Common Cause and the League of Women Voters, that has meant offering congressional candidates who abide by the limits matching contributions or vouchers good for campaign expenditures.

But such public financing remains an anathema to many Democrats and virtually all Republicans, who deride the idea as “welfare for politicians.”

To break a Republican filibuster and pass a bill in the Senate last June, Democrats agreed to drop nearly all public financing and to impose a tax on the campaign receipts of candidates who refuse to comply with spending limits of between $1.2 million and $5.5 million per Senate race, depending on the size of the state.

The House, which passed its bill last month, sidestepped the financing issue altogether by including what critics say is a “poison pill.” Even if it is enacted into law, the House bill won’t take effect unless separate legislation to finance it is passed in the future.

Skeptics say they doubt that will ever happen.

“There is no chance of passing the funding legislation in the House,” said Rep. Bill Thomas (R-Bakersfield), adding that the Democratic leadership’s decision not to include the financing all but guarantees the bill’s ultimate failure.

Supporters of the legislation reject such predictions as overly cynical.

They figure that once the other pieces of the first major reform of campaign financing in 20 years are in place, lawmakers will feel mounting pressure from their constituents to see the reforms through by financing them.

“Everybody is skeptical,” said Betsy Cain, president of the League of Women Voters. “But this is a credibility issue for Congress. . . . This will be a true test of reform, one of those issues the public will look at to see if Congress is serious about reform.”

The legislation still has several hurdles to clear before it can take that test. The biggest will probably appear in February and March, when negotiators sit down to reconcile the House and Senate bills.

Rep. Sam Gejdenson (D-Conn.), chief architect of the House bill, predicts that while most differences will be resolved, the two sides may have to agree to disagree and accept different rules for the House and the Senate on the key question of contributions by political action committees.

The Senate bill would ban all PAC contributions from congressional races. The bill passed by the House, where Democrats are more dependent on PAC contributions than their Senate counterparts, retains the current $5,000 limit on contributions by PACs.