Lott Derails Senate’s Campaign Fund Bill

The campaign to overhaul America’s election-financing laws suffered a crippling blow Tuesday as Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott withdrew a major bipartisan proposal to outlaw “soft money” contributions and impose other restrictions on campaign fund-raising.

Faced with possible filibusters both for and against the legislation--co-sponsored by all 45 Senate Democrats and four Republicans--Lott declared a parliamentary stalemate, halted further debate and called up an unrelated bill for consideration.

Reform proponents vowed to press their case at every legislative opportunity in the remaining days of the congressional session.

But “the odds now are against us, there’s no doubt about it,” conceded Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, one of the reform bill’s four GOP co-sponsors.

Lott (R-Miss.) acted only after narrowly escaping huge embarrassment. The GOP-dominated Senate came within a whisker of voting to kill his amendment, which had caused the gridlock over campaign finance reform in the first place.

Had reform advocates succeeded in scuttling Lott’s amendment, momentum for reform might have shifted somewhat in their favor. As it is, whether they can overcome GOP opposition remains doubtful.

“[The] McCain-Feingold [bill] is dead,” declared Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), its staunchest critic. “It’s not going to pass tomorrow. It’s not going to pass--ever.”

Tuesday’s withdrawal of the campaign finance bill authored by Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Russell D. Feingold (D-Wis.) came despite a last-minute public appeal by President Clinton from the White House.

But the president and other reform advocates insisted that they will yet prevail.

“Today was not the end of this fight for campaign finance reform but the beginning,” the president said in a statement. “I will fight for this measure as hard as necessary, for as long as necessary. And I call on all senators to realize that the bipartisan McCain-Feingold measure is our best chance to move forward with reform.”

Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) vowed to force the issue by attaching the legislation to other bills that come up in the Senate.

“This legislation is alive and well, and will be back,” Daschle said.

Indeed, one procedural vote today and two more on Thursday are scheduled on the matter, but, barring a change of mind by at least one Republican senator, no breakthrough is expected.

The underlying issue in Tuesday’s parliamentary maneuvering was the McCain-Feingold bill, which would ban “soft money”--the unregulated donations to political parties that are supposed to be used only for party-building purposes but often finance efforts that support specific candidates. Such funds are at the center of current investigations into irregularities during last year’s campaigns.

While imposing new contribution limits on political action committees, the bill establishes a test 60 days before an election to differentiate between political ads and true issue ads, which are not supposed to promote a candidate, with the political ads subjected to federal restrictions and reporting requirements.

With the measure’s demise, at least for now, both sides quickly shifted their focus to a new front: the battle to win the war of public opinion over who is to blame for killing campaign finance reform, despite more than a year of revelations of campaign fund-raising improprieties by Democrats and Republicans alike.

An unabashed foe of the McCain-Feingold bill, Lott asserted that he had “held up [his] end of the bargain” by allowing a “good” and “fair” debate on the matter. But since “there is no consensus on this issue,” senators “have to move to other items,” he declared.

Lott and McConnell had argued that the bill’s proposed contribution limits amounted to a violation of free speech and thus would be found unconstitutional by the courts.

“I feel good about what we did today,” Lott said, noting that the debate had consumed 22 hours over six days.

But Daschle and other Democrats argued that there was no real debate because Lott had used parliamentary maneuvers to block all but his own amendment from being considered.

“What kind of debate is that?” Daschle fumed, describing Lott’s tactics as “sleight of hand” and his amendment as “a poison pill” that “probably choked” the campaign finance reform drive, at least for now.

“There was not a free and open debate,” said Sen. Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.), a Daschle deputy.

“Today they gave you campaign finance fraud,” added Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.).

Clinton also chimed in on the issue, saying: “The Republican leadership and a minority of the Senate used procedural maneuvers to block the obvious will of a majority of United States senators to support bipartisan campaign finance reform legislation.”

Although Lott’s move to end the debate was not unexpected, the suspense leading up to Tuesday’s votes grew with each passing hour.

The day’s greatest drama unfolded on the Senate floor as senators began to cast the first of two key votes while two leading supporters of campaign finance reform--Collins and Sen. Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.)--sat in a back row “grinning like Cheshire cats” in anticipation of an upset victory over Lott, as Collins later conceded.

In the end, that was not to be.

The measure had 49 declared backers in all--just one senator’s vote shy of passage. If necessary, Vice President Al Gore would have cast a tie-breaking vote in support of the bill.

But after Lott agreed to allow the Senate to consider the bill, he offered an amendment to it, called the Paycheck Protection Act, to bar unions from using members’ dues for campaign donations without their prior, written authorization.

Although all 45 Senate Democrats denounced it as “a poison pill” that they intended to filibuster, they seemed able to command only 49 votes to kill Lott’s amendment.

But the outlook began changing during a vote to cut off debate on the Lott amendment, Senate sources said.

It turned out that two Republican moderates, Sens. Olympia J. Snowe of Maine and James M. Jeffords of Vermont, had signaled to Democrats their readiness to kill Lott’s amendment.

Because of that, the Democrats then were prepared to vote to end their filibuster against Lott’s amendment--a surprise outcome that would have paved the way for an immediate vote to kill it. That was a possibility that few, including Lott, had anticipated, judging by the intense conversations between him, McConnell and their aides as events unfolded.

But the scenario suddenly collapsed when Snowe issued a final demand in exchange for her support, a demand Democrats could not accept: that they back her compromise campaign reform proposal.

After Daschle told Snowe that he could not promise unqualified Democratic support for her alternative bill, Snowe withdrew her commitment to vote against Lott. Then every Democrat and three Republicans voted to continue their filibuster. Although that left 52 senators voting to end debate, 60 votes are needed to end a filibuster.

That was followed by a no-suspense vote to cut off a GOP filibuster on the McCain-Feingold bill, which also failed, 53 to 47.

It was then that Lott pulled the measure from the floor.

“We were very close” to getting the necessary 51 votes to kill Lott’s amendment, Daschle said afterward, although he declined to discuss his talks with Snowe. Sources said that Jeffords also had been prepared to vote with Snowe to kill the Lott amendment.

* OVAL OFFICE VISITS: Donors visited Oval Office, normally off-limits. A10