Rookies Beat House Odds to Revive Election Finance Bill

For Rep. Asa Hutchinson, the epiphany came during a recent meeting with eighth-graders in Alma, Ark.

When a student asked him to name the one thing he wanted to accomplish in Congress, Hutchinson realized that it was campaign finance reform. More than anything else, he replied, cleaning up the nation’s election financing system would help restore trust in government.

Hutchinson, an earnest first-term Republican, recounted that exchange during an angry confrontation with his House GOP colleagues Wednesday. Suddenly, and unexpectedly, the tide began to shift in his favor.

By the time the hourlong meeting was over, House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) had agreed to allow an unfettered debate in the House next month on campaign finance reform. It was a stunning reversal, considering that the reform movement had been pronounced dead by almost everyone within shouting distance of the Capitol.

Even more surprisingly, Gingrich decreed that the starting point of the debate will be an obscure bill drafted by a group of freshman lawmakers led by Hutchinson and Rep. Thomas H. Allen (D-Maine), two personable lawyers who disagree on nearly everything but this issue.

The story of how Hutchinson, Allen and 10 other upstart rookies burst onto the scene as campaign-finance power brokers shows that even in political Washington, personal candor and hard work still can prevail over mistrust, deceit and withering opposition from party bosses and powerful special interests.

For 15 months, the group of House freshmen has remained focused on what Hutchinson calls “the Rose Garden strategy”--crafting a campaign finance bill that can be signed into law.

“Perseverance and bipartisanship--that’s what paid off,” Hutchinson said Thursday. “That’s the overriding lesson.”

From the very start, it was an unlikely collaboration. Hutchinson is an archconservative from rural northwest Arkansas, a darling of the Christian right. Allen is the former mayor of Portland, Maine, a quintessential New England liberal with a Harvard law degree.

Their unusual alliance began in January 1997 during a retreat for about 70 newly elected House members. Campaign finance reform, someone suggested, might be an issue that the freshmen of both parties could work on.

Soon, six Democrats and six Republicans were named to a bipartisan task force, with Hutchinson and Allen designated as co-chairmen.

“It took three or four meetings before any trust or relationships built up,” Hutchinson said. “The initial impression was, ‘We’ve got to watch these guys because they want to defeat us’--and vice versa.’ ”

At the outset, the task force seemed to enjoy the blessing of its respective party leaders, who evidently did not expect the group to produce much in the way of substance. His GOP bosses, Hutchinson said, were quite supportive, if somewhat condescending. “They said: ‘Hey, this is a good example of what freshmen ought to be doing and how they can take an issue and run with it.’ ”

In retrospect, there were hints that the leadership’s support was less than met the eye.

“We had no staff,” said Allen. “We had no money. They wouldn’t even let us hold hearings.”

Last July, the task force approved, on a 10-2 vote, a “Bipartisan Campaign Integrity Act.” Among other things, the measure would prohibit national parties from receiving the unregulated “soft-money” contributions that were at the core of the fund-raising abuses of the 1996 election cycle.

Reaching that consensus was not easy, Hutchinson said. Task force Democrats wanted to go much further than the Republicans. Leaders in both parties became alarmed at the prospect of losing a major source of campaign contributions. They tried to persuade the freshmen to abandon their effort.

At a private meeting last summer at which Hutchinson and his GOP colleagues were to present their proposal to the entire Republican freshman class, they were preceded to the podium by one party leader after another--all denouncing the plan.

“They all spoke against our proposal and defended soft money,” Hutchinson said. “I was just flabbergasted that they came down so hard.”

The session left him depressed--and thinking the effort was doomed.

But Hutchinson rebounded. “I got up the next day and started working at getting more co-sponsors.” At last count, 50 Democrats and 21 Republicans had signed on.

Back home, Hutchinson came under heavy fire from the National Right to Life Committee, a staunch foe of campaign finance reform. He responded by expressing his “disappointment” at being attacked “by friends,” and declared: “I have to stand by my principles.”

Hutchinson and Allen are pleased that the task force’s bill is being criticized for both doing too much and too little. To them, that suggests they have managed to stake out a true centrist position.

Both houses of the GOP-controlled Congress attempted to block passage of comprehensive campaign finance reform legislation this year. But in the House, a protest movement gained momentum after members objected to the tactics employed by Gingrich, who used his power as speaker last month to require that any reform legislation receive a two-thirds “super majority” before it could pass, instead of the usual simple majority.

Gingrich’s move added momentum to a petition drive to force House leaders to allow a full and fair debate on reform legislation. By last weekend, it seemed increasingly likely that the effort, which was backed by most Democrats and more than a dozen Republicans, would succeed.

Before they acquiesced, Gingrich and his allies made a series of frantic, sometimes angry, phone calls in an effort to head off the rebellion.

At one point, Hutchinson was on his car phone in rural Arkansas exchanging heated words with Gingrich, who was on a cell phone in New Hampshire. And on Tuesday, GOP Chairman Jim Nicholson called Hutchinson from Europe, urging him not to sign the petition.

Hutchinson suggested that Nicholson instead should urge the speaker to bring up a true reform bill. Later that night, Gingrich and his lieutenants realized that they had lost.

Still, Hutchinson was clueless when he walked into Wednesday morning’s GOP conference, bracing for a “lecture” from his GOP bosses.

Sure enough, angry words were exchanged, with some members denouncing the Republicans who had signed the petition as “the dirty dozen.”

But then, two GOP leaders, Reps. Jennifer Dunn of Washington and Bill Thomas of Bakersfield, sidled up to Hutchinson and told him to be prepared to speak about the freshmen’s reform bill because “the dynamics had changed.”

Second in line at the microphone, Hutchinson soon got his chance. Besides touting the freshmen’s reform bill, he rued the pervasive public cynicism and distrust of government. “We’ve got to change directions,” he told his GOP colleagues. His remarks were met with applause.

“There’s much work to be done,” Hutchinson said later, noting that under the open rules promised by Gingrich, the freshmen’s bill will be subject to all sorts of amendments, including some designed to scuttle the measure.

“We now have a chance,” added Allen. “And I don’t believe that the American people want us to miss this chance.”