Campaign Reform Bill Stirs Senate

The Senate began consideration of a revised campaign finance reform bill Thursday, amid expectations that the legislation again will go down in defeat--even though the House passed a tougher measure last month.

Floor debate quickly turned sour as conservative Republicans, who oppose the bill, launched an all-out attack on Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.)--a sponsor of the measure and a GOP presidential candidate--for contending that the current finance system makes politicians corrupt.

Seizing on examples that McCain cited on his Internet Web site, several GOP senators demanded that he show how obtaining funds for federal programs--or pork-barrel spending for their states--amounts to corruption, no matter who contributed to their campaigns.

“The issue is where is the corruption?” asked Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), the Senate’s foremost foe of campaign finance legislation.

McCain and Russell D. Feingold (D-Wis.) have pared their often-debated proposal to delete a key provision disliked by many Republicans that would have restricted the use of “issue-advocacy” ads, which now escape any regulation.

They also have openly invited senators of all stripes to propose amendments. Their hope is to build a big enough coalition of senators who have a stake in the bill to muster the 60-vote majority they would need to block an expected filibuster by conservatives.

But proponents conceded that they face an uphill fight. McCain and Feingold clearly are looking toward the longer-term. If they don’t succeed now, they hope at least to chip away at the opposition in preparation for another try in 2000 or 2001.

In the bid to win more votes, the core of the revised McCain-Feingold bill is a provision that would ban the use of “soft money”--the largely unregulated contributions by corporations, unions and wealthy individuals to political parties. In recent years the parties have amassed tens of millions of dollars in such contributions.

Proponents of campaign finance reform had hoped that prospects for the McCain-Feingold bill would be boosted after the House passed the tougher bill last month on a 252-177 vote, with a sizable number of House Republicans bucking their leadership to support it.

But in the Senate, conservatives are preparing a spate of “poison-pill” amendments--such as a sharper tightening of restrictions on campaign spending by labor unions--that are expected to win the approval of most Republicans but might prompt Democrats to abandon the legislation.

McConnell, who led the filibuster that killed the bill in 1998, has threatened a similar tactic. The Kentucky lawmaker heads the Senate committee that parcels out the party’s campaign contributions to GOP senatorial candidates.

The sponsors’ invitation to other senators to propose amendments of their own so far has yielded only a tepid response.

One amendment would increase existing ceilings on contributions to candidates. The proposal, by Sen. Charles Hagel (R-Neb.), would triple the $1,000-per-donation limit on direct contributions to federal candidates and automatically adjust them for inflation in future years.

A second Hagel proposal would limit the soft-money contributions that a corporation, labor union or individual makes to any national political party or its entities to $60,000 in any calendar year.

The votes on these proposals are expected to take place next week.

The Senate approved two noncontroversial amendments to the bill Thursday--one by McCain that would require candidates to make public all campaign contributions within 24 hours and another by McConnell requiring senators to report all evidence of corruption that they see.

What provoked the conservatives in the opening debate was an item on McCain’s Web site that cited examples of special-interest spending, which he said were linked to so-called “soft-money” donations--among them a $2.2-million sewer grant for Salt Lake City obtained by Sen. Robert F. Bennett (R-Utah).

Obviously irked, Bennett led a vehement attack against McCain, demanding to know how soft-money contributions could possibly have influenced his quest for a sewer grant.

McCain demurred, insisting that he had not meant to imply that Bennett in particular had been co-opted by campaign money. But he stood firm in asserting that “in the aggregate, wasteful spending is caused by, among other things, soft money.”

The role of soft-money contributions in U.S. political campaigns has grown exponentially in recent years, partly because of restrictions on direct donations to candidates, known as “hard money.”

Although McCain and Feingold have exorcised the provisions on “issue-advocacy” ads from their revised bill, the issue’s ghost looms anyway--angering conservatives. The House-passed legislation would limit the use of such advertising.

Although reformers view such ads as a way to circumvent regulations on campaign financing, opponents contend that the restrictions would amount to a limit on free speech. Issue ads discuss candidates and their records without directly urging voters to elect them.

Steve Weissman, a lobbyist for Public Citizen, a liberal group that is backing the legislation, said it is too early to tell whether McCain and Feingold will be able to attract the 60 votes needed to choke off the filibuster when the balloting comes up next week.

But Weissman said that it “still would be a big step forward” if the two lawmakers merely were able to increase the 52 votes they won last year to end the filibuster. That way, he said, proponents will be poised to adopt a more aggressive strategy in 2000 or 2001.