Rare Step Taken to Get Finance Reform Vote

House supporters of campaign finance legislation are taking the rare step of a petition drive to compel Republican leaders to give them a vote on their bill to limit the amount of money spent on elections.

Once again, House Democratic leader Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri said Thursday, “we are forced to use the only means at our disposal to press for a fair vote on campaign finance reform.”

House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) said backers of the campaign spending bill had squandered their opportunity for a vote and he would be urging Republicans not to support the discharge petition. “We’re going to be talking to folks and hoping they wouldn’t do that,” Hastert said.

Under House rules, lawmakers can force action on a bill if they can get a majority of the chamber, 218 members, to sign a discharge petition.

With members generally reluctant to defy their own leaders, discharge petitions are not a common practice. The last successful petition, in 1994, concerned a balanced-budget constitutional amendment.

But in both 1998 and 1999 Republican leaders agreed to bring campaign finance legislation to the floor when backers of a petition were on the verge of getting 218 signatures. As in those instances, the petition is being sponsored by the Blue Dogs, a group of conservative Democrats.

The House in both those years passed campaign finance legislation that went on to die in the Senate.

Hastert agreed to give Reps. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) and Martin T. Meehan (D-Mass.) a vote last week on their bill to ban “soft money,” the unregulated millions that pour into national parties from unions, corporations and individuals, and restrict certain political ads run by interest groups in the final days of an election.

But Shays and 18 other Republicans joined most Democrats in defeating rules for debating the legislation, saying they were crafted to give unfair advantages to their opponents. That put further action on the legislation on indefinite hold.

The discharge petition would replace those rules with a new rule that would allow the House to vote on the Shays-Meehan bill and two GOP-backed bills, with the one receiving the most votes advancing to the amendment stage and final passage.

Meehan said they were sending a simple message that “campaign finance reform is coming back to the floor of the House and this time the rules will be fair.”

Shays and other Republican supporters of his legislation met with Hastert on Wednesday to make clear that, if they couldn’t negotiate a new date for floor action, they would support the discharge petition.

Hastert insisted Thursday that “I didn’t have to be bullied by a discharge petition to say we would have a vote” last week and that it was Gephardt and the Democrats who scuttled their chances by voting down their rule.

Under the rules of a discharge petition, the filers must wait seven legislative days before starting to gather signatures. Rep. Jim Turner (D-Texas), one of the organizers, said that should allow them to get their drive going before lawmakers leave for the August recess and get the legislation back on the floor shortly after they return in September.

The Senate in April passed a bill sponsored by Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Russell D. Feingold (D-Wis.) that closely mirrors the Shays-Meehan bill, giving supporters of campaign spending limits their best chance in years of curtailing spending on elections. In the last presidential election, the two parties took in almost $500 million in soft money donations.