Unregulated and Unaccountable, Soft Money Talks With ‘Magic’ Words

“My father worked for the same company for 40 years. He had a great health plan with complete prescription drug coverage. Now the White House wants to take it away from him and force him into a government-run HMO. Call Adam Schiff and tell him to stop scaring seniors.”

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The radio ad began two or three weeks before election day. The first time I heard itcoming home late one night from the campaign office I almost drove off the road.

The ad was played incessantly for the next two weeks over each major Los Angeles radio station at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars. It got so bad that I would change the station when it came on only to find it was on the next station too.

But despite the admonition to call me and tell me to stop scaring seniors--a nice irony given that the ad was designed precisely to scare seniors--no one ever called. No one was supposed to.

Never mind that there was no “White House” plan. Never mind that the congressional plan I supported to provide prescription drug benefits under Medicare was purely voluntary and that no one would have been forced to join. These commercials, and dozens of others like them, both for my candidacy and against it, were paid for by massive unregulated contributions that exceeded the legal limits by millions of dollars. And no one could be held accountable. Not my opponent. No one.

How was this possible? How could the pharmaceutical industry, for example, spend millions of dollars on similar ads throughout the country masquerading under the name “Citizens for Better Medicare” and avoid contribution limits of $1,000 or $5,000? Through the miracle of soft money.

Contributions from corporate treasuries have been banned since 1907, when Teddy Roosevelt sought to curb the excessive influence of the large conglomerates on the political process. Similarly, labor unions have been precluded from using their treasury funds to influence federal elections since 1947. Although corporations and labor can form political action committees of their members to contribute, those hard money contributions are limited to $5,000.

There is no limit on soft money, however. What exactly is soft money? Unlike the soft water that comes from your home treatment system and has slightly different qualities than hard water, hard and soft money are identical. Cash to pay for commercials. Cash for mail. Cash to pay for getting out the vote. The checks may be drawn on different accounts but the purpose is the same: to get people elected to federal office or get them thrown out.

But there is one distinction, and it is the distinction that makes all the difference. Soft money ads don’t use the “magic” words. That is, they don’t tell you to vote for or against Adam Schiff; they tell you to call him. And believe it or not, it is generally no more than this ethereal difference that allows contributors of soft money to avoid disclosure and accountability, and to spend as much as it takes--millions if they choose--to influence federal elections. As long as they don’t use the magic words, they can do, say and spend as they please.

One of my first acts as a member of Congress was to co-sponsor the McCain-Feingold / Shays-Meehan campaign finance reform measure. My race for Congress was the most expensive House race in U.S. history, topping $15 million to $20 million. Teaming up with Rep. Mark Kirk, a Republican freshman from Illinois who had the second most expensive House race, we have founded Freshman for Reform, a bipartisan group of new lawmakers committed to reforming the way Congress operates. Campaign finance reform is first on our agenda.

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The McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform measure would eliminate the use of soft money by banning political party soft money and prohibiting the use of corporate and labor funds to pay for broadcast ads that refer to federal candidates in the 60 days prior to an election. In Buckley vs. Valeo, the Supreme Court upheld contribution limits in federal campaigns but formulated the magic words standard to narrow and save the vague law passed by Congress. In so doing, it created a loophole in campaign finance laws that you can drive a sound truck through. McCain-Feingold would close that loophole.

Now is the right time to ban soft money. Nationwide, the campaign battles of 2000 saw a surge of special-interest money flooding into our democratic electoral process, shattering all previous records. The wave of soft money has exploded from $86 million in the 1992 elections to $260 million in 1996, to nearly $500 million last year.

Change will not be easy. The special interests, which have come to dominate the soft money industry, have formed a strong anti-reform coalition spanning all ideologies from the far left to the far right. And many members of Congress, content to support campaign finance reform when it looked to have no chance of passing, are beginning to balk under its newfound momentum.

As McCain pointed out when I joined him at a recent press conference, passage will require the American people to stand up and demand an election system free from the corrosive influence of unregulated, anonymous and unaccountable contributions.

So, to use the parlance of the soft money ads themselves, “Call your Congress member. And urge him or her to vote for campaign finance reform.”