House OKs Campaign Finance Bill

The House early today gave solid bipartisan approval to legislation that would reshape the nation’s political fund-raising system for the first time since the post-Watergate reforms of the 1970s.

Led by Democrats and a breakaway bloc of Republicans, the House, on a 240-189 vote embraced a ban on the unlimited donations to national political parties known as soft money. The action took Congress one major step closer to making the reform a reality.

Passage of the legislation came after two rival proposals offered by GOP leaders that aimed to derail the reform effort fell well short in early votes Wednesday. By early today, several tests on amendments had also failed to splinter the pro-reform coalition.

“This is a great moment for the country,” said House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.), a leading reform advocate. “I just think this is going to create a new politics in this country that surrounds organizations and people and ideas rather than large amounts of money and television ads.”

In the last decade, both major parties increasingly have relied on soft money contributions from unions, corporations and wealthy individuals to help pay for political advertising outside of the system of federal campaign contribution limits.

Critics denounce the practice as an ever-widening loophole in election law that allows big donors to seek undue influence over candidates for president and Congress. They cite the discredited Enron Corp. as a prime example of a special interest that sought advantage in Washington by giving more than $3.5 million in soft money over the last decade.

The bill the House approved, sponsored by Reps. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) and Martin T. Meehan (D-Mass.), closely tracks a companion measure by Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Russell D. Feingold (D-Wis.) that the Senate passed last April, 59 to 41. Today, 41 House Republicans joined 198 Democrats and one independent in the pro-reform majority.

The main provisions of each bill are similar: They would bar national parties from raising soft money, increase the size of contributions that can be given directly to candidates for federal office and impose new regulations on broadcast advertising by interest groups that target candidates in the days before a general or primary election.

Soft money has powerful defenders among elected officials who are reluctant to tinker with a formula that helped send them to Washington. House Republican leaders, claiming their House majority could be at risk, fought the Shays-Meehan legislation with every weapon in their arsenal. Indeed, they scheduled a debate this year only after a rebellious majority of House members signed a rank-and-file petition to force action.

GOP leaders on Wednesday proposed two alternatives to the bill that sought even tighter limits on political donations. While the Republican leaders conceded that they did not want these alternatives to become law, they hoped the House might endorse them as a way to force a potential bill-scuttling conference committee with the Senate.

The House swatted away the two proposals easily--one on a 249-179 vote, the other by a whopping 377 to 53.

While the House coalition pushing the reform bill showed strength in these preliminary votes, the Shays-Meehan measure was subjected to an array of attacks in a marathon series of votes that culminated early today.

With the bill having survived the House largely intact, advocates now plan to send it back to the Senate for final congressional action. If approved there, it would be sent to President Bush for his signature or veto.

Bush has been noncommittal, though increasingly there have been signals he would sign the bill. At the White House on Wednesday, he told reporters that he wants to “sign a bill that improves the system.”

He added that if a bill is acceptable to him, it should take effect immediately. That was an implicit criticism of a last-minute decision by Shays and Meehan to postpone their proposed soft money ban until after this year’s congressional elections. Early today, the House affirmed the sponsors’ position.

Still, Bush promised to “take a good look” at whatever Congress might send him, and Fleischer said the Shays-Meehan bill makes “several improvements to the current system.”

Bush’s refusal to threaten a veto means that major campaign legislation has a solid chance of enactment. In fact, several prominent Republican lawmakers opposed to the proposed reforms have predicted that the president will sign a soft money ban into law.

In all, Republicans and Democrats collected nearly $500 million in soft money for the 2000 elections--more than five times the $86 million they collected in 1991-92.

GOP leaders have denounced the bid to ban soft money as an unconstitutional infringement on free speech. And they have warned it would leave their party more exposed to attacks by unions and others sympathetic to Democrats.

“This is not reform,” House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Texas) said of the bill. “This is regulation.”

Advocates said the ban is needed to rebuild public confidence in the political process.

“This beautiful city in which we serve, 200 years ago was built on a swamp,” said Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), the House minority whip. “And a swamp it is again today, a swamp of special interest money. Today we have the opportunity to drain that swamp.”

In a key preliminary vote, 39 Republicans joined 200 Democrats and one independent to move the Shays-Meehan proposal forward. Two of the dissident Republicans were from California: Reps. Stephen Horn of Long Beach and Doug Ose of Sacramento. Rep. Elton Gallegly (R-Simi Valley), who in 1998 and 1999 had voted for earlier versions of the bill, sided with his leadership this time in opposing the bill in the initial vote.

All 32 House Democrats from California supported the bill.

After the preliminary vote, the House began to consider amendments.

Republican leaders proposed 10 amendments that advocates of the bill described as “poison pills.” As the House was working through those proposals far into the night, it defeated nine of them, including one to impose a U.S. citizenship requirement on campaign donors. Currently, noncitizens who are legal residents are allowed to make donations.

One GOP leadership amendment that passed the House on a largely party-line vote with Republican support eliminated a provision that was meant to help Democrats pay for a new party building in Washington. But congressional aides said afterward the amendment did not appear to threaten passage of the bill.

Reform advocates comfortably survived an important test as the House defeated an amendment to make the soft money ban effective immediately. Backers of the bill, who argue that it is impractical to change the system when November elections are approaching, had feared the GOP leadership proposal would cost the bill support in the Senate needed to overcome an expected filibuster.

Advocates of Shays-Meehan squeaked past another challenge as the House rejected, 219 to 209, a proposal backed by the National Rifle Assn. to give special protections to political advertising pertaining to the 2nd Amendment.

But the House approved three other amendments offered by supporters of Shays-Meehan. One, approved on a 327-101 vote, stripped a provision from the bill to regulate the cost of political advertising on television. Shays and Meehan, who gave their allies the green light to offer the amendment but did not endorse it, said it would not jeopardize its fate in the Senate.

The provision had been pushed into the Senate-passed bill last year at the urging of Sen. Robert G. Torricelli (D-N.J.) and other senators who face high advertising costs in major television markets.

Another amendment, approved by voice vote, would relax limits even further for candidates who face self-funded wealthy opponents. A third amendment offered by the Shays-Meehan coalition would raise the individual contribution limits for House campaigns to $2,000 per election per candidate, up from $1,000. It was approved, 218 to 211, mostly with Republican support, mirroring provisions in the Senate-passed bill for senatorial and presidential contribution limits.

The debate on the legislation underscored the high stakes as lawmakers on both sides acknowledged that Congress was considering historic changes to the financing system.

Rep. John T. Doolittle (R-Rocklin), a prominent opponent, said the current system is the product of a Democratic-led Congress in the 1970s and that those reforms have left the GOP at a disadvantage for two decades.

“If this disastrous bill passes us today unamended, I suspect we will have another 20 years in the trenches before we ever come back,” Doolittle said, voicing fears of many in his party that the reforms could cost the Republicans control of the House and undercut their chances of regaining a Senate majority. Many in the GOP especially lament that the bill does not require unions to obtain permission from their members before using dues for political purposes.

Rep. James C. Greenwood (R-Pa.) cited the ongoing investigation of Enron’s collapse in explaining his support of the bill. The chairman of a House subcommittee leading the probe, he noted that the now-bankrupt energy company repeatedly gave major checks, totaling tens of thousands of dollars apiece, to Democratic and Republican party committees to influence the 2000 elections.

“My friends, this is not about philosophy,” Greenwood said. “It is about access and influence, and it corrupts our process.”

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Times staff writers Janet Hook and Edwin Chen contributed to this report.