Vote Broadens Use of ‘Soft Money’ by State Parties

The Federal Election Commission on Wednesday adopted a series of amendments that critics, including two of the six election commissioners, said would significantly weaken the ban on “soft money”--the unlimited contributions to national political parties--that was the centerpiece of this year’s landmark campaign-finance reform act.

In a marathon session to approve regulations that will implement the law, the commission’s three Republicans and a single Democrat went beyond even the FEC’s legal staff in further narrowing key definitions in a voluminous set of draft rules that the act’s four congressional sponsors already had contended would water down their law.

As an example, just before the commission recessed for the night, its members voted 4 to 1, with one abstention, to narrow the definition of the word “solicit” so that it means only “directly ask.” Under this definition, recommendations or suggestions for a contribution, as well as an array of other approaches, would not be covered by the ban.

“This definition has the potential for great mischief,” Lawrence Norton, the FEC’s general counsel, told the commissioners before they voted.

After the meeting, Don Simon, general counsel for the public-interest group Common Cause, said: “This is a definition that defies common sense and allows parties and federal officials to continue to solicit soft money as long as they are careful not to use the word ‘ask.’ ”

Hours before, the commission did cede to the four sponsors on one basic provision of the law. They rejected a Republican-sponsored amendment that reform advocates said would have continued to permit the political-attack advertising that has drawn much of the reformers’ criticism and consumed the bulk of the soft-money contributions, often in the hundreds of millions of dollars, raised by the parties from corporations, labor unions and other special interests in recent years.

So contentious and prolonged was Wednesday’s debate that the commission did not adjourn until close to midnight, as it attempted to address additional amendments and all other provisions in the 318 pages of final draft regulations. The members will resume their deliberations this morning.

But throughout Wednesday’s debate, the commission, which not only is making the rules but will later interpret and enforce them, did take on some of the most controversial provisions, which the law’s authors opposed. And the session underscored the deep political and philosophical divisions between the legislators who wrote the bipartisan campaign reform act and the regulators who must frame it in law.

Even as the commission met, President Bush joined fellow Republicans at the Washington Convention Center a few blocks away, taking advantage of current regulations--which expire Nov. 6, the day after election day--to raise more than $30 million for the party’s congressional and senatorial campaign committees.

On the eve of the FEC session, the law’s chief sponsors--Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Russell D. Feingold (D-Wis.) and Reps. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) and Martin T. Meehan (D-Mass.)--warned the commission that they would be watching closely, and that the bill’s ban on soft money would be “fundamentally undermined” by watered-down definitions.

Responding to such criticisms, Commissioner Bradley A. Smith, a Republican who wrote extensively against campaign-finance reform before he was appointed to the FEC, opened the meeting Wednesday by lashing out at what he called “the paranoia and the hysteria” that the soft-money rulemaking has engendered among the law’s sponsors and the “self-styled reformers” who support them.

“Part of their agenda is to abolish” the FEC, Smith said. “They have a vested interest in denigrating everything we do.”

On the Democratic side, long-serving Commissioner Scott E. Thomas countered that “the battle” over the rulemaking is “whether we will somehow undo the statute [the lawmakers] had worked to pass.”

And several times during Wednesday’s debate, Thomas warned that some of the amendments were doing just that--opening loopholes for future evasion of the soft-money ban.

Smith sponsored several of those amendments, which broadened the ways in which and local political parties, committees and candidates can use unregulated soft money for election activities that may affect federal candidates and elections as well.

The reform act was meant to ban all soft money in the federal election system and even regulate it at the level when it could affect “federal election activity.”

In seeking to narrow the definitions of that federal activity, Smith, his Republican colleagues and Democrat Karl J. Sandstrom, who cast the tie-breaking vote on several of those amendments, argued that broad definitions of such activities as voter registration drives would have a chilling effect on grass-roots politics and would violate basic principles of federalism.

“This is not going to allow more soft money into the system,” Smith said of his amendment. “Congress knew there would still be soft money in the system.”

Arguing against another amendment sponsored by Sandstrom that would, in effect, permit state and local candidates or committees to use soft money to compile voters’ lists, Commissioner Thomas argued, “As a matter of policy, I think we’re going in the wrong direction.”

“I’m trying to head off, before it’s too late, some of these easy vehicles for evasion of the legislation,” he said.

“I don’t want us to start going down that slippery slope,” Thomas added.

But on the key issue of narrowly defining the rules governing attack ads, Smith backed off an amendment that would have created broad exemptions to the ban on any advertisement or communication that “promotes, supports, attacks or opposes” a candidate for federal office.

The commission’s final draft rules put off a decision on whether to further define the phrase.

The law’s sponsors had asked the FEC not to specify a definition.

The commission’s Republican chairman, David M. Mason, promised to hold additional public hearings in the future if the FEC does further define that phrase. He added: “There are no nefarious intentions nor secret plans on the part of any of the commissioners--there’s no plan afoot here to hide the ball.”

Republican Michael E. Toner, who was appointed to the FEC recently by President Bush after serving as chief counsel to his presidential campaign, concluded: “We have done exactly what the [law’s] sponsors have urged us to do.”

On balance, Paul Sanford, a former FEC attorney and director of FEC Watch, a reform-minded group that is monitoring the commission, said, “I think we’re going to end up with a lot narrower a statute than what its sponsors thought it should be.

“We will have less soft money in the system than we have now, but there will be more than the sponsors of the statute wanted.”

During the afternoon recess, Thomas observed: “I would say the high-water mark for the McCain-Feingold legislation was about 10:05 this morning, before we started the discussion.”