Finish Campaign Reform

On Tuesday, the Republican Party smashed soft-money fund-raising records by wooing corporate chieftains at a dinner headlined by President Bush. About $30 million, the lion’s share of it soft money, was collected.

If any further proof were needed of the importance of the campaign finance reform that Congress passed in March, the dinner provided it. But as a bipartisan task force created by the group Democracy 21 shows in a lengthy report called “No Bark, No Bite, No Point,” the campaign laws, which go into effect after midterm elections, will be meaningless unless the toothless Federal Election Commission is shut down and replaced by a new regulatory agency.

The six-member commission’s public mandate is to enforce campaign finance law. But Congress actually designed the commission, established in 1974, to be ineffective and impotent, fearing it could damage individual member’s careers. Structural problems abound. For one thing, the commission can have no more than three members of the same political party. On high-profile decisions, deadlock has resulted. The commission found, for example, that the 1996 Dole for President Committee had received illegal contributions from the Republican National Committee but tied 3 to 3 on whether to pursue enforcement action.

In 2002, the commission again voted 3 to 3 not to investigate whether a group called Republicans for Clean Air, funded by Texas multimillionaires Sam and Charles Wyly, violated the law in spending $2 million on a television campaign attacking Sen. John McCain a week before the 2000 Super Tuesday primaries.

Partisanship at the agency is so blatant that this year Chairman David Mason and Commissioner Bradley A. Smith helped the House Republican leadership try to kill the Shays-Meehan campaign finance bill. Mason has called the bill flatly unconstitutional and Smith branded it a sham. Yet now that it has been passed, both men are supposed to enforce its provisions.

Congress and the president need to start over and establish an agency capable of enforcing the law. The most basic reform would be to create an election agency modeled on the General Accounting Office that would be headed by a single administrator who would be subject to Senate confirmation and serve a term that did not overlap with the president who appointed him or her. This would help guard against the partisanship that cripples the commission.

The Democracy 21 group also recommends establishing a panel of administrative law judges that would decide accusations of election law violation brought to it by the new agency. The panel would also act as a check against potential abuses of power by the administrator of that GAO-style agency.

Far from having finished with reform, Congress needs to take this next critical step.