Are PACs good for you?

ARE PACs GOOD FOR YOU?

DAVID BOREN of Oklahoma has a bill up before the Senate that would limit the spending by PACs on individual candidacies. What Senator Boren is saying is what we have all been hearing for so long, namely that PACs are dominating the votes of congressmen. Concerning which, a few observations and a reminiscence:

1) In December of 1973, I had a telephone call from Peter Peterson asking me to endorse a citizens' committee's call designed to accomplish two things. The first was to limit the earnings a congressman or senator would be permitted. The second was to reward congressmen and senators, who, in Peterson's opinion, were underpaid. His reasoning was that if a legislator continues to give high-paid speeches and write books and articles and remain a partner in his law firm, he is going to run into a conflict of interest.

I regret deeply, in retrospect, that I gave my name to a reform that turned out to be much less than that. Because from that general impulse grew the idea that individual contributors to a political campaign should be limited in what they could give. That dispute ended in a law suit, and the Supreme Court ruled, in Buckley v. Valeo, that one couldn't constitutionally limit the sum that Candidate Jones spends on his own candidacy if it comes from his own pocket; or the sum Citizen Smith spends to advance the policies with which Candidate Jones is identified, provided that Smith is not acting in collusion with Jones.

2) The situation gave rise to two phenomena. The first, of course, was the PACs. They are organizations whose function it is to round up all the Citizen Smiths they can find, get money from them, and spend that money to elect Candidate Jones. The PAC contributions to general elections seem to be doubling every four years, and Senator Boren is correctly concerned about the implications of congressional dependence on money-raising issues.

But a side effect of the PACs is the increasing immobility of Congress. It is easier to raise money for an incumbent, and the re-election rate threatens to reach an all-time high, if you take into account that Southern seats are now genuinely contested. This means that congressmen will be reluctant to limit PACs, which serve them so well to stay where they are. And why do they care so much about staying where they are?

3) In part they care because the Peterson Protocol has had a most serious effect on congressmen. They are told that they cannot pursue other interests, indeed in effect that they cannot keep other skills honed. It becomes then a supreme matter of concern for them that they should achieve re-election: because acting as congressmen is, after a while, all they know how to do. Traditionally in America men would go to Congress for a couple of terms and then go back to what one used to call the "real world.' Back to business, back to law, back to the academy, whatever.

Last week, the figure by which senators are permitted to augment their income was raised by $7,500 (though this bill has yet to be signed into law). That is a step in the right direction. But it doesn't go far enough. The Republic has a stake in a congressman's continuing to engage himself in other activity than lawmaking. There is, in fact, much sentiment that would limit the terms of congressmen to eight years, or ten: but the possibility of such a reform's being passed is approximately zero.

The reform truly needed is intimately bound up in the ethos of government. The other day, on one of the morning talk shows, House Minority Leader Bob Michel was talking about the vote on tax reform. What he said was that he himself had "voted [his] district.' After all, he continued, his district in Illinois is a heavyindustry district, and there are provisions in the Rostenkowski bill that reduce incentives to investment and vitiate depreciation schedules. You can't expect me, Michel was saying, under such circumstances to vote for such a bill? Now can you?

Well, 4) yes, actually. It really does have to do with the ethos. Representatives in Congress have got to be expected to think about the commonweal. We have to make great efforts to judge congressmen by their fidelity to the interests of the Republic. Otherwise, they might as well become light bulbs, to flash red or green according to plebiscitary findings back home.

On the money matter, we'd be better off undoing the whole baggage train of dos and don'ts. Just reveal everything, and let the voters decide.

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