On the Right - Feeling One's Way on Finance Reform - political campaign finance reform debate - Brief Article

NEW YORK, MARCH 20

It isn't exactly correct that conservatives oppose any limitations on political spending on the grounds that such limitations are unconstitutional slights on the First Amendment. Oddball interpretations of the Constitution are the licensed property of constitutional ultramontanists, the kind of people who grew up on the mother's milk of the American Civil Liberties Union, or Americans United. They're the people who tell you that because the Constitution guarantees the separation of church and state, you can't have a benediction at a public high-school graduation ceremony. Or that because free speech is guaranteed, you can show Deep Throat at the corner movie theater. There are many conservatives who say that kind of thing is spinach and the hell with it. Indeed the current discussion over political financing almost begs for a confrontation with the Supreme Court, and is probably headed for that, whichever course is adopted by Congress.

Sen. Mitch McConnell, who is a persuasive advocate of leaving things as they are, summed up his position on Monday in the initial debate: "The only way to really get at the core of this problem, if senators believe that the influence of money in politics is so pernicious, is to change the First Amendment. . . . The nub of the problem is you can't do most of those things as long as the First Amendment remains as it is."

But that isn't so, as we have seen. There is now, in the law, and okayed by the Supreme Court in Buckley v. Valeo, a provision that limits individual contributions to an election candidate to $1,000. If the First Amendment absolutists were correct in what they say, that 1974 law would have been struck down as unconstitutional. There is one out that the ACLU types have. It is that although the Supreme Court okayed the restrictions in Buckley, it oughtn't to have done so. And an extension of the restrictions proposed in McCain-Feingold is going to provoke the Court into doing what it should have done back in 1976, which is to rule against any restrictions on the expression of political opinion.

Sen. McConnell does useful work in insisting that the polemical scene should be described in terms of cultural reality. It isn't just the GOP's television ad quarreling with the Democrats'. The dominating voices in the political forums are the media. Consider us book-writers. Receive an unfavorable review in the New York Times for your latest book and there isn't enough money in the bank of the wealthiest publisher to contend effectively against such a review.

Applied nationwide, you have political candidates who claim a right to struggle against unfriendly and potentially lethal adversarial commentary by the editorialist or television commentator. Such a person, it is reasonably claimed, has got to get air to breathe by publishing issue advertisements, and these cannot be financed by $1,000 donations by individuals. You need the amalgamated strength of larger entities. That translates into soft money.

In the end, the fear is of votes that reflect vested interests. The problem of modern government is that most of what is truly influential, in the world of positive law, is traceable to government. In a better- ordered world, it would not so greatly matter what Congress decides on this or that issue, because Congress would forswear the conceit of regulating our lives. But as long as Congress has the taxing authority, combined with the right to tax progressively, there is a need to fight back, and in this case, the weapon being used by opponents of McCain- Feingold is a view of the First Amendment's protections that is historically disreputable.

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