Only finance reform needed: Less government power

Congratulations to the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP), the liberal, foundationsupported group pushing tighter government restrictions on campaign finance. Their new study of 1.2 million individual and 230,000 political action committee campaign contributions between 1993 and 1996 proves conclusively that the group has no reason for existence, and should immediately end its partisan preaching about the evils of campaign money and go out of business.

The whole thesis of the campaign-reform mantra, as CRP chants it, is that "those with the most money have the loudest voices and thus the most influence," i.e., money corrupts politics, especially big, bad business money.

As the Washington Times' news story on the study reported, CRP research director Larry Makinson found business contributions to Republicans increased dramatically after they won control of Congress in 1994, from 49% of corporate contributions to the GOP before, to 63% afterward. As Makinson inelegantly put it, "The dramatic flip-flop [in party contributions] shows dramatically how money follows power."

Power, Not Money,

Is Controlling Factor

Reflect upon Director Makinson's words (as he evidently did not). If money follows power, money is not the controlling factor; power is. That is, power corrupts money more than money corrupts government. Liberal reformers have causality exactly backward.

This is what opponents have been trying to explain to liberal campaign zealots ever since the American Conservative Union and others filed suit against the original campaign finance law way back in 1976. The government extorts business because government has the power, and business pays up to protect itself from those who regulate its very existence.

The only real finance reform is less government power. Anyone who has been in a room with a senior senator and a big businessman, and who can free himself from ideological blinders, sees which way power flows. It is rare to find a senator not willing to lecture a corporate "giant" even when extorting contributions, but it is impossible to discover a businessman willing to tell a congressman what he truly thinks.

CRP, thus, deserves great praise for undermining the entire justification of the Ralph Nader, Common Cause, Public Citizen, Citizen Action, the Washington Post, New York Times, et al. campaign reform dogma, even if inadvertently. Many of the others promoted by CRP have not been slack in undermining credibility either.

Public Citizen, founded by Nader and best known for its anticorruption "Boot Newt" campaign, in a wonderful example of poetic justice has been sued by the Federal Election Commission (FEC) for coordinating its Boot campaign with Gingrich's campaign opponent. If true, this would be a violation of the very law inspired by the same Ralph Nader. Public Citizen denies the charge, but the FEC . notes that its consultant, Frank L. Jackalone, contacted the Herman Clark campaign six times-but reformers shouldn't notice.

Leftist Citizen Action Charged as Illegal Conduit

Citizen Action-which a Post story described as a New Left liberal "refuge" following the decline of the civil rights and antiwar movements-is the big daddy promoter of reform politics in the United States.

Where Public Citizen coordinated a mere $59,200, Citizen Action is charged in a federal election officer's report with serving as an illegal conduit for $1.5 million from the AFLCIO and $475,000 from the Teamsters union in a complex scheme to win reelection for the latter's president, Ron Carey-now forced by federal prosecutors to resign.

Three former Carey campaign advisers who have pleaded guilty to fraud in the operation-including Michael Ansara, a former Students for a Democratic Society revolutionary, and Jere Nash, a state chairman of Common Cause-are the sources for the charge of a conduit connection.

The union connection, later detailed by reporters Thomas B. Edsall and Frank Swoboda, is littered with New Left revolutionaries associated with Citizen Action and the "reform" faction that now controls the labor movement.

Karen Nussbaum, head of the AFL-CIO's Women's Department and its '9 to 5" project, is married to the current Citizen Action president, Ira Arlook. Former national leader of Citizen Action and husband of Environmental Protection Administration Administrator Carol M. Browner, Mike Podhorzer, is now with the AFL-CIO public affairs office, whose director is Steven Rosenfeld, husband of New Jersey Citizen Action's head. Paul Booth, director of organizing for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, and once national secretary leader of Students for a Democratic Society, is married to Heather Booth, a founder of Citizen Action. AFL-CIO president John Sweeney is himself a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and was designated "honored ally" of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.

In confessing, Ansara said he was motivated by "misguided idealism," and Nash contended he had "worked for good government my entire life." Good government idealism is the banner of the campaign reform crusade. But the goal of this dedicated New Left remnant is to cleanse politics of evil business and mainline citizen political action money, leaving voter communication power solely in the hands of unions and the media.