Mullings A Political Cyber Column By Rich Galen

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Uncoordinated Expenditures

Wednesday, June 27, 2001

First things first. The trip to East Timor has been postponed until either after the rainy season or until after the dry season. As it is on the other side of the international date line, I forget which.

More to the home front, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the other day, on what are called "coordinated expenditures" by the national committees (RNC, DNC, ETC.) overturning a lower court ruling in a case brought by the Republican Party of Colorado which held that the political parties had a First Amendment interest in being permitted to spend as many hard dollars as they liked in support of a candidate of that party.

SCOTUS ( the Supreme Court of the United States) ruled by a five-to-four majority that the Congress has the right to set limits on those expenditures - that free speech is not at issue.

Most of the major dailies in the nation (the NY Times not being one of them) carried the story as if the US Olympic Ice Hockey Team had beaten the Russians AGAIN.

The Democrats, of course, cheered the decision because they haven't got three nickels in hard money to rub together. The Republican committees, The Republican National Committee, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, and the National Republican Congressional Committee have a great deal of hard money, even after that special Congressional election in Virginia about which you have read so much.

Why? Because, notwithstanding what you read in each and every report on campaign finances, the GOP has ALWAYS had many, many more small donors than the Democrats.

Small donors are the backbone of hard money.

Getting back to the SCOTUS decision, one is hesitant to dismiss it on the grounds that it was five-to-four. We have won some of those close ones, and we know they count just as much as the unanimous ones.

This decision had to do with hard money. That is money which is controlled by the Federal Elections Commission as to amount, as to source, and as to reporting requirements.

Notwithstanding that the dailies and supporters of campaign finance legislation cheered the decision as proving that McCain-Feingold will be held to be Constitutional, as Jim Abrams reports in his AP piece, "The two sides agree that Monday's 5-4 ruling does not directly relate to the campaign spending legislation that passed the Senate in April and is headed for a House vote in July."

I have grown up in the two-party system. Indeed, I have made most of my living as a professional participant in one of them. I understand there may be some need to reign in spending, but the current fashion which holds that the answer to better politics is the continued weakening of the two-party system is flat wrong.

Think the Jeffords switch caused some heartburn? Consider, then, a House or a Senate with six or seven parties any one of which - maybe a party of only three members - holds all the cards in terms of who is Speaker of the House, or who is Majority Leader in the Senate.

On Brian Wilson's KSFO program the other night, we had a long discussion about this subject. Wilson suggested anything which slows down the legislative process is good - most laws creating (as we used to say in college debates) new and greater evils.

If, for instance, three members of a very minor party in the U.S. House - with very narrow, but very strongly held views - were the difference in whether the Democrats or the Republicans controlled things, you don't think they could influence legislation?

Three members in a body of 435 is POINT six percent of the House. Assuming they each won their seats with about 50% of the vote - half the people having voted against them - then they would represent not more than three tenths of one percent of the population.

And they could hold the other 99.7% of us hostage to whatever narrow view they espoused.

So, the Supreme Court has ruled and the limits on coordinated expenditures by the political parties will go back in place.

Yah. Hoo.

When you see an ad next fall by an organization you despise - on the left OR the right - which has NO connection with the campaign in which you are interested, and the candidates have little or no money to counter those ads, remember this decision.

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Copyright © 2001 Richard A. Galen

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