The Canadian Record (Canadian, Tex.), Vol. 107, No. 14, Ed. 1 Thursday, April 3, 1997 Page: 2 of 28
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WARNING: Smoking cigarettes will condemn
you to lingering illness and an early and very
unpleasant death.
WARNING: Smoking cigarettes will condemn
you to lingering illness and an early and very
unpleasant death, unless, of course, you are
a teenager and therefore immortal. *
Proud of their prowess
By David S. Broder in The Washington Post National Weekly Edition
The WHITE HOUSE RATIONALE for the
I questionable 1996 campaign fund-raising prac-
tices is more revealing than its authors seem to real-
ize. Take their arguments at face value and you will
see why incumbents of either party are not likely to
allow major changes in this system.
What President Clinton and his assorted spokes-
men have been saying is this: We Democrats got our
clocks cleaned by the Republicans in 1994 and they
were gearing up to outspend us again in 1996, as in
fact they did. So we cranked up the money machine
in earnest. Some folks decided for reasons of their
own to help us out. Some of them were shady, and we
should have put a finer moral screen on their contri-
butions.
But — and this, Clinton & Co. insists is the key
point — nobody has proved yet we did anything
improper in return. And, remember, please, that we
weren’t doing this for ourselves. We were doing it to
save those millions of people whose lives would have
been ruined if the Republicans were running every-
thing in Washington.
Therefore, despite the embarrassment of having
to return $3 million so far to some particularly sleazy
characters, despite the knocks they’re getting for the
hospitality they lavished on these suspect donors,
despite the rule-bending involved in solicitation calls
from the White House by the vice-president and a
$50,000 check being received at the White House by
the first lady’s top aide, despite all this press furor,
they are proud, proud of what they did.
Better to stand and fight than capitulate to those
wicked Republicans, they say.
When I remark that this rationale is more reveal-
ing than they realize, what I mean is that this is the
very sort of mind-set that has made it impossible to
get real change in the campaign finance system for
the last 20 years.
In all that time, there has never been a moment
when one party or the other — and often both —
could not discover a better reason to exploit the
opportunities the present system allows than to
change it in any basic way.
Rarely a day goes by that Clinton and Gore do not
urge Congress to pass a sweeping campaign finance
reform bill. But when the Democrats controlled the
White House, the Senate and the House of Repre-
sentatives in 1993-94, no campaign finance bill ever
reached the president’s desk. The many House
Democrats who depend on union political-action com-
mittees for their biggest contributions did not want
to accept a ban or severe limitations on PACs that
senators, who are less dependent on PACs, were
ready to write. Feminist Democrats and their sup-
porters insisted that EMILY’S List — a wildly suc-
cessful machine for bundling contributions for female
Democratic candidates — be given special protec-
tion.
Republicans, for their part, wanted union spend-
ing curbed — but not much else. Clinton, who had
many other fish to fry on Capitol Hill, acquiesced in
a congressional slowdown that ensured the success
of the promised Republican Senate filibuster.
Republicans have been no better. President Bush
vetoed a “reform” bill he rightly said was tilted to the
Democrats, and the last Republican Congress never
passed any legislation in this area.
The reality is that most incumbents of both par-
ties — for all that they may whine about the burden
of fund-raising — prefer the system under which
they were elected to any untested scheme that might
replace it.
Another reality is that it is damnably difficult to
devise a system that will effectively reduce the role
of money in politics and still not trample on constitu-
tional rights to express political views. The difficulty
of striking a balance — and rising above the parochial
interests of incumbents — makes it sensible to con-
sider creating a blue-ribbon bipartisan commission
to frame a proposal Congress could vote up or down,
but not amend. Bob Dole offered that idea several
times when he was in the Senate, and it is embodied
now in a bipartisan proposal originated by Republi-
can Rep. Rick White of Washington.
It is likely that the focus on sleazy campaign
practices will force the passage of something called
the Clean Elections Act of 1998.
But without such a commission, it may well be
cosmetic legislation. You could probably get a unan-
imous vote in the House and Senate today for a
provision that would impose a federal death penalty
on any foreigner giving even a $5 contribution to an
American candidate.
They would love to congratulate themselves on
their virtue and be able to tell their constituents that
they had slammed the door shut on those despicable
aliens’ tampering with the integrity of our elections.
And then they could go back to business as usual,
Republicans and Democrats alike.
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Ezzell, Nancy & Brown, Laurie Ezzell. The Canadian Record (Canadian, Tex.), Vol. 107, No. 14, Ed. 1 Thursday, April 3, 1997, newspaper, April 3, 1997; Canadian, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth736171/m1/2/: accessed July 9, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.; crediting Hemphill County Library.