campaign finance – Page 4

The court and clean elections

Voluntary public financing — a necessity if we are to remove the taint of private money from electoral politics — appears safe in the wake of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling, though I think reform advocates have a right to be concerned.

A close reading of this story in the Asbury Park Press indicates that there are few campaign finance experts in New Jersey who view the court’s ruling as being at odds with the state’s program. The primary “expert” tying the court decision back to the state’s clean-election program is Mike Schrimpf, a flack with the conservative Center for Competitive Politics (is there a greater example of false advertising?), an organization that opposes public financing.

“Rescue funds are primarily designed to level the playing field, and the court explicitly said that the Legislature cannot use the “leveling the playing field’ rationale as a reason to justify campaign-finance laws,” said Michael Schrimpf, a spokesman for the Center for Competitive Politics, which opposes using public funds for elections.

The experts — who come from both parties — take a different view:

Nick Nyhart, president of the Public Campaign Action Fund, said publicly funded elections have withstood court challenges in the past as courts have ruled government can place limits to curb actual or perceived corruption. What may differentiate New Jersey’s program is that the more onerous burden is placed on the candidate who volunteers for the program, not the self-funded one.

In the federal law — known as the millionaire’s amendment, which was inspired by now-Gov. Jon Corzine’s successful run for U.S. Senate in 2000 — the free spender has more reporting requirements while the opponent gets relaxed contribution limits.

“As a candidate, you don’t give anything up in order to get the relaxation of campaign contributions. It’s a pure gift,” Nyhart said. “For candidates who agree to public financing, they do agree to a spending limit and the amount of (rescue) funds are also limited, so certainly a candidate can outspend you.”

Two of New Jersey’s prominent partisan election lawyers agreed.

“If you sign into Clean Elections, you may be entitled to that money as part of a voluntary program — a little different than what’s going on at the federal level,” Republican lawyer Mark Sheridan said.

Another key difference, said Democratic lawyer Angelo Genova, is that New Jersey’s rescue money is awarded on a case-by-case basis with a ruling by the state Election Law Enforcement Commission, not a blanket formula, as the congressional law was written.

The decision does question “whether or not the ability of the publicly financed candidate to seek additional public financing imposes a burden on the self-financed candidate who doesn’t participate in the Clean Elections program,” Genova said. “I think reading this opinion, our program can withstand that scrutiny because it’s dealt with on a case-by- case, and not a formula, basis.”

Dispatches: Reinvent public financing

Dispatches focuses on the broken presidential public-financing system.

Obama and the public-financing quandary

Barack Obama is the first presidential candidate to officially opt out of the federal public campaign-finance system — which a New York Times analysis paints as “the most critical threat to its survival.”

But is it?

The story outlines some history, but ignores the reality of the last two presidential races — campaigns in which the major-party candidates went private during the primaries, building up huge warships and spending oodles of cash before opting in after the party conventions.

And the story’s most damning quote —

“Obama’s decision may not be the death knell of public financing, but it certainly is close to it,” said Anthony J. Corrado Jr., a campaign finance expert and professor of government at Colby College. “Public financing has become a system of last resort, rather than the jewel of the campaign finance system. Rather than being a source of funds, candidates accept public money kicking and screaming.”

— is really a comment full of nuance that deserved more context. Its implication is that the system is not working, that candidates only participate because they believe they must.

In fact, the story’s most significant comment comes at the end:

“The reality is that the amount of money that comes from the government is not enough to run a modern presidential campaign,” said Larry Makinson, a consultant to the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington group that tracks campaign donations. “The amount Obama has raised from small contributors has been unprecedented. There has never been an infusion of small dollar donors like this.

“And,” Mr. Makinson said, “he got there by snubbing the campaign finance system.”

Obama’s arguments — that his fundraising apparatus, by collecting millions of small donations, acts as a shadow public-financing system; that

the public financing apparatus was broken and that his Republican opponents were masters at “gaming” the system and would spend “millions and millions of dollars in unlimited donations” smearing him.

— is both fact-based and disingenuous. It is doubtful, after all, that he would have opted out if he did not believe he could out raise his opponent by a significant margin.

And, as the Times notes in its main bar, the GOP’s “527 advantage” may not materialize this year.

It also is doubtful that John McCain would be making such a big deal out of this if he wasn’t having such difficulty raising money himself. After all, McCain has been trying to play both sides of this issue for months, taking out a loan to keep his primary campaign going — using the promise of public funds as collateral — and then backing away when he appears to win the nomination and set his financial house in order.

The issue here has less to do with the candidates anyway than with the system itself. If we want it to work, we need to expand it dramatically and provide it with a legitimate and recurring source of funding. We need to provide free television and radio time to help reduce the costs and we need to look at 527s — independent groups that can spend whatever they want — to see if they can be policed without infringing on their First Amendment rights.

Time to take the plunge on clean elections

The state Assembly is considering legislation that would extend the state’s clean elections pilot to the 2009 election, expanding it to eight districts. The bill is in many ways better than the earlier pilot programs (more districts, covers primaries, reduces stipends) , though it remains flawed (treats some non-major party candidates differently) and should be amended before being made law.

First, the improvements:

primary elections are covered, which should — in theory — allow for competition in one-party districts (those in which one party not only controls both Assembly seats, but in which the minority party offers nothing more than token opposition)
members of the Green and Libertarian parties, and other “political group(s)” that are “permitted to register its members by use of a voter registration form or that is named on a political party declaration form approved by the Secretary of State,” would get the same funding that candidates from the two major parties would receive
the cost has been reduced per candidate and for the program overall, despite the expansion. Candidates would receive $75,000 each for the primary and the general, while third-party candidates would receive $75,000 for the general and some additional money if they qualified early.

The problem? Basically, independent candidates not connected to a party like the Greens or the Libertarians would be handed less money than affiliated candidates — leaving hopefuls who either want to run on their own or who have no ideological connection to any of the registered parties to battle against not only the difficulty of running an insurgent campaign lacking institutional support but agaisnt funding disparity, as well.

The rationale for this — well, I just can’t see one. A candidate is a candidate is a candidate; while some have better shots at winning, all of the candidates on the ballot should be treated the same and receive the same amount of cash. To do otherwise is to violate the spirit of democratic government.

I have one other criticism, which echoes the critique former state Sen. Bill Schluter made during last week’s hearing — that incremental improvements need to give way to full-fledged reform.

The trouble, as Schluter sees it, is that continuing to conduct pilot programs with a few districts added each time postpones the benefits of Clean Elections indefinitely and makes poor use of the public funds that are committed to it.

“Many believe that the two pilot programs of 2005 and 2007 have given us all the information needed to devise and enter into a full statewide Clean Elections system,” he told the Assembly State Government Committee. “Yet no one seems willing to take a leap of that significance and magnitude.”

He wants a referendum placed on the ballot in November that the state would expand the program to all 40 districts.

He urged the Assembly committee to “craft a proposal for a permanent, 40-district Clean Elections program which applies to all legislators for both primary and general elections, and submit this proposal to the voters at referendum in November 2008 for an up-or-down vote.”

Such a proposal would be supported by the many public-interest groups that have backed the principle of Clean Elections, Schluter predicted. The public “would become knowledgeable and, presumably, engaged” through full discussion of the issue in the media and via a strong public-information campaign. And November’s presidential election should produce a big turnout that would be “ideal.”

“Certainly, this referendum would be a clear indication of how serious New Jerseyans are about reform,” he said. “By putting this issue on the ballot, the public will have the opportunity to decide if paying a reasonable amount to remove special-interest money from campaigns — thereby saving the extra cost that vendors, contractors and professional service organizations charge the state — is a worthwhile investment.
“When put to a vote in both Maine and Arizona, the public answered with a resounding YES. The essence of this strategy is that the public, not the Legislature, would give the program its blessing and would make the tough decision of approving the expenditure necessary for implementation.”

Covering all 40 districts next year would put an end to the controversial job of picking pilot districts, Schluter said. Under A100, the task would be accomplished through a supposedly bipartisan arrangement, but it could well produce the same kind of partisan dissatisfaction that followed the selection of Baroni’s 14th District for the 2007 pilot over the neighboring 12th District.

A favorable referendum vote would make Clean Elections permanent, applying to all legislative races beginning in 2009. “This is especially important for 2011, which is a year of legislative redistricting, a very contentious process,” Schluter said. “It is hard to imagine how the Legislature could successfully address this issue in 2011 if the program and its standards were not already in place.”

Schluter ended his pitch with a challenge. “If Clean Elections is such a good idea with so much public benefit, let’s take the plunge,” he said. “Why procrastinate with halfway measures and more pilots? For those who are afraid that a full statewide Clean Elections initiative is so bold that the people will be offended, they should take comfort in knowing that a referendum will be used to ‘let the people decide.'”

Letting the people decide — an interesting concept that is unlikely to happen, given that the state Legislature rarely asks voters to approve anything it is not required to send to referendum.

Too much money business

Money is a distorting influence on the electoral process. Simply put, the need to raise ungodly amounts to cover the cost of running not only national by state level and local campaigns has resulted in a level of cynicism that should be unacceptable to the political classes.

Instead, we hear the candidates talk tough but then rush out to collect their checks, ignoring the rules that they say they support.

That’s what we’ve been watching over the last week or so, as the three remaining major candidates — Democrats Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and Republican John McCain — do a dance designed to raise questions about their opponents sincerity.

First, there was the criticism of Obama by McCain for Obama’s weasling out of a promise to abide by public financing rules for the general election, prompted by conditions Obama wanted placed on the agreement.

Not that McCain was playing it straight, either, as he attempted to back out of the public financing system after using it to secure a loan when his campaign was near bankruptcy. Add to this the series of stories detailing his connections to lobbyists and you have a picture of the clean-cut kid sneaking behind the school gym to get high.

Clinton, for her part, has been spending campaign cash like a drunken sailor,

Then there are the Democrats’ superdelegates — a group that has been receiving generous help from both Obama and Clinton over the last three years.

All of this creates an impression of conflict — the infamous quid pro quos — and hypocrisy, neithger of which leave our elected officials and democratic system looking particularly good.

As The New York Times writes today, “Americans deserve better.”

Taken together, these skirmishes over cash stand as an advertisement for change. Money has to be taken out fo the system without violating the First Amendment. The courts have ruled that money is the equivalent of speech, and while they are not the same it is money that allows speech to be heard in our culture. A hard cap on donations or spending would cross this line, I think, so some other system must be put in place.

Or the system that exists for public funding of the presidential race needs to be reinvigorated bu making sure there is enough cash available to run legitimate campaigns. In an era of tight budgets, this will not be popular. But the money saved on the kind of pay-to-play nonsense that plagues government could help offset the costs.

Plus, public funding should be extended beyond the presidential races to the states — to senators, Congressmen and state-level officials, even local officials.

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