Advertisement - Click to support our sponsors.
Editorials
Thursday, April 20, 2000‘Soft money’ campaign
contributions must endMOST Americans thought they had solved the problem of campaign spending excesses with the post-Watergate reforms. Wrong. The problem has re-emerged in the last decade through the exploitation of a legal loophole. And the existence of public financing for presidential elections hasn't helped a bit.The issue: Exploitation of a loophole in campaign laws has resulted in a huge increase in indirect contributions.
The major current problem is called "soft money." This term describes contributions to political parties, not individual candidates. The law limits donations to candidates but not to parties.
Martin Schram, who writes a column for Scripps Howard News Service, reports that the origin of the soft-money ploy was the 1988 presidential campaign between Vice President George Bush and Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis.
At the onset of the campaign, the Republicans had a huge advantage in campaign contributions, he writes. "So the Democrats' top fund-raiser, Robert Farmer, suggested that his party use a loophole in the post-Watergate reforms and ask its wealthiest givers to give more than ever before -- $100,000 -- which would be legal if the checks were made out to the party and used only for 'party building.' "
Paul Kirk, the Democratic Party chairman, recalled that "Mike Dukakis didn't like the idea at all." But he agreed.
Kirk's Republican counterpart, Frank Fahrenkopf, remembered how his fund-raiser, Robert Mosbacher, told him what the Democrats were doing. He said, "Mosbacher came in and said he was worried sick about what Farmer was up to. He told me and said we have to do the same thing. My reaction? I objected! I said there's something unseemly about taking $100,000 from one person. Bush didn't like it either. But then he went along with it."
Fahrenkopf noted,"We were so careful to make sure they never mentioned George Bush or Michael Dukakis -- and certainly never showed their pictures...I always thought as party chairman it was against the law to use party soft money to promote the candidacy of a president. Our ads simply said: 'Vote Republican.' "
That campaign opened the floodgates for soft money. Today the parties are raising perhaps as much as $500 million for the current presidential campaign, mainly for television messages.
Schram points out that "President Clinton converted the soft-money loophole into his political life preserver in his panic after the GOP's midterm sweep of 1994. He ordered a massive TV ad campaign, a soft-money hard-sell on the virtues of his presidency. At all cost."
Both Kirk and Fahrenkopf said they are dismayed at the way the use of soft money has exploded. They agree something has to be done to stop what Kirk compared to "an arms race out of control."
Growing public awareness of the problem is one of the reasons for Sen. John McCain's strong showing in the Republican primaries. McCain has crusaded for campaign reform -- particularly a closing of the soft-money loophole -- in the Senate and it was one of his main campaign themes.
Soft money has to go. Tougher limits on campaign contributions are needed, without violating First Amendment free-speech rights.
The soft-money problem has emerged despite the existence of public financing for presidential campaigns. Public financing of elections isn't a solution at the federal level -- or at the state or county levels either.
Supreme Court appeals
CONGRESS enacted restrictions four years ago on the authority of federal courts in hearing appeals of criminal cases, but the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that federal judges still can overturn convictions.
In setting aside death sentences of two convicted murderers in Virginia, the high court removed doubts about whether it could reject state court rulings. The decisions properly reaffirm the Supreme Court's role as the nation's ultimate authority.
The 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act was intended to trim the lengthy appeal process that led to seemingly endless terms on death row. The bill was aimed mainly at terrorism, prompted by the Oklahoma City bombing.
However, its most sweeping provision limited the right of prisoners -- not only those on death row -- to file habeas corpus petitions, their only means of getting federal courts to review whether they are being held in violation of their constitutional rights.
Among other things, the new law directed federal judges to defer to the rulings of state judges on constitutional and other issues, even if those rulings were incorrect, as long as they were not "unreasonable." In the Virginia cases, the Supreme Court rejected a definition of "unreasonable" that effectively would have stripped it of the ability to review state court rulings.
In other words, the high court cannot grant an appeal from a state court decision that it regards as incorrect unless it was unreasonable. In the Supreme Court's majority opinion, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor acknowledged that the word "unreasonable" may be difficult for some people to define but it is "a common term in the legal world and, accordingly, federal judges are familiar with its meaning."
The Supreme Court may define "unreasonable" any way it wants. By doing so, it seems to have charted for itself a broad method of deciding which criminal cases it may review. As vague and arbitrary as that may seem to nonlawyers, it is preferable to the crippling effect that critics of the appeal process had desired.
Published by Liberty Newspapers Limited PartnershipRupert E. Phillips, CEO
John M. Flanagan, Editor & Publisher
David Shapiro, Managing Editor
Diane Yukihiro Chang, Senior Editor & Editorial Page Editor
Frank Bridgewater & Michael Rovner, Assistant Managing Editors
A.A. Smyser, Contributing Editor
