Posted July 19, 2007 by J. Gerald Hebert In Proud Defense of McCain-FeingoldThe chest thumping continues over the Supreme Court's WRTL decision by those who hope to see substantial union and corporate treasury funds unleashed over the airwaves on an unsuspecting public. It would be a full time job responding to all the inaccuracies being published by the anti-reform movement, but one historical whitewash was so egregious the Legal Center decided to offer a response. The following letter to the editor was published in The Wall Street Journal on July 14, 2007: In regard to Brad Smith's diatribe ("The Speech Police," [subscription] editorial page, June 27) against efforts to regulate unlimited political giving by corporations and unions: More than a century of such regulation is rooted in a sad history of purchased access and legislative favors. In Mr. Smith's account, the historical context vanishes like Trotsky from doctored Soviet-era photographs. His revisionist history dismisses the Tillman Act of 1907 banning unlimited corporate contributions as an extension of segregationist Jim Crow laws. The commentary makes no mention of Teddy Roosevelt's successful clean government campaign to rid our elections of such abuses. Similarly, Mr. Smith attributes the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) and its amendments 70 years later to an attempt by Democrats to save their congressional majorities. He neglects to mention the activities of Nixon's Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP) and hundreds of thousands of corporate dollars in White House safes or even the Watergate break-in. The commentary is rife with such contextual vacuums, but perhaps the most important is Mr. Smith's most recent airbrushing of history in which he mischaracterizes the context of the case behind the recent FEC v. Wisconsin Right to Life decision by the Supreme Court. The provision of the McCain-Feingold law weakened by a new "exception" created by a splintered court did not "prevent citizens' groups from running broadcast ads discussing pending legislative issues close to an election." The group in question, or any corporation or union, could run ads even using unregulated treasury funds right up to Election Day arguing for the passage or defeat of any legislation. They could urge the targeted audience to "contact Congress immediately" and provide the House and Senate switchboard numbers so that the caller will be routed to his or her elected representative. Only if a candidate was singled out by name in the days immediately before an election did the provision prohibit the use of corporate and union treasury funds for the ad. Because Wisconsin Right to Life was a nonprofit, it could even have run explicit campaign ads urging a named candidate's election or defeat, so long as it had a policy of not accepting corporate or labor money. Prior to the passage of McCain-Feingold, such ads were routinely used by corporations and unions to skirt existing contribution limits. Fortunately, other loopholes closed by McCain-Feingold remain closed, for as Teddy Roosevelt recognized nearly a century ago, corporate expenditures for political purposes "have supplied one of the principal sources of corruption in our political affairs." J. Gerald Hebert |
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