In the last few weeks, politicians have been giving us an advanced-level course in ethics. Don’t worry about the cost. Somebody else is paying for it.
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It is a study on how people in Washington and Springfield deal with the rules of campaigning. Different strategies, different endgame.
In Washington, you might think big change is coming in how politics is practiced. Do-gooder groups like Public Citizen and Common Cause are firing out faxes on the day-by-day battle to bring campaign finance reform to a vote. The New York Times editorial page is crusading about the heroes and villains in the “cause” of campaign finance reform.
Now, it’s not really a cause. It is a good thing to try to keep politicians honest by setting some rules so they aren’t selling new laws to the highest bidder. But a cause? When was the last campus demonstration you saw over campaign finance reform? When was the last time you had a long, serious talk at the dinner table with the kids over campaign finance reform?
It’s a cause for the people who have secured full-time employment in the effort either to promote or to stop something called campaign finance reform. For most everyone else, it’s a thorn, it’s something that bothers people who suspect that politicians are on the take. And if politicians were public-spirited and interested in resisting temptation, they would do something to put their constituents’ minds at ease.
Now, here’s the difference in how that is playing out this year in Washington and Springfield.
In Washington, the reformers are very high-minded. There are several campaign finance reform bills around that promise to make dramatic changes. The most prominent one in the House would ban political parties from collecting so-called “soft money,” the money that comes without limits or restrictions. It would penalize anybody who wants to spend more than $50,000 of their own money to run for the House. It puts limits on how much anyone can spend on their own to push a candidate or a political issue.
That’s very tough and high-minded reform. It’s also a gross intrusion on free speech masked as very tough and high-minded reform. And it will never become law.
The game has been rigged by the House leadership so there will be a debate on campaign reform for those who wish to be recorded in favor of the cause, but nothing substantial will become law. House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who promised a debate on campaign reform, is now wrangling to stretch out that debate in fits and starts over the course of the summer. In the end, the reform bills will be stunted, probably by a move to create a commission to conduct another exhaustive study on the need for campaign reform. The leadership will get away with that because most Democrats and Republicans really don’t want to dramatically change the rules. It’s the same game the Democrats used for 25 years to block campaign bills when the Democrats ran Congress.
Bank on it. High-minded, low-minded, whatever, there will be no change in campaign law coming out of Washington this year.
Now, on to Springfield.
The legislature finished up its spring session last weekend, and one of the final things that got approved was a campaign reform bill. This was the bill crafted by Paul Simon and Mike Lawrence, who run Southern Illinois University’s Public Policy Institute.
The bill passed overwhelmingly in both houses. Gov. Jim Edgar will sign it into law.
It will ban legislators from using their campaign funds for their personal needs, like cars and houses and college tuition. It will ban legislators and state officials from taking gifts from lobbyists and people who get contracts from the state. It has a slew of new rules to make it clearer who’s donating the money.
But it isn’t very pretty.
To get it passed, the people pushing it had to make some huge concessions. The worst is that the law won’t apply to any money that candidates have in their campaign kitty on June 30. That’s a whopping loophole. It means that if I have $100,000 in campaign money on June 30, I’ll be able to use up to $100,000 on cars and houses and my kids’ college tuition. Over time, the personal use ban will have greater impact. But for now, the legislators cut themselves a break.
The law also makes some exceptions from the ban on gifts. The legislators insisted that they just had to be allowed to let lobbyists pay for dinner and golf and tennis and a few other goodies. So those were exempted from the ban.
If most of the legislators had entirely noble intentions, those loopholes wouldn’t have been necessary. But most of the legislators don’t have entirely noble intentions.
They whine and moan about having to do anything to restrict their freebies. One Democrat told me that when the House Democrats debated the state’s $37 billion budget in a caucus, the members asked just a couple of questions. But when they debated the campaign bill, they peppered the sponsors with dozens of questions about who would still be able to get away with what.
Simon and Lawrence dealt with what was possible, not what was press-releasable. They started negotiations with what Democrats and Republicans could agree on. They recognized that the last altruist left Springfield in 1860, and even he wasn’t perfect. They got a bill passed.
So here’s the final exam question for the political ethics course: Do you choose A) the Washington school of high-minded failure or B) the Springfield school of taking what you can get. The correct answer is B.
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