Year for ‘Soft Money’ Demise

The American people are fed up with the corrupting level of money spent every election year for candidates for Congress and the White House. Determined members of Congress such as Reps. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) and Rep. Martin T. Meehan (D-Mass.) need to keep pushing campaign reform legislation until it finally becomes the law of the land.

Let this be the year, and let the crusade resume today. The Republican leaders of the House and Senate should stop exerting all their energies toward blocking reform legislation as they give lip service to it. The House is scheduled today to take up the Shays-Meehan reform bill and, as last year, opponents will try to sabotage it with innocuous-sounding amendments that in fact are designed to kill the measure.

A bipartisan coalition of Republicans and Democrats that passed Shays-Meehan last year by a vote of 252 to 179 should reject those “poison pill” amendments and give this measure their full support. The more impressive the vote, the better are the odds that Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Russell D. Feingold (D-Wis.) can push their companion measure through the Senate in spite of the GOP leadership’s vow to defeat it through a filibuster.

Opponents act as if reform would cripple the American electoral system. That’s not true. The major feature of both bills would close a loophole in the 25-year-old campaign finance law that allows the use of “soft money” to directly support or oppose candidates. The political parties were authorized by the law to raise soft money for a legitimate purpose--to build and strengthen parties by financing voter registration campaigns, get-out-the-vote drives and the like. The proposed ban on soft money has no effect on what individual candidates can raise and spend on their own campaigns.

Perverse interpretation of the law has allowed this unlimited source of special-interest money to mushroom in recent elections. Party national committees raised more than $55 million in soft money during the first six months of this year. The total for the election cycle could reach $750 million.

The fund-raising scandals of 1996 were rooted in the soft-money loophole. As the volume of cash soars, so does the likelihood of more scandal. The House should send a resounding message today: This is the year to ban soft money.