Money in Politics, Ants in the Kitchen

Each day’s unfolding news about who gets invited to White House coffees, meetings with regulators or overnights in the Lincoln bedroom helps us see a little deeper into the murky void where money and politics meet. Combined with similar news last year about Republican contributors who were given the opportunity to sit in congressional leaders’ offices and draft the laws regulating their own industries, it should generate the kind of urgency and public outrage that is necessary to force Congress to take action on campaign finance reform.

But will these stories actually help those who want to evade reform to change the subject? Instead of asking about how to free democracy from the power of money, we are being drawn into a quest for specific actions that might have violated the law or are so obviously corrupt that they should be made illegal. It is all too easy for me to imagine the Congress that I left last month passing, with great fanfare, a bill that says: No money from anyone born in a foreign country. No money from labor union dues. No money in exchange for coffee in the Oval Office or a nap in Lincoln’s bed. It might go on, maybe even adding a watered-down version of the timid McCain-Feingold bill, which offers small rewards to politicians who voluntarily rein in their spending and fund-raising.

If this happens, Congress will congratulate itself and then we will shelve campaign finance reform for another 23 years. But very little will have changed. Some specific practices might be curbed. Some channels through which money flows into the system will be closed. But money in politics is like ants in your kitchen. If you don’t close all the holes, it will find a way to get in. And when it gets in, it tends to corrupt the democratic process, whether in glaring ways, as when access to the White House or congressional leaders’ offices is put up for sale, or in much subtler ways that erode our confidence that democracy is living up to its promise.

Put another way, I think it’s less important what happens in Lincoln’s bedroom than what has happened to Lincoln’s legacy of government of, by and for the people.

President Clinton, in his press conference Tuesday, painted a very vivid picture of the pressures of fund-raising that too easily draw politicians into this morass of phony friendships and strange alliances. He said, “There is a race to get as much money as you can to keep from being buried by the other people and to make sure you can get your message out, and at the edges, mistakes are made.”

I disagree with the president on only one point. I don’t think the mistakes are just at the edges. The entire process, even when conducted strictly within the law, invites corruption and erodes the confidence that the decisions made in our democracy are based on our representatives’ honest judgment and deliberation about the best policies and the interests and opinions of all their constituents.

Campaign finance reform, then, should not simply criminalize a few activities at the edges. It should start with fundamental principles. Elections should be based on ideas, not money. Every candidate should have the basic resources to get his or her message out.

Unfortunately, reform based on those principles has been blocked for two decades by the Supreme Court’s profound error in holding that a rich man’s wallet deserved the same protection as a poor man’s soapbox. In the 1976 case Buckley vs. Valeo, the court ruled that limits on total spending in campaigns--or on the amount a millionaire like Steve Forbes could spend on his or her own campaign--could not be limited, although contributions could be limited. The result is an absurdity: Some candidates have the capacity to bury their opponents; others are so constrained that they can’t let voters know where they stand.

Real campaign finance reform must begin by confronting and reversing that error, whether through an amendment to the Constitution or simply by forcing the court to reconsider the Buckley decision. The attorneys general of 24 states have signed a bipartisan statement urging that Buckley be reversed. Legislation that tries to work around Buckley inevitably becomes so complicated that it never passes; voters don’t see how it would solve the problem and politicians can kill the bill with impunity.

With the obstacle of Buckley out of the way, we can move on to campaign finance legislation that gives voters control over how much is spent on elections, that ensures that all candidates can get their ideas out and that even creates some alternate means--through television or the Internet--to help candidates communicate with voters. The result will be that no one will have a special advantage in getting access to their representatives, and policy will be based on democratic debate, not on who gave what to whom.

Former U.S. Sen. Bill Bradley (D-N.J.) served from 1979 until 1996.

Base elections on ideas, not big donors’ interests. And give every candidate the chance to get his message out.