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Show CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM David A. Owen the 60 needed to end a filibuster according to Senate rules. A more important obstacle for reform than the minutiae of Senate rules is the Republican leadership's ardent opposition to any type of soft money regulation. The Republicans have long enjoyed a significant fund-raising advantage, given their generally more pro-business and lower tax policies that appeal to wealthy constituencies with plenty of money to donate. The proliferation of soft money has only exacerbated the inequity in fundraising between the two parties, and the Republican leadership in Congress is not about to give up that distinct advantage. As long as Republicans retain congressional control, their deeply entrenched opposition all but guarantees the failure of meaningful campaign finance reform. The only meaningful solution to the infiltration of American politics by enormous sums of corporate, individual, and organized labor's money is to ban its use in federal electoral politics, which is congruent with the original intent of the Federal Elections Campaign Act of 1974- For the past 10 years, citizens' voices have become less and less important while interests such as, major corporations with nearly unlimited sources of money were given front row seats to every step of the policy formulation process in Washington. The clear and simple solution to the problem of unregulated soft money, is to remove the tumor of unrestricted non-federal money from federal campaigns and restrict independent issue advocacy in the same fashion as candidate advertisements. This is the first step in cleaning up America's battered political system. The Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act (BCFRA) seeks not only to ban unregulated soft-money contributions from federal elections, but it also seeks to modernize the system. The other reform proposals involved in BCFRA will be addressed in the following section. REFORMING AND MODERNIZING THE FEDERAL ELECTION CAMPAIGN ACT OF 1971 The original Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 laid out the basic rules and regulations by which federal campaigns have been run in the United States ever since. However, many inside and outside the system have argued that the current set of rules (with contribution limits that have not been altered in decades) is in need of certain forms of modernization. Several bills have been introduced in Congress recently to address the issue of updating the contribution limits and even abolishing them. In this section I will offer a brief overview of existing federal campaign finance laws and proposed efforts to reform them. FECA laid the groundwork for our modern system of campaign regulations. Under FECA, as was mentioned in the last section, contributions to candidates and candidate committees for federal offices are strictly limited to individuals, or groups that represent contributions made by individuals. Under current law, as established in FECA 1971, individuals are limited to contributing $1,000 dollars per election cycle (both the primary and general cycles being considered separately) with a maximum of $25,000 in aggregate hard-dollar contributions per annum. The Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act of 1999 (BCFRA) proposed amending those limits to compensate for inflation, and the loss of soft money. BCFRA would raise the yearly aggregate total an individual could contribute to $30,000. Also, under current Federal Election Commission guidelines, an individual can only contribute a maximum of $20,000 to a national party or state party's federal account. (EEC Laws, 439a) The BCFRA would lower that limit, in the aggregate, to $10,000. The BCFRA also proposes significant reform in the area of reporting requirements. Under current Federal Election Commission regulations, federal campaigns are required to report total amounts of monies raised and spent as well as individually itemize all contributions received that exceed, in the aggregate, $200 per calendar year. Further, campaigns for federal office are required to make the "best effort" possible to identify the occupation and employer of all persons whose contributions must be itemized (i.e. those contributions exceeding an aggregate of $200 per cycle). Title III of the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act seeks to lower the general reporting threshold from $200 to $50, while it would only require the reporting of the names and addresses of those persons making contributions between the amounts of $50 and $200. INDEPENDENT EXPENDITURES As was discussed in the first section, the definition of different types of advocacy is vital to determining whether or not an advertisement paid for by a national party committee should be counted as a coordinated expense (one where costs are shared between the party and candidate's committees) or an "issue ad" which can be used to bolster a candidate's position on a particular issue without actually stating "Vote for Candidate A." But what if the person or group of persons screening the advertisements are not affiliated with either the party apparatus or the candidate's committee? What are the rules and regulations governing these types of "independent expenditures?" The answer is simple: there are very few rules and regulations which govern the use of independent expenditures. One might be surprised, even appalled to hear that should Bill Gates decide to spend millions of dollars running campaign advertisements against any given candidate, he is free and welcome to do so under current Federal Election Commission guidelines. There are however a few restrictions on how these ads can be run. The name "independent expenditure," implies that these activities will be carried out separately from and free of any coordination with the national party committees, state committees, or the candidate's campaign. In addition, as with "soft-money" advertisements, independent expenditure ads |