McCain-Feingold’s Death Greatly Exaggerated By U.S. Senator Russ Feingold July 3, 2007 After the Supreme Court announced its decision in the case of Wisconsin Right to Life (“WRTL”) vs. Federal Election Commission this week, we heard the kind of hyperbole that has surrounded the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law from the beginning. One television anchor even asked if this decision was the death knell for McCain-Feingold. In fact, the core of McCain-Feingold -- the ban on unlimited “soft money” contributions -- was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2003, is being enforced, and remains in effect today. To paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of McCain-Feingold’s death have been greatly exaggerated. The WRTL decision deals with a different part of the law that addressed the problem of phony “issue ads.” In 2003, the Supreme Court ruled that that this provision restricting unlimited corporate and union spending on pre-election advertising that mentions candidates is constitutional. The new decision does not overturn that decision, but it does say the provision was unconstitutional as applied to the actual ads run by WRTL. It will now be up to the Federal Election Commission to determine how to enforce that part of McCain-Feingold against other issue ads. Depending on how the FEC decides to proceed, the Court’s ruling may herald a return to the days of virtually unlimited corporate and union spending on campaign ads. That result would be bad for the country, but it is certainly not the end of McCain-Feingold. From the start, some in the media have exaggerated what McCain-Feingold did, sometimes to praise the bill, and sometimes to vilify it. While I support public financing, and would be glad to take private money out of politics completely, that was never what McCain-Feingold was intended to do. John McCain and I sought first and foremost to curb the worst example of the corrupting influence of money in politics: the soft money system. This system, which in our view was nothing more than legalized bribery and extortion, was an appallingly easy way for wealthy interests of all kinds – corporations, labor unions, and individuals – to buy access to and influence over members of Congress and the President. Even though corporate and union contributions have been prohibited for decades and individual contributions are strictly limited, under a loophole created by the Federal Election Commission, these same donors were allowed to give as much soft money as they wanted to either, or both, of the political parties. Even worse, federal candidates, including congressional leaders and the President himself, often personally solicited these contributions, creating a corrupting link between the money given and the workings of government. Under the soft money system, powerful interests brazenly used enormous contributions to try to influence legislation or government policy, and the parties, eager to out-raise each other, encouraged them to do so. Big contributors got untold access to the most powerful people in government. These donors had special invitations to closed door receptions and retreats with members of Congress that most constituents could only dream about, not to mention the opportunity to attend coffees with the President of the United States in the White House or spend a night in the Lincoln Bedroom. Banning soft money put a stop to those sleepovers and retreats, and the corrupting influence they exerted. That was always our primary goal. Not only did the soft money ban end a system that was the very symbol of corruption in politics between 1988 and 2002, it also strengthened the parties themselves, forcing them to create a broader base of donors, and boosting their overall donations as a result. The parties actually raised almost as much hard money in 2004 and 2006 as they did soft and hard money combined in the corresponding years of 2000 and 2002. That is a reform of which the American people can be proud. Americans were outraged and embarrassed by the corrupt soft money system, and rightly so. If Twain had been alive during soft money’s heyday, there’s no doubt that the great American satirist would have had a field day with so much material. But today, fortunately, it’s fair to say that the soft money system is still dead, and that’s no exaggeration.