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A similar bill, floated in the Senate by Bob Dole, enjoyed the favor and the legwork of a like-minded organization of larger manufacturing concerns, the Alliance for Reasonable Regulation. By “reasonable,” the car makers and chemical companies meant “less,” just as the manufacturers and couriers that made up Project Relief intended to relieve themselves of the burden of excessive regulation. It makes good sense, really. Why go to all the fuss and bother of “bidding defiance to the laws of the nation,” as per Jefferson’s allegations against moneyed corporations, when it is ever so much easier to simply sashay up to the Hill and have those puppies rewritten?

This sort of folderol bore little resemblance to the legislative process as I remembered it from that
Schoolhouse Rock
song, “I’m Just a Bill.” The humble singing scrap of paper that made it all the way to Capitol Hill started very differently: The folks wanted a law and called their congressman, who wrote the law. That seems so desperately mid-seventies, as earnest and outmoded as Jimmy Carter or a macramé plant holder.

DeLay, uncoincidentally, was the second leading fund-raiser for the freshman Republicans in Congress in 1994, bested only by the Newt. He reportedly kept a ledger in his office detailing which lobbies were friendly and unfriendly, based on the amount that their political action committees had given to the Republican machine. DeLay told groups with Democratic ties that they wouldn’t see jack until they hired a Republican lobbyist, because he didn’t want to deal with “people who wanted to kill the revolution.” Okay, whatever you say, Che. This crackdown is sometimes called The K Street Project. And you’ll never guess what little Randy DeLay, Tom’s bro, became when he grew up: a lobbyist, and a mighty successful one, particularly when lobbying his brother, which he did on behalf of a Mexican cement company and a ginormous railroad merger. Yes, all the brothers going to rise up, come the revolution.

When bipartisan campaign finance legislation became all the rage on Capitol Hill, Mr. DeReg didn’t hesitate to poo on the killjoy rule talk. Money wasn’t the problem, said DeLay; in fact, money was the very lifeblood of the political system. And Newt, even though he crumbled and shook hands with Slick Willie over the promise of a campaign finance reform bill, maintained that all the player-hating analysis was nothing more than a loony expression of socialist disapproval of the free enterprise system. If a stomach-pill manufacturer could pay 100 million dollars to get a message out, quoth the Newt, why shouldn’t we spend that a couple of times over on promoting and producing the political process?

It is understandable that persons like Gingrich and DeLay, who are so wholeheartedly devoted to the pursuit of funds, would consider them the alpha and omega of political life. When the first, much-ballyhooed campaign finance bill choked, it was on account of nobody wanting to be the first to give up all the sweet, sweet donations. It was like a Mexican stand-off, everyone having unwittingly spent themselves into a state of Mutually Assured Donation. Republicans decried contributions from staunchly Democratic unions: Their dues were extortion, plain and simple, pimped out of blue-collar just folks and funneled to pesky liberal do-gooders, regardless of the political preferences of individual workers. Democrats, meanwhile, decried corporate contributions, but largely because the Republicans were better at soliciting them—and they did not express their disapproval by refusing huge corporate contributions to their own campaigns. Oftentimes, big donors bet on both nags: Enron, for example, skewed Republican in keeping with its Texan roots, but threw an unholy heap of cash at the Democrats as well. I think those rich dudes might be on to something. Maybe next election, I’ll vote for both guys, too. Whichever way the shit goes down, my ass will be covered.

I don’t know if money is, as DeLay claims, the lifeblood of politics. Maybe he needs to act that metaphor out for me again, like he did with that red tape thing: He could inject a Statue of Liberty with a big syringeful of green ink, to represent the healing effects of cash transfusions on the body politic. I’m not a doctor, but if I had to diagnose the American body politic, I do not think I would write “monetary anemia” or “insufficient fundingitis” on its chart.

How about calling money the
food
of politics, as in, “If money be the food of politics, feed on!” The food metaphor works on other levels, too: The body politic can be said to be bulimic. Look at the way voters binge and purge over election cycles, trading Great Society–style liberal largesse for conservatives’ cutbacks and capitalism. Gingrich and company claimed that they wanted the government to go on a diet, but at the same time they were fattening their own party coffers. Binge on contributions; purge the regulations. In with the money, out with the governance. Perhaps DeLay could do a press conference in which he appears before a fridge at midnight, eats a giant cake shaped like the Statue of Liberty, and then throws up an omnibus bill outlawing laws against laws that stop the spread of laws. One of his pals from Project Relief could hold his hair back.

Project Relief and the Association for Reasonable Regulation were megalobbies, which is to say, lobbies made up of other lobbies. It is hard to estimate exactly how many active lobbies there are in Washington. In 2002, there were more than twenty-four thousand registered lobbyists there, about forty-five for every member of Congress, a ratio that fairly wallops Surf City’s promise of two girls for every boy. Moreover, these estimates merely account for those involved in lobbying at the federal level. There are also thousands of lobbyists pitching woo at the state level, too. Add up all the dough that flows from both levels, and we are talking about at least a billion dollars, maybe even two billion. I leave it to your discretion, Gentle Reader, to judge whether or not the titans of industry would sink that kind of cash into a process that granted them few tangible gains. For example, the most lobby-mobbed issue of the last few years is tax policy. Is it mere happenstance that corporate tax revenues are at historic lows, or is it some damn fine work on the part of influence peddlers?

Of course, lobbying is only one part of the contemporary political equation. Sure, you can pay a lobbyist to get your message out, but you can also just let the sweet, sweet money speak for itself, in the form of campaign contributions. One of the reasons why campaign finance legislation has been a hot topic for the past few years is that the past three U.S elections have been the most expensive ever, until the next one came along. An amended version of McCain’s campaign finance bill, the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA), was finally passed in March of 2002, in time for the 2004 election, but it didn’t end up curbing campaign contributions or spending. It merely rerouted the copious cataracts of cash into different kinds of slush funds.

To understand how this came to pass, a wee history of U.S. campaign finance law might come in handy. The Federal Election Commission rules were written in 1971, and rewritten throughout the seventies, after the Watergate scandal revealed little tidbits like the fact that Nixon got millions of profoundly illegal clams for the 1972 campaign. The 1974 amendments set contribution limits: An individual could give $1,000 to a candidate, and a political action committee could give $5,000. Total individual donations to the party, political action committees, and specific candidates could not exceed $25,000 per year.

The 1976 Supreme Court decision in a case called
Buckley vs. Valeo
altered these regulations somewhat, challenging the constitutionality of the 1974 changes to the Federal Elections Campaign Act (FECA) on the grounds that the rules infringed on the First Amendment right to free speech. The argument was simply that no significant political expression could take place without spending some money. The Court consequently struck down limits on candidate expenditures, family contributions, and self-contributions, paving the way for eccentric billionaire campaigns à la Steve Forbes and Ross Perot. It also ruled that there could be no limits on the expenditures of candidates and their committees, except in the case of presidential candidates who accepted federal matching funds. But the court upheld the FECA with respect to contribution limits, the disclosure process, and provision of federal funds for presidential elections. Justice Warren Burger issued a partial dissent/partial concurrence in keeping with the partial decision, noting that it was paradoxical of the Justices to limit contributions while permitting theoretically unlimited expenditures. He wrote, “The Act as cut back by the Court thus places an intolerable pressure on the distinction between ‘authorized’ and ‘unauthorized’ expenditures on behalf of a candidate; even those with the most sanguine hopes for the Act might well concede the distinction cannot be maintained.” Throughout the late seventies, legislators messed with the FECA, trying to retain such distinctions, but by 1979 they further amended it to okay unlimited spending on the part of state and local parties for promotional, get-out-the-vote-type campaign materials, also known as “soft money.”

Hard money pays for campaign ads that explicitly declare, “Vote for John Q. Public.” Soft money pays for campaign activities that do not use words like “vote” or “elect.” Hard money is regulated by the Federal Election Commission (FEC). Soft money is not. The beauty and utility of this bumper-sticker-fund provision didn’t dawn on fund-raisers until the late eighties, during the Dukakis campaign. By 1992, both parties had raised about $46.5 million in soft money, versus $219 million of the hard kind subject to FEC regulations. During the 1996 race, soft money tripled, swelling to $150 million, and hard money just about doubled, to $393 million. In the 2000 race, the Republicans raised $466 million in hard money and $250 million in soft money. The Democrats pulled in $275 million in hard money and $245 million in soft money. Throughout 2001 and 2002, Repubs and Dems socked away another $250 million and $246 million, respectively, stashing their soft cash before the November 2002 deadline set by the BCRA.

The BCRA is not as stringent as the first McCain-Feingold bill, which Jesse Helms and the gang filibustered to death. Soft money is out, but in exchange, limits for hard-money contributions have been raised. Even though the BCRA was a compromise bill, it got tied up in court challenges as soon as it passed. The eighty or so court cases challenging the BCRA were collected under the case name of
McConnell vs. FEC.
The McConnell in question is Republican senator Mitch McConnell, one of campaign finance reform’s most ardent opponents. He was instrumental in fighting McCain-Feingold, and swore that he would do in the courts what he could not do in the Senate. Republicans seem to adore appealing to the judiciary in this way, their anti-lawsuit rhetoric notwithstanding. McConnell claimed that the BCRA is flat-out unconstitutional, as it contravenes the First Amendment. On December 10, 2004, the Supreme Court decided in favor of the FEC, upholding all the major provisions of the BCRA.

The BCRA was supposed to set stricter guidelines for campaign contributions and check the tide of soft money. But once the soft-money loophole closed, another campaign-financing entity emerged to keep the sweet, sweet funds flowing. The 2004 election marked the rise of the 527, so named for a section of the tax code. The 527s are tax-exempt fundraising organizations, and they disclose their activities to the IRS, not the FEC. This means they are unregulated by the FEC, which makes them look an awful lot like—you guessed it, chum—soft money. The 527s are subject to some BCRA provisions, like the ones that determine when political ads can be aired, but other than that, they are free to deploy their unlimited contributions as they see fit. When fund-raising was split into hard and soft money, there were two kinds of ads. Hard-money ads were allowed to engage in express advocacy. Soft-money ads could only implicitly advocate for a candidate. Soft-money ads were, for the most part, issue ads, or negative speculation about opposing candidates. The 527 ads in the most recent election cycle went beyond these old categories of express and implicit advocacy, into new realms of hyperbole and character assassination. Consider the 527 organization that got the most political bang for its millions: The Swift Vets and POWs for Truth. These vets didn’t say a thing about Kerry’s policies, or his voting record. Instead, they engaged in innuendo, insinuating that Kerry was a sham war hero, who didn’t really deserve his Purple Hearts. Republicans had the unmitigated gall to question Kerry’s service record, even though their own candidate couldn’t be bothered to show up for all of his draft-deferring National Guard service. This strategy was totally in keeping with the gospel according to Karl Rove: attack your opponent on his strengths, not his weaknesses.

There were, of course, also pro-Kerry 527s, like MoveOn and America Coming Together, which benefited from the largesse of anti-Bush philanthropists like George Soros. These organizations were also very good at soliciting small contributions, particularly over the Internet. In the run-up to the presidential election, pro-Democrat 527s were actually raising and spending more money than the Republican ones. The Republican 527s made a big push in the last three weeks of campaigning, and outspent the Democrats during the final crunch, particularly in battleground states like Ohio. The Progress for America Voter Fund, a consortium of Bush-friendly corporations and muckety-mucks, blew more than $16 million on advertising in the last three weeks of the campaign. Over the course of the 2003–04 campaign cycle, 527s raised and spent more than half a billion dollars. The fund-raising totals for 2004 alone were $434 million. These figures are comparable to the figures for soft money before the ban, which indicates that there is just as much money spilling into the electioneering process as there was before, and that the BCRA has merely rerouted the flow.

Fans of campaign financing free-for-alls, like McConnell, often claim that spending helps get out the vote, an issue of the utmost importance in a democracy that is lucky when half its eligible population makes it to the polls. And I actually agree with Senator James Buckley and Eugene McCarthy’s argument that forms of political expression depend on spending some bucks. The problem is that this introduces a little something Supreme Court types would call “invidious equality,” a situation that is theoretically equal but practically discriminatory. Everyone is protected by the First Amendment. But the First Amendment plus a couple of million bucks can get you the presidential candidate of your choice and maybe even the chance to help pen the laws of the land. Take away the millions and you have the inalienable right to bore people on public transit.