SCOTUS Opens New Front on Campaign Finance Reform

The long-awaited Supreme Court decision on campaign spending by corporate interests was every bit as bad as public interest groups had feared it would be. They are ready for the next battle in the long war over campaign finance reform.

In its 5-4 ruling, the court said that corporations can spend as much as they want to support or oppose candidates for president and Congress, undoing decades-old limits on corporate spending in federal campaigns.

The court overturned a 20-year-old ruling that said corporate interests can be prohibited from producing their own campaign ads. But it did leave in place a prohibition on direct contributions to candidates from corporations and unions.

In his dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens said, “The court’s ruling threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions around the nation.” Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor joined Stevens’s dissent.

The 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign finance legislation, at the center of the court ruling, was an attempt to limit money and influence on politics. But it has pretty much failed. Rather than a stemming of direct contributions by special interests, the past seven years have seen a burgeoning of unregulated, independent expenditures for campaign advertising.

Common Cause and other campaign reform supporters are working on the next generation of reform, which Arn Pearson, a campaign finance lawyer and vice president at the organization, said will focus on trying to increase the number and amount of small political donations.

Advocates will also seek to add more public money to the system, rather than limiting large donations from corporate and special interests.

“You’re not going to get rid of the big money. It’s not really the amount of money that’s being spent; it’s where it comes from that matters,” Pearson said.

Pearson suggested that advocates are never going to beat the conservative, libertarian-leaning Supreme Court, so they have to find another approach.

“The Supreme Court is making it increasingly difficult to do anything to change the influence of money in politics,” said Pearson.

Reform advocates want to create a system where big money and independent expenditures don’t matter as much and are counterweighed by small contributions from individuals.

“The idea is to change the balance of where money comes from by making it easier and more attractive to raise small-donor money,” Pearson said.

That’s the idea behind a joint study recently released by the Campaign Finance Institute, the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute called Reform in an Age of Networked Campaigns: How to Foster Citizen Participation Through Small Donors and Volunteers.

Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution and Norman Ornstein of the Amerian Enterprise Institute were involved in the project, which proposes to expand the playing field of campaign donors. “Instead of focusing on attempts to further restrict the wealthy few,” Mann and Ornstein want to “focus on activating the many.”

They propose a new system of partial public financing in the form of matching funds for small contributions.

Given the current economic climate and the public’s mood about politics and Washington, such an approach could be a very hard sell. But it’s worth a shot. It’s clear that reform can’t stand up to the current Supreme Court, and McCain-Feingold has proved a toothless tiger in the effort to rein in influence and money in politics.