Last week was supposed to be the time when a serious federal campaign finance reform bill would finally have its chance to get through Congress and reach the president’s desk. But when the dust settled last Thursday, the expected up-or-down vote in the House of Representatives never took place. Instead, an acrimonious tangle of procedural machinations led to the bill being shelved for now, with bitter recriminations flying across the aisle in its wake. An end to the corrupting role of so-called soft money in American politics will have to wait for another day.
When the Senate at last approved the McCain-Feingold bill last spring, all eyes turned to the House, which has twice before passed versions of the bill known as Shays-Meehan (after its sponsors, Connecticut Republican Christopher Shays and Massachusetts Democrat Martin Meehan). This time the stakes were real: House members could no longer cast a self-aggrandizing reformist vote safe in the knowledge that it would die in the Senate.
Complicating matters for reformers this time was the defection in recent weeks by several members of the Congressional Black Caucus. Led by Maryland Rep. Albert Wynn, many in the caucus concluded that soft money might not be such a bad thing after all, and they threw their support instead to Ohio Republican Robert Ney’s cynical alternative measure that would merely limit soft money contributions (at ridiculously high levels) and regulate some of its uses.
So last week’s House floor debate and scheduled vote figured to be a pitched battle between the Shays-Meehan bill and the Ney-Wynn alternative. Nobody knew how it would turn out—it was that close. But the battle was never staged; it all collapsed in a dramatic if somewhat recondite tangle over legislative procedures involving amendments.
The sponsors of Shays-Meehan had proposed a package of 14 amendments to accomplish two things: bring wavering members of the Black Caucus back into the fold, and make the bill as identical as possible to the McCain-Feingold measure that passed the Senate. The latter was necessary because if the House passed a bill that was meaningfully different, it would go to a House-Senate conference, where Republican opponents have pledged to (and would be fully able to) kill it.
But on the eve of the floor debate and vote, House Republican leaders laid out procedural rules for the bill that sent Shays-Meehan supporters through the roof. The rules mandated a separate vote on each amendment, rather than the single vote on the package of amendments preferred by the bill’s sponsors. Shays and Meehan clearly figured that their fragile coalition of support might fracture with separate votes.
House Speaker Dennis Hastert subsequently offered to allow a single vote on the package of amendments, but with the understanding that a package of new amendments also would be offered to the alternative Ney-Wynn bill. Congressional Democrats saw this for what it was: a new and insidious game designed to confuse House members and sink Shays-Meehan. So they simply decided not to play. Instead, with the help of 19 Republicans, House Democrats pulled off a rare floor-vote defeat of a pending bill’s governing rules. The consequence: no rules, hence no debate, and no vote on the bill itself. Speaker Hastert then shelved Shays-Meehan, and campaign finance reform is dead, yet again, for now.
Afterward, each side rancorously blamed the other for this outcome. Republicans smugly accused reform advocates of killing their own bill. For Democrats, the procedural contretemps posed a calculated high-stakes risk: take a chance with rules stacked against success, or run away and live to fight another day. They chose the latter. Supporters now could try the cumbersome process of circulating a discharge petition to force the House leadership to bring Shays-Meehan to the floor, but that’s a rare and difficult process that would take months.
Polls consistently show that Americans want relief from the controlling influence of corporate and special-interest cash in our political system, but not badly enough to make themselves clearly heard or to punish lawmakers who steadfastly defend the status quo. After this latest debacle, a spokesman for Hastert said “it’s time to vote on something that people care about.” The thoroughgoing arrogance of that statement masks an underlying, if disturbing, reality: We get the tainted system of democracy we deserve, and live with the consequences of our unwillingness to demand better.
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