‘Anything goes’ now in campaign financing?

JACK GILLUM

Asso­ci­ated Press

WASHINGTON — Is it “any­thing goes” now in America’s cam­paign finance system?

John Edwards is acquit­ted of using cam­paign cash as hush money. There’s an explo­sion of high-dollar super polit­i­cal action com­mit­tees in the pres­i­den­tial race. It’s all stok­ing crit­i­cism of revi­sions and reg­u­la­tory loop­holes in a sys­tem that was intended to keep bet­ter con­trol of polit­i­cal money after Watergate.

Loos­en­ing the law has made it eas­ier for politi­cians to butt up against the legal line — if not cross it — and for wealthy Amer­i­cans to influ­ence who wins office, from the White House on down.

All told, the immense amount of money in Amer­i­can cam­paigns, the cozy rela­tion­ships between can­di­dates and their finan­cial back­ers — and now, too, a seem­ing lack of account­abil­ity for alleged rule-breakers — is fuel­ing the public’s long-standing dis­trust of its politi­cians and doubts about the cred­i­bil­ity of the system.

“There’s not much for vot­ers to have faith in,” says Trevor Pot­ter, a for­mer Fed­eral Elec­tion Com­mis­sion mem­ber and a pro­po­nent of campaign-finance reform. “We don’t have much of a campaign-finance sys­tem at this stage, and we are wide open to the pos­si­bil­i­ties of corruption.”

Span­ning many weeks, the Edwards trial in North Car­olina show­cased what pros­e­cu­tors said was a clas­sic case of mis­us­ing cam­paign funds: Here was a for­mer pres­i­den­tial can­di­date, they said, who chan­neled large sums of money from a deep-pocketed donor to cover up a love child and a mis­tress. But jurors acquit­ted Edwards, in part because the statute he was charged under required him to know he was break­ing the law.

Jurors said the gov­ern­ment didn’t prove that. Said one, Sheila Lock­wood: “I just felt that he didn’t receive any of the money, so you can’t really charge him for money that he got.”

Cam­paign finance laws have changed remark­ably since Edwards ran for the White House four years ago.

Had he been a can­di­date this year, and had his back­ers wanted to help him, they could have estab­lished a super PAC and donated unlim­ited amounts of money that could have been used in any num­ber of ways. It’s unclear if that still would have been legal for the uses in his case, although the super PACs have been able to take more risks than the cam­paigns they sup­port. Super PACs are barred from coor­di­nat­ing with a candidate.

But it doesn’t seem that clar­ity is com­ing any­time soon. The FEC can’t agree on new regulations.

Take last Decem­ber, when a Repub­li­can super PAC asked com­mis­sion­ers if it could “fully coor­di­nate” with a Sen­ate can­di­date. The com­mis­sion dead­locked on a 3–3 vote after a heated discussion.

Michael Toner, a Wash­ing­ton lawyer and elec­tion law expert, said it would be a mis­take to con­clude that the failed pros­e­cu­tion of Edwards means that cam­paign finance vio­la­tions will not be prosecuted.

“There’s no ques­tion that there were rel­a­tively unique facts in the Edwards case,” he said, and that there are other areas in cam­paign law where wrong­do­ing is clear cut — such as con­tri­bu­tions from foreigners.

It’s not just the FEC. A divided Con­gress has shown no appetite to take up the issue in earnest despite calls for an over­haul by Democ­rats after a series of fed­eral court rul­ings — includ­ing the Supreme Court’s Cit­i­zens United deci­sion in 2010 — started to dereg­u­late the system.

Polit­i­cal grid­lock and reg­u­la­tory ambi­gu­ity have paved the way for an unprece­dented amount of spend­ing from out­side groups and spe­cial inter­ests. Cam­paigns, polit­i­cal par­ties and super PACs sup­port­ing Pres­i­dent Barack Obama and Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Mitt Rom­ney have raised more than $400 mil­lion apiece, fig­ures that put the elec­tion on track to cost more than $1 billion.

Despite claims of inde­pen­dence, super PACs have incred­i­bly close ties to the can­di­dates they’re work­ing to help elect.

Restore Our Future, sup­port­ing Mitt Rom­ney, shares office space with the same con­sul­tants who help Romney’s own cam­paign. The groups insist there is a “fire­wall” — the work­spaces are sep­a­rated, they have said, by a con­fer­ence room. A for­mer White House spokesman, Bill Bur­ton, runs the Pri­or­i­ties USA Action super PAC with its goal of help­ing Obama win a sec­ond term.

The fuzzy rules have super PACs push­ing the lim­its. Many have non­profit arms that legally don’t have to dis­close their donors. Some mega-donors — notably casino mogul Shel­don Adel­son — have said they will be giv­ing their money to these shel­ters to avoid pub­lic scrutiny.

“That’s exactly what the laws we have are sup­posed to pre­vent,” Pot­ter said, “that one can­di­date for pub­lic office is not com­pletely beholden to an indi­vid­ual and his interests.”

We’ve been here before.

Con­gress began to change how Amer­i­cans fund their elec­tions in the mid-1970s after slush funds and cover-ups forced Richard Nixon’s resignation.

“I believe that one of the cru­cial fac­tors in deter­min­ing whether or not we con­sider a gov­ern­ment demo­c­ra­tic is not how much power pub­lic offi­cials have, but rather how pub­lic offi­cials secure and retain their offices,” Law­ton Chiles told his col­leagues on the Sen­ate floor in April 1974.

Since then, there’s been no short­age of instances of ques­tion­able rela­tion­ships between politi­cians and the peo­ple who bankroll their candidacies.

On the Demo­c­ra­tic side, hun­dreds of Obama’s major back­ers have had repeated access to his top advis­ers or have attended glam­orous state din­ners. The White House has declined to offer com­plete details on those meet­ings. And on the Repub­li­can side, GOP super PACs have faced their own trou­bles in dis­clos­ing donors required under exist­ing rules. Some major con­trib­u­tors have been listed in fed­eral data with ambigu­ous addresses or shell corporations.

Sit­u­a­tions like those have fueled voter dis­trust of both parties.

Repub­li­can Sen. John McCain, a major player in campaign-finance reform, has warned the cur­rent sys­tem is so influ­enced by wealthy donors that it will require “major scan­dals” before it is fixed. Con­versely, anti-reform advo­cates have said campaign-finance dereg­u­la­tion is more faith­ful to free-speech pro­tec­tions afforded by the First Amendment.

One thing cer­tain in an oth­er­wise uncer­tain cam­paign finance land­scape is that no changes are immi­nent. This will be the sys­tem at least through the Novem­ber election.

Posted by AP News on Jun 1 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.