As the clerk calls the roll, Tom Daschle, the normally mild Democratic leader, bursts through the center double doors, raises his hand and shouts, “Aye.” Patty Murray, who came to the capital as a self-described “mom in tennis shoes” reformer from Washington state and ended up heading the Democrats’ soft-money committee, looks peeved about something. It turns out Common Cause lobbyists have been making the young receptionists in her office cry with their ginned-up calls threatening to wreck Murray’s reformer reputation if she votes nay. She reluctantly sticks with Daschle, who now has more than enough votes to win.
Mitch McConnell stands silent and momentarily alone, hands clasped in front of his blue pin-striped suit, staring blankly across the Senate floor. The Kentucky curmudgeon who dubbed himself the Darth Vader of campaign-finance reform is whipped, and he knows it. Within the hour, he’ll hoist the white flag in the press gallery, blaming the editorial pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post for pushing this “stunningly stupid” bill on an issue that “ranks right up there with static cling” as a concern for American people.
After a six-year struggle, McCain is feeling superstitious. “I won’t pop any corks until I’m standing in the Rose Garden,” he says as he rushes down the stairs a few minutes after winning the key test vote. “The president with me over one shoulder and Feingold over the other. Can you imagine!”
Finally, we can. John McCain is not the “Gladiator” and the bill he sponsored with Russ Feingold will not redeem the Senate and restore the glory of Rome. But I did watch something strange take place in Washington last week. Against every expectation, senators actually voted to drain money–big money–out of their own campaigns. McCain and Feingold took on the most personal issue imaginable for politicians–their own prospects for re-election–and won. The cynics got rolled.
Until the Senate acted, the smart money was on soft money. Now, despite the formidable opposition of Rep. Tom (The Hammer) DeLay in the House, the odds have shifted dramatically. Obstacles remain, especially if the bill goes to a House-Senate conference committee, which can sometimes be a legislative graveyard. But the momentum is finally with reform, and President George W. Bush indicated last week that he would probably sign the bill.
If he does, don’t expect pristine politics. Office seekers will still have to “dial for dollars” and speak at fund-raising banquets; other loopholes will eventually open. In the shorter term, the provisions in McCain-Feingold to regulate TV advertising by outside groups may be declared unconstitutional. But even if the Supreme Court knocks down the limitations on sham “issue ads,” the soft-money ban is expected to hold. That means the appalling spectacle of presidents and senators extorting $100,000 or $500,000 or $1 million contributions from individuals and interest groups that want favors from government will come to a merciful close.
So how did senators get shamed into voting against their self-interest? It wasn’t easy. “This is like negotiating a SALT treaty,” Mark Salter, McCain’s chief of staff, moaned midstream. His boss, often derided as a grandstander, suddenly found himself playing a delicate inside game. At midweek he was arguably more nervous than at any time during his 2000 presidential campaign. Cindy McCain offered her husband a candy bar. “If I have one of those, I’ll bounce off the ceiling,” he said.
After beating back a potentially devastating compromise amendment offered by his friend Chuck Hagel, McCain faced a dilemma he knew would come. Republicans, led by Fred Thompson, insisted that the “hard money” limits, fixed at contributions of $1,000 per donor, were too low; they hadn’t changed in the 26 years since being enacted in the post-Watergate reforms. Most Republicans opposed any reform, but the 10 Republicans whom McCain hoped to win over wouldn’t ban soft money without the guarantee of getting more hard money.
The Democrats, meanwhile, all claimed to support reform, but they had become addicted to soft money. With a less affluent base of supporters, Democrats were (and are) fearful that the GOP will swamp them with hard money. But a few big-state Democrats, led by Dianne Feinstein of California, offered to raise the hard-money limits, though by less than Thompson.
This set up the arcane showdown. The key parliamentary move by McCain and Feingold was to convince their colleagues to essentially approve two different amendments on the same topic, by the same margin. By backing both the Thompson and Feinstein amendments by identical 54-46 margins, senators had to retreat behind closed doors to negotiate. Inside the ornate Lyndon Johnson Room off the Senate floor, they eventually split the difference and found a compromise that doubled the hard-money limits to $2,000 per person. (The details are infinitely more complicated, of course.) Feingold took it to Daschle, who backed the deal over the objections of many other Democrats.
Why did the senators in the LBJ room compromise instead of killing the whole thing, as most preferred? “They wanted to be rid of it. They knew, like bad pennies, we’d keep showing up,” says McCain. “They don’t like the system either–having to arrange those seats to the Super Bowl for $100,000 contributors. They don’t like to read in the papers after every vote that so-and-so gave X a million dollars in return for Y. And the last election helped. They aren’t sure, but they’re beginning to feel the people want it.”
McConnell and company had one last chance to maim McCain-Feingold, an amendment for something called “nonseverability.” Say what? As John Breaux said, “Back in Louisiana, people would think you’d lost an arm or a finger.” What the amendment actually meant was that if the part of the bill that regulated TV ads was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court (as many expect), the soft-money ban would be automatically invalidated, too, cutting the heart out of the law.
When the reformers prevailed on allowing one to be “severed” from the other by the court, the Senate battle was effectively over. But nobody knows exactly what the impact of the bill will be on the two-party system. “If you’re going to control the parties, you sure as hell better control Grover Norquist [a right-wing activist] and the NRA,” says Fritz Hollings as he gets off one of those little subway cars that senators ride around the Capitol. Others speculate that the parties will adjust, and end up better off for having kicked their addiction to soft money. Either way, it’s always fun to watch a Beltway bungee jump into the void.
