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Campaign Finance Reform: John Mccain
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The modern era of campaign finance reform has an equally partisan origin. From the mid-1960s on, opinion polls showed steady erosion in public support for big government and liberalism. Republicans made substantial congressional gains in 1966, and two years later Richard Nixon won the presidency. By 1970, Democrats feared—with good reason—that their longstanding electoral majority was in jeopardy. There were three ways that they might turn things around, observes Cato Institute election-law expert John Samples: persuading the public to embrace their big-government philosophy, changing that increasingly unpopular philosophy, or “preventing or at least hobbling the translation of the shifting public mood into electoral losses and policy changes.”
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Although attempts to regulate campaign finance by legislation date back to 1867, the first successful attempts nationally to regulate and enforce campaign finance originated in the 1970s. The Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) of 1971 required candidates to disclose sources of campaign contributions and campaign expenditure. It was amended in 1974 with the introduction of legal limits on contributions, and creation of the Federal Election Commission (FEC). It attempted to restrict the influence of wealthy individuals by limiting individual donations to $1000 and donations by Political Action Committees (PACs) to $5000. These specific election donations are known as ‘Hard money’. The Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA) of 2002... known as "McCain-Feingold," after its sponsors, is the most recent major federal law on campaign finance, which revised some of the legal limits of expenditure set in 1974, and prohibited unregulated contributions (called "soft money") to national political parties.
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Guide Note: Campaign Finance Reform is a blanket term referring to all efforts to lessen or remove the impact of fundraising on the electoral system. The most recent legislation towards this end is the controversial McCain-Feingold Law of 2002.
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McCain's campaign officials deny that he's backed away from supporting campaign finance reform. "He is a conservative candidate. He is going to run on reform should he decide to run," said Danny Diaz, a spokesman for McCain's exploratory campaign. "He's committed to reducing the amount of special interest money involved in politics. He has been. He will remain so."
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"John McCain's shameless hypocrisy on campaign finance reform is making mockery of the very system he used to reshape his image in the wake of his own scandal," said Democratic National Committee Communications Director Karen Finney. "Using the Constitution to defend his decision to skirt election law today after attacking people who used those same arguments a few short years ago shows that John McCain is just another Washington insider sticking his finger in the political winds."
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[W]as the last pretense at campaign finance "reform" dumped into Boston Harbor. McCain-Feingold has proved more of an embarrassment than even its critics predicted, taking the "big money" that previously flowed to answerable politicians and neatly diverting it to unaccountable, shadowy groups, as well as stripping Americans of their free speech rights. But the farce hit an all-time low at the Democratic National Convention, where the groups that spent the past year quietly sidestepping the law felt confident enough of its loopholes to openly assume their place as the new fund-raising arm of the Democratic Party.
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John Mccain