Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

The Unabashed and Unalterable Foe of the Campaign Finance Bill

See the article in its original context from
October 2, 1997, Section A, Page 16Buy Reprints
TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers.

Suddenly mousetrapped as he led the debate against the campaign finance bill, Senator Mitch McConnell had to stand before his peers the other day and retreat to a bit of down-home Kentucky candor in confessing to the creation of ''a five-legged dog.''

''Somebody said you might be able to make a five-legged dog, but nobody has ever seen one in nature,'' said the Senator, responding to an adversary's discovery that Mr. McConnell had once co-sponsored a campaign finance bill that would have imposed some of the very limitations he has been opposing so articulately as the Senate's avid point man against the McCain-Feingold measure.

''Politics is a team sport,'' the Senator admitted, momentarily putting aside all his polished constitutional arguments. He confessed regret that in a weak moment, he had signed on to ''a five-legged dog'' of a Republican campaign bill in 1993. That was back when his party was in the minority and could safely propose countless good-government concoctions in the knowledge they would never pass.

''The Senator from Kentucky may be guilty of many things,'' Mr. McConnell pleaded for himself, ''but I think, in this debate, rarely guilty of inconsistency.''

He won agreement from Senator John McCain, the adversary who had grinningly won the point, but hardly the match, against Mr. McConnell.

''At least Mitch is out front about where he stands,'' Mr. McCain, Republican of Arizona, said in a break from the debate in which he has been going toe to toe against Mr. McConnell as the McCain-Feingold bill boils toward a vote next week.

In the debate, Senator McConnell, a 55-year-old law school academic and battle-hardened politician from the Kentucky trenches, has been quite comfortable in seconding the Supreme Court ruling that securely upholds unfettered campaign spending as the heart of political free speech. Off the floor, he has not been neglecting what he preaches, serving as chairman of the Senate Republicans' campaign committee, one of the big-money engines working to maintain his party's Congressional majority.

By the count of the public affairs lobby Common Cause, Senator McConnell's committee raised $2.1 million in the first six months of this year -- twice as much as in the corresponding period two years ago -- in the controversial category of ''soft money,'' unregulated donations that the McCain-Feingold bill would ban.

''His opposition to campaign reform is not simply an innocent defense of the First Amendment,'' Ann McBride, president of Common Cause, insisted as Mr. McConnell unapologetically prepared for another Thermopylae stand next week against the passage of the bill.

''The people are not clamoring for us to shut down political discussion in this country,'' he told the Senate on Monday, shaking off the inky opprobrium of editorial writers who label him the antagonist heavy applying Republican power to squelch reform.

Proponents of the legislation recognize that his track record is formidable: Senator McConnell engineered a filibuster that withstood a record eight debate-shutdown votes in a similar campaign-bill showdown nine years ago. He is once more filibuster-ready, his eye agleam for the stand next week, should the bill's supporters inch beyond their current 49-vote minority.

''We're not going to lose this,'' said the natty, combative Senator McConnell, pausing outside the floor. He speaks in a gentle drawl, delighted to stand for more campaign spending even as his opponents try to rein in the contribution side of the financing ledger.

Mr. McConnell flashes a discreet, blade-like glint in debate. One of his most dedicated opponents, Senator Russell D. Feingold of Wisconsin, the bill's chief Democratic sponsor, finds him gifted at ''red herring'' shifts in debate.

''Now he's going to put up another fig leaf,'' Senator Feingold interjected as Mr. McConnell belittled the opinion of 126 constitutional scholars that the bill could pass court muster.

''I could probably find 126 people who say the earth is flat,'' Mr. McConnell remarked dismissively.

The Senator exults in the good-guy, bad-guy swirl of his colors. ''To Common Cause, I'm Darth Vader,'' he said. ''But to the American Civil Liberties Union, I'm Luke Skywalker.''

The bill would impose restrictions on the election-season advertising of independent advocacy groups, and Mr. McConnell betrays merry-eyed delight in debate when he quotes the A.C.L.U.'s studious objections to the measure as a ''blunderbuss assault on issue-oriented speech.'' In his view, the summer hearings into campaign abuses were not so much a rallying cry for tighter fund-raising as an argument to liberalize the post-Watergate strictures on ''hard'' donations, those that are regulated.

''The voters are not going to punish people for killing a bad bill,'' the Senator confidently insisted during a breather in his office. He gestured to a plaque memorializing his fiery filibuster stand against a campaign overhaul in 1994. ''That was five weeks before the biggest victory for my party in Congressional races in this century,'' he said, beaming at the rewards of political speech.

''The others may be a little less forthright than Mitch,'' Senator McCain said, referring to lawmakers he finds silently hiding behind the bold-speaking Mr. McConnell in their wariness at being labeled outright reform opponents who profit from the status quo of big-money politics.

Actually, the main change this year cited by Senator McConnell, after a decade of his fighting and filibustering against campaign restrictions, is in finding more senators ''willing to stand up and be counted.''

''It was tougher in the old days, when senators were more defensive,'' he said, tracking the decline in gun-shyness to the Supreme Court ruling that found campaign spending to be at the heart of free speech.

Between his fund-raising duties and his debate performance, Senator McConnell is rather happily practicing what he preaches.

''Write it down,'' he told his colleagues in debate on Monday. ''We are not speaking too much in the American political process. We are not going to pass this unconstitutional piece of legislation.''

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 16 of the National edition with the headline: The Unabashed and Unalterable Foe of the Campaign Finance Bill. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT