Campaign finance: When will we learn?
Re: Astroturf Politics - How liberal foundations fooled Congress into passing McCain-Feingold
(OpinionJournal of the WSJ, March 21, 2005)
http://www.opinionjournal.com/diary/?id=110006449
Hoodwinking the public about campaign reform is not only a federal issue. It also happened here in Colorado where Amendment 27 (2002) disallowed direct Union and Corporate contributions to campaigns but then opened a loophole called "Small Donor Committees". The effect of this is to allow every union and every local subchapter to set up a separate committee and donate 10 times as much to each candidate as an individual can.
Republicans didn't respond quickly to this loophole, allowing the Democrats to massively outspend them and causing the Republicans to lose control of both houses of the state legislature.
Unfortunately, almost anything marketed to the public as campaign finance reform stands a good chance of passing, and without much real scrutiny since nobody wants to be painted as "anti-reform".
| Print article | This entry was posted by Rossputin on 03/21/05 at 11:07:46 pm . Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. |
Yours truly
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03/22/05 @ 08:18:10 pm
I don't think "the people" are that hot on Campaign-Finance reform. If you go to my Blog I have an article on how Congress was fooled into believing there was a grass roots effort for campaign-finance, but it was actaully set up by a bunch of Left wing groups led by Pew. It cost 123 million in their dollars to pull off, but it is interesting reading.