Campaign-Finance Reform: Incumbent Protection Racket.

If campaign-finance reform is the solution, what's the problem? It used to be candidates' spending, which was supposedly out of control, promoting a corrupting race for cash. But while earlier reform bills featured limits on candidates' spending, that idea was dropped long ago. Senators this year voted to lift the restrictions on direct contributions to candidates, allowing them to raise and spend more. Last season's corruption is this year's common sense. Earlier versions of reform also attempted to ban PACs, then considered the primary vehicle of Big Money interests in Washington. That idea, too, was abandoned. Now Congress is debating a ban on "soft money" donations to political parties that would actually augment the role of PACs, which give "hard money" donations directly to candidates.

The case for campaign-finance regulations keeps shifting, without ever attaining coherence. But in debating the latest bill-McCain-Feingold- the Senate has achieved an admirable consistency: It is supporting reforms that protect incumbents, and blocking those that do not. Incumbents loathe three things: millionaire candidates, who can overwhelm them with spending; TV broadcasters, who charge them money to run their campaign ads; and independent groups, which can hammer them with negative advertising. McCain-Feingold, as amended on the Senate floor, neatly protects incumbents in all three cases.

One successful amendment would raise the limits on direct contributions to candidates when they face a rich, self-financing opponent. But the rationale for those limits was that unlimited donations are corrupting, or at least create the appearance of corruption. Or are donations corrupting only when there are no millionaires in a race?

Senators also voted to force broadcasters to sell them TV spots at the lowest possible rate. This is a measure without the slightest tissue of good-government justification, but is simply senators wielding their sheer power over broadcasters.

Finally, of course, McCain-Feingold would prevent unions and corporations-a category that includes many advocacy groups-from advertising 30 days before a primary and 60 days before a general election. This provision, too, would work to the benefit of incumbents, who are more likely than challengers to be the target of ads attacking their records.

McCain-Feingold's advertising restrictions are likely to be found unconstitutional, since dozens of court decisions say that political communication is highly protected under the First Amendment. Even John McCain thinks that at least one of the restrictions is unconstitutional (it was added by an amendment that he opposed). Not that this minor matter dissuades him from crusading for the amended bill's passage. (So much for the idea of "restoring confidence in government.") The courts can clean it up later, goes the thinking. But if the courts strike some provisions of the bill, the resulting law might be very different in its effect and character from the one Congress passes.

Hence the need for an amendment that would junk the law entirely if the courts pick off parts of it. But the press dismisses this idea as a "poison pill" (definition: anything John McCain doesn't like). Another alleged poison pill is "paycheck protection"-an amendment defeated on the Senate floor-which would prevent unions from spending dues on political causes without their members' permission. Surely, this is a worse, more clearly identifiable abuse of the political system than any of the fuzzy "corruption" McCain-Feingold purports to fix with its scattershot, ever-shifting collection of regulations.

The premise of all campaign-finance efforts over the years has been that it should be harder for people to donate and for politicians to spend. It is money in general, rather than any particular practice, that is considered corrupting. There are two major problems with this approach. 1) Less money in politics means less politics. As the analogy in Buckley v. Valeo had it, if you restrict how much people can spend on gas, you restrict how much they can travel. 2) If the goal is to wring money out of politics in general, the regulatory effort will have to become more and more ambitious. If it starves the parties of cash, for instance, it will next have to chase after the independent groups that will spring up to take their place. This is why McCain-Feingold doesn't just ban "soft money" but also regulates outside groups' fundraising, advertising, and "coordination" with politicians. The logic of this type of reform presses toward a system that is hermetically sealed from private donations and dependent instead on "clean" public dollars: socialism for politicians.

If McCain-Feingold doesn't fall of its contradictions, it deserves to fall of its ambitions.