The incumbent protection bill.

ONCE again, it is campaign-reform season on Capitol Hill. Congressmen are busily crafting a campaign-reform bill with an arcane mixture of regulations, subsidies, spending limits and new taxes--but this time, there is a difference. In 1992 campaign reformers were free to propose measures designed essentially for public relations, secure in the knowledge that the President would veto whatever they produced. But the new President has enthusiastically signaled his intention to sign into law any campaign reform that Congress places before him. This explains the delicate, secret, internal negotiations that Congress has been conducting for months.

The most significant recent congressional reforms--the disclosure of signatures on congressional discharge petitions and the institution of term limits in 15 states--have not been the result of efforts by the congressional leadership; they have been engineered by rank-and-file congressmen or by activists beyond the Beltway. In fact, the congressional leadership bitterly fought such measures whenever possible: the leadership convinced some supporters of discharge-petition reform to remove their names from the petition in question, and authorized the use of public funds to fight against term limits in court. The leadership's goal is obvious: its members wish to entrench themselves by removing any possibility of a fair fight in public view--both between incumbents and challengers and between the majority-party leadership and pro-reform congressmen of both parties.

When thinking about campaign reform, it's helpful to step back for a moment and consider what a campaign is. Essentially, it's a winner-take-all fight--an electoral fight, but a fight all the same (note the military derivation of the term). How to reform fights between candidates? Presumably, we should make them as fair as possible. The 93 per cent incumbent-re-election rate in November 1992 (that vaunted anti-incumbent year) suggests that incumbents have sizable advantages--like taxpayer-financed mass mailings, travel allowances that fund a trip back to the district each weekend, abundant media coverage granted by reporters often too lazy to do anything more than retype a press release, and scores of staffers to ghostwrite letters, secure federal grants, and otherwise burnish the Member's image in the district. The top priority of any campaign-reform package should be to remove those advantages.

On this view, the campaign-reform bills that are working their way through Congress are disappointing, though hardly surprising. Like any entrenched class, congressional Democrats wish to hold their advantages in perpetuity. Therefore, instead of diminishing the tremendous electoral advantages that incumbents already have, the Democrats' campaign-reform bill aims to build on them.

The centerpiece of the bills both the House and the Senate have produced is a limit on the amount that congressional candidates can spend. But the spending caps are equal for challengers and incumbents, failing to take into account the tremendous incumbent advantages described above. Twenty years ago, the Supreme Court declared that spending caps are an unconstitutional limit on First Amendment freedom; hence the bills call those caps "voluntary." But if a candidate exceeds the cap, his opponent receives hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal subsidies or discounts on advertising and mailings. Furthermore, the Senate version of the bill mandates a 34 per cent tax on the campaign receipts of candidates who do not comply with voluntary limits. The ingeniousness of these taxes and penalties is that--since it takes a substantial amount of spending just to reach parity with incumbents' natural advantages in media access and name recognition--incumbents won't have to break the limit; challengers will.

Most challengers who avoid the problem by running cheaper campaigns will be effectively disarmed. A third of the House challengers who spent $400,000 to $600,000 were elected in 1992. Of challengers who made it over $600,000, half won. While Congress is still debating the exact figure at which the spending limit would be set, it is likely to be just at the point where challengers start to become dangerous.

Spending caps, which ostensibly are responding to the fact that too much money is spent on political campaigns, are ultimately a solution in search of a problem. Campaign spending continues to increase because the value of what candidates get when they win--a legislative seat--is increasing. Such spending will decrease when the power of the Federal Government does, and not before. It's important to realize, though, that campaign spending is a drop in the bucket compared to other portions of the economy: as George Will has noted, the $678 million that congressional candidates spent on elections in 1992 is "about 40 per cent of the sum Americans spent on yogurt."

The campaign-reform bill also fails to do anything significant about those oft-demonized sources for campaign coffers, "soft money"--for example, money given to a political party rather than directly to a candidate--and political-action committees (PACs). While "soft money" contributions are rightly stigmatized, the bills do nothing about the real problem: undisclosed money from special interests, such as the $430 million that unions pumped into congressional campaigns last year.

PACs pose a different problem. PAC clout derives from the fact that each committee is permitted to donate $5,000 in each race, while individual donors are limited to a fifth of that amount. There are currently bitter fights in Congress about how much to reduce the maximum that a PAC can donate to a campaign, but such a move would be in precisely the wrong direction. The appropriate measure would be to raise the limits of individual contributors so as to place them on the same footing as PACs. Hampering PACs will only further insulate legislators from democratic pressures.

Leveling the Field

THOSE WHO genuinely want to see a fair electoral fight should work for reform in these areas: The congressional frank. In 1992, Congress appropriated $112 million for mail--an average, per term, of $368,000 for each representative and $1.9 million for each senator. This pays for repeated mass mailings that are often little more than pro-incumbent advertising. Less than a tenth of the mountain of constituent mail is in response to constituent inquiries. A rule that Members of Congress could respond to constituent correspondence but could not initiate it would do more for campaign reform than any measure that is currently being debated.

Constituent service. Members of Congress are eager to dedicate greater and greater portions of their, and their staffs', time and resources to helping constituents find their way around the Federal Government. This is because casting difficult votes on national policies will always displease some constituents, but ensuring the re-issuance of the lost Social Security check is a win-win situation for the Member and the constituent. Constituent-service staffs should be sharply reduced, with provisions for addressing citizen complaints by ombudsmen or other institutions.

Challenger fundraising. Special interests have figured out that the smart money is on the incumbent, and they donate accordingly. In 1992 in House races, for instance, less than 10 per cent of PAC funds went to candidates challenging incumbents. If any change is made to contribution limits, it should be to raise them--especially for challengers. The size and source of any political contribution--including all "soft money"--should be fully disclosed. Finally, campaign treasury surpluses should be disallowed for use in other campaigns, forbidding the accumulation of permanent war chests.

Term limits. Although campaign reform is no substitute for term limits, term limits would do much for real campaign reform. They would ensure a steady flow of competitive open-seat races; they would diminish incumbent fundraising advantages, which depend on the perception that incumbents will hold their seats in perpetuity; they would foster increased political action by ordinary citizens and political responsiveness by candidates.

Perhaps most important, term limits would end the era of the permanent campaign. A 1990 Los Angeles Times analysis of campaign spending found that over half of it was by incumbents with little or no opposition. The purpose of such spending is to reinforce the substantial barriers to entry by challengers. Term limits dismantle these permanent campaigns.

One question remains: Where will the money for the campaign-reform bill's public subsidies come from? This is a subject of bitter fighting between senators and representatives delegated to produce a compromise version. The Senate's taxation of candidates who exceed "voluntary" spending limits at least faces the fact that the money must come from somewhere. Not so the House, which was so dismayed by the widespread public hostility to taxpayer financing of political campaigns that its own bill refuses to designate a revenue source, stating only that another bill must be passed which will pay for campaign reform or else the package will not be enacted. That legislative scheme permits House Members to be in favor of reform even if no revenue bill passes and thus no legislation occurs.

Chicanery is not confined to the House. The Senate version contains a "non-severability" clause, which means that if any portion of the bill is found unconstitutional, the entire bill falls. A public-interest lobbyist told me that he knows of two cases--one involving a Democratic senator, one a Republican--in which the senator amended the bill in a way his staff had told him was grossly unconstitutional. It is hard to escape the conclusion that such behavior indicates a wish to take credit for reform and let the Supreme Court do the dirty work of eliminating it.

Nearly everyone is familiar with Samuel Johnson's dictum, "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel." Not so with Roscoe Conkling's rejoinder. Conkling, a New York political figure of the turn of the century and a bit of a scoundrel himself, responded that Johnson had overlooked the possibilities of the word "reform." We would all do well to keep Conkling's warning in mind when we see incumbent politicians professing to reform the procedures that will govern their re-election.