A splendid example

Perhaps it was the meltdown of Enron that exposed to four members of the House the link between politics and the big money of financing campaigns. The representatives who just last week signed on to a soft-money ban that had been languishing in the House were Alcee Hastings of Florida, Eddie Berenice Johnson of Texas, Peter Visclosky of Indiana, all Democrats, and Republican Greg Ganske of Iowa. With just three more signatures, the Shays’ Meehan reform leaves committee where it would likely be passed by the full House.

Enron’s ties to politics were particularly obvious in 2000. The company and its employees gave $572,000 to the Bush campaign, and, more to the point, were able to spare another $1.7 million in soft money to both Republicans and Democrats. Now that the company, which had so much to do with steering federal debate on electricity deregulation, has gone bankrupt and left average workers without jobs and average investors without a penny, the National Republican Senatorial Committee recently decided it would be inappropriate to keep a recent $100,000 donation from Enron and sent it back. The Republican Governors Association likewise recently returned an Enron donation of $60,000.

But the damage to people’s lives has already been done and it is too late now for the kind of congressional oversight of an industry that helped fabricate an energy crisis in California. Getting such influential players out of politics, however, is a positive step Congress still can and should take.

The tool for this simple but difficult task is a discharge petition, which will force House Republican leaders to schedule a straightforward vote on Shays-Meehan, the House version of the nearly identical McCain-Feingold passed by the Senate in June. The discharge petition is a rarely used device, it being an undisguised rebuke to leadership. In this case, the rebuke is warranted and necessary; the elegant simplicity of an up-or-down vote on this important legislation will be a striking contrast to the chicanery used to avoid one.

It takes a majority, the signatures of 218 members, to impose discharge. Given that 252 members voted for Shays-Meehan both in 1998 and 1999, the petition would seem easily done, but those two enactment votes were taken in the safety of knowing McCain-Feingold was bottled up in the Senate. Senate enactment blew the House’s cover; now it must vote for real. The current number of discharge supporters stands at 215.

Signing the petition will take courage for House Republicans; it is they who will have to openly defy their leadership, particularly Speaker Dennis Hastert, who proposed the unacceptable rules for debate that led to the bill’s withdrawal in mid-July. Conviction is what Democrats must prove – those two votes for Shays-Meehan when McCain-Feingold was safely stalled don’t count.

Shays-Meehan/McCain-Feingold is a modest bill; its central provision is a ban on soft money, such as the half-billion in unregulated funds that the parties raised and used in the last election. While it may be true, as some reform opponents allege, that closing this loophole only will lead to the opening of new ones, to accept that cynical argument is to accept that American elections can never aspire to being anything more than the buying and selling of influence.

House Republican leaders first tried to block reform by proposing an alternate version that offered sham reform. That fizzled, so procedural tactics were employed to prevent a vote, and these have been effective for the last four months. The splendid example of Enron, however, shows just how expensive these tactics have become.