also sought other means to keep the FEC on a tight leash. For example, it mandated that a vote of four Commission members would be necessary to issue regulations and advisory opinions, as well as to initiate civil actions and investigations. On a Commission that, under law, could contain no more than three members of the same political party, the effect of this was to give both the Democrats and the Republicans veto power over Commission actions. During the 1980s, this requirement has produced 3-3 stalemates on some of the most controversial questions facing the FEC; in two major instances, the Commission acted only after being faced with federal court orders.
FECA Amendments of 1979
By the time the FECA Amendments of 1976 were signed into law in May of that year, it was clear that the initiative in campaign finance regulation had passed from reformers and their allies in the media to those directly affected by the new rules of the game: incumbent legislators, political parties and major interest groups. President Jimmy Carter, who took office in January 1977, sought to make public financing of congressional elections a major legislative priority. But the proposal did not succeed in gaining a majority in either house of Congress during Carter’s term.
The one major piece of campaign-related legislation that did pass was the FECA Amendments of 1979, which were far more a response to the complaints of political candidates and operatives than to the visions of reformers. The 1979 FECA amendments were designed largely to reduce the paperwork burden on campaigns by easing the reporting requirements imposed on candidates and political committees. They thus represented a relaxation of some of the constraints that earlier reforms had placed on those in the political process.
During the late 1970s, there was considerable discussion regarding the impact of the FECA among those regulated by federal campaign law. In response, the House Administration Committee in August 1978 commissioned a study by Harvard University’s Institute of Politics. The assessment singled out three problems: it found that the law set individual contribution limits too low, it imposed burdensome reporting requirements on campaigns, and it weakened the role of political parties (Harvard University 1979). Several of the recommendations in the report were influential when possible revisions to FECA were taken up by the Senate Rules Committee in mid-1979.
Perhaps the greatest controversy during the debate over the 1979 FECA amendments centred around the conversion of excess campaign funds to personal use. The Senate wanted to ban such a practice; the House did not. In a compromise, the final legislation barred the conversion of campaign funds to personal use but exempted all House members in office at the time of the law’s enactment: 8 January 1980. They were given the prerogative of converting the campaign funds upon retirement.
This provision, which became known as the “grandfather clause,” did not end the controversy. Throughout the 1980s, there were calls to do away with that clause, as media stories focused on retiring House members who, in some cases, converted hundreds of thousands in campaign dollars to personal use. Finally, in a November 1989 pay-raise package, Congress repealed the grandfather clause as of January 1993, thereby giving senior House members several years to decide whether to retire and take personal advantage of campaign treasuries that in some cases exceeded half a million dollars.
Virtually overlooked amidst the grandfather clause debate were provisions in the FECA Amendments of 1979 that were to have far-reaching and often controversial effects during the 1980s.
In response to complaints that some of the law’s restrictions had eliminated the role of state and local parties in presidential contests, the 1979 law allowed state and local parties to underwrite voter registration and get-out-the-vote drives on behalf of presidential tickets without regard to financial limits. This provision also applied to campaign material used in volunteer activities, such as slate cards, sample ballots, palm cards, and certain buttons, bumper stickers, and brochures. In addition, the law permitted certain of these party- or ticket-oriented materials to make passing reference to a presidential candidate without it counting against the spending limits of the presidential contest.
The growth of these activities fuelled the “soft money” debate of the 1980s as presidential campaigns took full advantage of the 1979 amendments to exceed the official spending ceiling imposed by law.
Reform Takes a Pause
By the beginning of the 1980s, the United States had in place a system of election regulation that had taken most of the previous decade to enact and fine-tune. Federal elections were subject to strict rules for disclosure of spending and receipts, and the role of the wealthy donor was greatly diminished by the availability of public funding in presidential races and the presence of contribution limits in both presidential and congressional contests. Unlike the negative reforms of prior decades, which attempted to prevent abuses by a series of restrictions, limitations and prohibitions, public financing represented a step forward in that it provided an alternative - public funding in presidential campaigns - to less desirable forms of private money.
In 1980, Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory returned the Senate to Republican control for the first time in a quarter of a century. The House remained in Democratic hands, but reform elements there saw little opportunity for change during Reagan’s first term, and campaign finance proposals languished.
It was not until late 1986, when the Democrats recaptured control of the Senate, that campaign finance reform was to move once again to the top of the legislative agenda. By that time, the Republicans, too, had begun to see that certain types of reform might be in their interest. While far apart on solutions, leading legislators in both major U.S. political parties had become increasingly concerned as problems with the federal campaign finance system became more and more apparent.
ISSUES FOR THE 1980s
The failure of Congress to act on campaign finance reform throughout the 1980s can be attributed to the convergence of several political realities. The decade produced no scandal that sparked great public outrage. Numerous legislators in both major political parties did not see reform as being in their electoral self-interest, and the lack of public attention made it easy for them to ignore the issue. Finally, as pressure for change began to grow toward the end of the 1980s, sharp partisan differences between Democrats and Republicans emerged, making compromise elusive.
As Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate Republicans’ point man on the issue, candidly observed: “Campaign finance is the rules of the game in our democracy, and either side would love to write the rules in a way that benefits them to the detriment of the other side” (Peck 1990, 3).
The following section focuses on the issues that arose in the presidential and congressional systems of political finance during the 1980s, as well as the problems experienced by the Federal Election Commission. It also outlines some proposed legislative solutions.
Presidential Campaigns
Whatever its shortcomings, the U.S. system of public funding of presidential campaigns can claim some degree of success since first being implemented in 1976. During the pre-nomination period (the primary and caucus election process) it has enhanced access to voters by supplementing the treasuries of those candidates with limited name recognition and inadequate financial resources. For example, in 1976, a long-shot aspirant named Jimmy Carter captured both the Democratic presidential nomination and the election. In 1980, Republican George Bush, then relatively unknown to rank-and-file voters despite having held several appointed government positions, mounted an unexpectedly strong challenge to Ronald Reagan. It landed Bush the vice-presidential nomination and put him on the road to the White House.
In addition, the combination of contribution limits and extensive disclosure and compliance requirements has prevented a recurrence of the free-wheeling atmosphere that pervaded the 1972 Nixon campaign. This suggests that the laws of the early 1970s have succeeded in altering the
