Word: reformer
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...House changes the bill, there will be a House-Senate conference to work out the differences--or provide for a suitable burial. The Republican leadership can stack the conference with reform foes, who could help kill the bill behind closed doors and save Bush from a tough veto decision. Bush will need all the political capital he has to move his budget and tax proposals through Congress; reform opponents knew last week that they could not count on his veto to save them...
...great puritan is at it again. John McCain calls himself a crusader; he has the attitude to match. He wants nothing less than to purify the nation and drive out evil. The evil is money in politics, of course, and he will slay it with campaign-finance reform. His panacea is to ban the soft-money contributions that corporations, unions and others give to political parties for use in campaigns...
...that is just the intended consequence of this reform. Consider the unintended consequence. McCain fought mightily for "severability"--the guarantee that the bill would stand even if one provision or another is thrown out by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional. He won. But don't we already have a lamentable experience with severability? In 1976 the Supreme Court threw out one provision of the post-Watergate campaign reform. The court ruled that you can constitutionally restrict how much a candidate can raise but not how much he can spend. That created a gigantic loophole for the very rich. They...
Imagine what will happen to today's great campaign reform when, as is likely, the Supreme Court throws out the restrictions on issue ads by independent groups. Will the great interests--unions and corporations and others with means--which can no longer give to parties, withdraw from the political arena? Of course not. As surely as night follows day, they will end up funding thinly disguised independent groups running their own political ads before an election. There will thus be no diminution of money (or corruption) in politics. There will simply be far more chaos. Instead of the political parties...
SENATOR RUSS FEINGOLD Manages to keep campaign-finance reform afloat and share spotlight with media-fave McCain...