Like tinsel during Christmas, today, the WSJ features its customary election-season editorial denouncing the follies of campaign-finance reform.
While the piece does well in debunking the so-called "post-Watergate model," I also think it's important here to highlight the fact that campaign finance reform is hardly a fixed entity. There are many strands of reform: McCain-Feingold, for e.g., simultaneously banned some contributions and expanded others. Arizona and Maine, meanwhile, have used full public-financing systems for years; Oregon offers a 100% tax credit for the first $50 an individual contributes to a state campaign.
Moreover, its successes or failures don't exist in a legislative vacuum. Take, for example, the presidential matching-funds system. Throughout this election cycle, references to the system seem uniformly accompanied by variants of adjectives such as "defunct" or "broken." Rarely, however, is it mentioned why the system isn't working: namely, the fact that since it was created in the 1970s, even as election costs have swelled, Congress has spurned attempts to raise its funding, thereby assuring its obsolescence.
There are plenty of strong ideological cases to make against campaign finance reform, and toward the end of its piece, the WSJ begins to make them. But if campaign finance reform has actually encouraged people to flood the system with more money, as they say, shouldn't that satisfy them given their views on money and speech?
--Te-Ping Chen
