Paying for campaigns: McCain eyes next target [View All]

[Freddie Stubbs]

By John McCain

The elections of 2004 proved the success of the McCain-Feingold Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act while highlighting a new problem within the system that still needs to be addressed.
The 2002 bill I sponsored with Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., has worked well to achieve its most important objective. It was primarily designed to eliminate the corrupt influence that corporations, labor unions and wealthy individuals had on our government through their large soft-money contributions.

Today, soft money is illegal in federal campaigns. No longer can a president, senator, member of Congress or head of a national party solicit huge sums of unregulated money for a federal campaign. Before McCain-Feingold, corporate and labor-union donors forked over six- and seven-figure soft-money contributions to gain access to and buy influence over officeholders — or perhaps worse — to avoid legislative reprisals from them.

Further evidence of the act's success is the significant reduction of s ham "issue ads." In the mid-1990s, corporations and labor unions began evading laws that banned the use of their treasury funds for federal elections by using those funds to pay for campaign ads that attacked and promoted federal candidates and were disguised as "issue ads." The act shut down this circumvention of the law by requiring corporations and labor unions to use PAC money, raised voluntarily from individuals, and not their treasury funds, to run ads referring to federal candidates.

MORE: http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/2004-11-03-mccain-campaigns_x.htm