Among the parties filing amicus briefs in the Vermont expenditure limits case is the Democratic National Committee, speaking as the Democratic Party’s "governing body."  The DNC supports the Vermont law, and this is perhaps little more than professional courtesy and personal consistency on the part of the current DNC Chair who, as Governor of Vermont, supported and signed into law these contribution and expenditure limits.  Chairman Dean has said, however, that more is indeed involved.  For him, the Party was obligated to assert its seriousness of purpose in this "culture of corruption." 

     For these reasons, the DNC has embraced spending limits—stringent ones, imposed without choice and without the compensatory balm of public funds—in the name of "promoting ‘electoral competition and protecting equal access to political participation;’" and "‘bolstering voter interest and engagement in elective politics;’"  DNC Br. at 6.  Its brief dutifully places the best possible face on Vermont’s detailed regulation of political parties.  Under the law, the limits are low (e.g. $400 for a statewide office), applicable to coordinated support as well as to cash contributions; and there are legal "presumptions" that parties may labor to overcome in favor of findings of coordination.  Yet the DNC is able to see in this form of regulation a boon to the parties, some enhancement of their role relative to "candidates [who] have increasingly become individual entrepreneurs, able to raise and spend unlimited sums in their own right, and less dependent on the parties."  DNC Br. at 11-12.

     One of the reasons for candidates choosing to chart their own course is some doubt about the parties’ will and ability to assist them.  This may be an irreversible trend—the struggle of parties is not entirely the fault of bad lawmaking—but it is a trend surely accelerated by a national party’s decision to abandon its core mission, one of raising and spending whatever it can to win elections, for the refined pleasures of reform politics.  Whatever harm done may be limited, since the party’s competitive position is hardly jeopardized by an amicius brief.  It still matters, however, that the DNC endorses this form of State action to limit, severely, how parties can help their candidates. 

     In the past, when the parties have supported federal coordinated spending limits, they could argue with some apparent sincerity that these limits had already been set preferentially high for the benefit of parties, and that their elimination was neither wise nor sound.  Of course, the parties also believed that these limits were competitively helpful, more disadvantageous to GOP parties believed to have limitless resources.  In the Vermont case, the DNC, while not admitting to it, is defending a statute entirely unfriendly to parties.  It is left to applaud the State for leaving the party with the right to make "independent" expenditures—even assuming that the parties can meet the legal standards for this independence—which represent a forced divorce from their own candidates who cannot guide and consult on the expenditures.  All of these practical difficulties are traded for the glimmering chimera of more "competition," "equal access" to the political process, and heightened "voter engagement." 

      Chairman Dean has explained the DNC’s legal position as "an opportunity to actually do something."  He has stated:  "I thought it would be hypocritical to be pillorying the Republican Party for their corruption when this opportunity was coming before the Supreme Court."  And having signed the Vermont stature into law, he might have felt keenly this concern with hypocrisy.  Under these pressures, both PR and personal, the Chair chose to align the party against its own interests as a political organization that requires for its success, and for the success of its candidates, ready access to resources and fewer rather than more legal restrictions.  Understandable as this may be, as a response to the politics of the hour, an alternative would have been to say nothing.

Bob Bauer