The House Republicans set out to make a point yesterday, and, by the narrowest of margins, they did.  See Thomas B. Edsall, "Campaign Finance Measure Approved," Washington Post, April 6, 2006 at A1.  For years, they have been on the wrong side of the "reform" issue, and now they claim it as their own, standing for enforcement of the law against new forms of "soft money."  They don’t believe it, of course:  the reform they peddle is a toxin, intended to snuff out political adversaries.  This is their purpose:  to turn the reform argument inside out, perverting it for political ends, showing it up as a nothing more than a ploy.  Democrats got this point, voting virtually without dissent in defense of the progressive allies under attack.

      Another point, less intentionally made, has to do with the process by which reform is prepared for decision:  it is a point of process.  The Rules Committee brought the bill to the floor under a closed rule.  Debate was limited to an hour.  Prior Committee work—the work of the House Administration Committee—was discarded, and the original Shays-Meehan proposal, coupled with a new repeal of party spending limits, took its place.  The process by which this measure was assembled, debated or voted was not, by any defensible use of the term, serious.  What followed, predictably, were vacuous floor exchanges, followed by a party-line vote.

      Rules established for political competition can be made this way—they are made this way—but this sort of process, which is really its functional absence, is fatal to their credibility.  It is too much to expect consensus, of course; and invariably, the majority will favor rules beneficial to its interests and adverse, to one degree or the other, to their opposition.  Reform’s history, from the early twentieth century to the present, demonstrates this truth that, in reform, what is "right" is all often determined by might, and to its advantage.  But this is good reason to insist on some reasonably fair, deliberative process—some exposure of arguments to serious discussion, with opportunity afforded for amendment and compromise.  That this doesn’t happen speaks for itself:  because reform is an exercise in politics, the premium, as in any political contest, is on winning, which eliminates the incentive for bargaining with the very opposition that it is the object to defeat.

      What happened yesterday is not much different, really, from the process leading to the enactment of McCain-Feingold.  In the Senate, which acted first, Committee work was skipped.  A bill was produced, much of it written by reform lobbyists, only to be presented as the one "true" version, which was not to be disfigured by "poison pill" amendments.  Some dealing then took place once the bill went to the floor; but this, in its way, was also a closed process, as incumbents from both parties made last-minute adjustments necessary to mitigate the bill’s harsher effects on them.  The House debate that followed lasted all of a day (including some part of a late night.)  As in yesterday’s vote, one party stood largely opposed to the other.  Partisanship might have been expected to kill the bill, too, since the President with the signing pen was a member of the party in opposition, but he approved it nonetheless, for political reasons of his own. 

      Republicans did not believe that this process was credible, and this belief always reinforces the broader suspicion that what is "reform" is merely the means by which one political interest strengthens itself in the competition with another.  McCain-Feingold will not easily escape the cynicism that it bred.  Yesterday was its critics’ revenge, or the last installment of it.  Opponents of soft money reform rose up in its defense, borrowing both the rhetoric and the procedural shortcuts by which it was brought forcibly to life.

      "Reform," force-fed by one party to the other, cannot survive the technique by which it is administered.  The vote yesterday, and the "process" leading to it, discredited "527" reform, but it also further weakened the standing and perhaps also the durability of the 2002 enactment. 

Bob Bauer