In an excellent article that features solid, real-world reporting, over at Dailykos ePluribus Media's Timothy Smith reports on
a new campaign finance law proposed Representative David Obey.
House Resolution 4694, the "Let the People Decide Clean Campaign Act" -- introduced earlier this month by Rep. David Obey (D-Wis.) and co-sponsored by fellow liberal Democrats Rosa DeLauro (Conn.), Barney Frank and James McGovern (Mass.), Henry Waxman and Bob Filner (Calif.), Steve Israel (N.Y.), and Tim Ryan (Ohio) -- would allow nominees of parties that had averaged 25% of the vote for House races to receive full public funding.
All others would be required to produce signatures equal to at least 10 percent of the last vote cast in order to qualify for partial funding and 20 percent in order to receive full funding. In addition, any candidate who failed to qualify for funding would be denied the opportunity to spend privately raised monies on their campaigns.
The financing limits would be based on the median household income of the district in question, starting at $1.5M for a major party candidate in the wealthiest district in the country, and scaled down based on the percentage difference in household income between any given district and the wealthiest district. For example, in a district where the median household income is 70% that of the wealthiest district in America, the limit for that district would be $1.3M. In a district where the median household income is 40% that of the wealthiest district in America, the limit would be $900K.
This sounds pretty good, but where some difficulties arise around the definition of a "major party," and the limits imposed on candidates from other parties. In the bill, a "major party" is defined as a party that has averaged 25% of the vote in a given district, or a party that has gathered the signatures of 10% of the voters in the district in the previous election. This is obviously a barrier that no third party could ever regularly achieve. And the limits imposed on non-major parties are harsh.
As Adam B notes:
[T]hey can't even buy a billboard, under these rules, if I understand it right. Nor can they pay people to gather signatures.
I'm no huge fan of third parties, but this is bananas. B. A. N. A. N. A. S.
I am also not a fan of third parties these days, especially third parties that feel David Obey needs to be challenged from "the progressive side," as one candidate from the always relevant Catholic Worker notes in the article. I guess Obey's 90% loyalty rate over the past three years in Congress wasn't enough for this guy. Probably because Obey wasn't properly agitating the proletariat against their bourgeois masters.
As promising as I find the idea of publicly financed campaigns (candidates don't have to spend so much time raising money, a reduced chance of quid pro quo corruption, etc.), considering the restrictions it places on "non major parties," this bill does not seem to fulfill the promise of a cleaner, more active democracy that is the promise of any good piece of campaign finance legislation. It reminds me of how
much of the proposed restrictions online political activity would actually restrict grassroots activism, rather than encourage it.
However, I think there is a very promising side to this bill that should be explored through future legislation. Specifically, if financing could only be achieved by managing a certain average percent of the vote in a given House district, both parties would be more or less forced into running a 435-seat strategy every cycle. This is because failing to run a candidate in a given district in one cycle could potentially wipe out any chance to run a candidate in that district in future cycles, no matter what events may take place to suddenly make that district competitive. This is not to mention that only by running candidates in as many districts as possible would actually become the major source of fundraising for both the NRCC and the DCCC. Similar legislation to this would make a 435-seat strategy the accepted practice of both parties. This is good for both American democracy and for Democrats, who regularly fail to field as many candidates in House races as do Republicans.
Further, legislation of this nature could potentially go a long way toward eliminating the
"packing and cracking" gerrymandering Republicans have imposed on Democrats in many states. By packing as many Democrats as possible into two or three districts in a state, Republicans have been able to create huge numbers of districts where they hold s small, but often decisive, edge in partisan voting tendencies (thereby "cracking" the remainder of the Democratic vote).
Tom Schaller has more on this.
For example, in my congressional district, PA-02, Republicans would have no chance of ever achieving major party status under this bill. The district, as recently featured on the Colbert Report, is the third most Democratic leaning district in the nation, where Bush only managed 11% of the vote in 2004. There is no way that a Republican candidate would ever manage 25% of the vote here, and no way that Republicans would ever mange to acquire 10% of the signatures of voters in the last election, as they would need to find almost every single Bush voter in the district to pull it off. However, to being on the ballot here would deny them several hundred thousand dollars of money they could sue in a media market with several tight congressional campaigns, not to mention the largest media market in a swing state nationwide. The wouldn't want to be shut out here, and thus they would be forced to significantly reduce the "packing and cracking" gerrymander tactic that they have successfully employed in
Pennsylvania,
Florida,
Ohio,
Michigan,
Virginia, and elsewhere. Reducing gerrymandering would also be a benefit to both American democracies and to Democrats.
Overall, while this specific bill seems terribly flawed, legislation to create public financing and strong definitions of "major parties" could hold a lot promise. If both parties were forced into a fifty-state strategy and a reduction of gerrymandering while having to spend less time raising money and give less access to large donors, then it would be good for all of us. However, such a bill should not be so very restrictive on "non-major parties," because not only is that anti-democratic, in about 60-70 districts nationwide, right now only one party would qualify as "major."
