2004 was in many ways the year of the 527 organization -- political committees predominantly used to cicumvent campaign finance law by accepting soft money contributions in an effort to advocate for or against the election of a particular candidate without expressly doing so (which would in fact be illegal where merely running ads without express calls to vote one way or another would be legal under current law). And while it is widely believed that 527s were mainly used by progressives to oust President Bush that year, a number of the largest of these political organizations came from the right, perhaps most notably the Swiftboat Veteran groups. Another immense conservative effort, Progress for America (a misnomer if there ever was one in politics), raised and spent more than $30 million to knock down Democratic nominee John Kerry -- unlawfully, apparently. The New York Times' Kate Phillips has the details.

A major conservative group agreed to pay a $750,000 penalty as part of a settlement with the Federal Election Commission, which found that the group violated campaign finance laws by spending more than $30 million on advertisements and mailings supporting President Bush's re-election.

The fine was the third largest in the agency's 32-year-history. The settlement reflects a crackdown in the last several months on the political activities of so-called 527 groups -- named after a section of the tax law -- that surfaced in the 2004 election as a powerful force, raising and spending hundreds of millions of dollars in unregulated contributions through a loophole in the law.

[...]

The agency found that the group, the Progress for America Voter Fund, operated as a political action committee, soliciting money and financing advertisements.

It spent $26.4 million alone on advertising in battleground states in 2004 for the purpose of retaining Mr. Bush as president.

Its actions violated campaign laws because it was not registered as a political action committee that would be subject to strict limits on donations. The agency said it circumvented a ban on corporate money and accepted contributions that well exceeded the caps on individual donations.

Given the amounts of money that Progress for America was able to raise in 2004 and the size of the contributions they received -- "it reported raising $44.9 million in 2004, with nearly three-fourths from 13 donors", according to Phillips -- a $750,000 fine seems rather unconsequential and, frankly, not likely to deter others from undertaking the same type of malfeasance in the future. If the only consequence for openly flouting campaign finance law is a fine that could be easily covered by the check of a single donor -- even if that check is $750,000 -- I have little doubt that there will be 527s in the future that raise unlimited soft money contributions with the intent of impacting a federal election and with the understanding that they will have to pay a fine at some point down the line.

Our government and thus our elections are too important to be left susceptible to this kind of mistreatment. Public financing, perhaps a system like the one advocated by Chris, is probably the only long term answer to this problem. But in the short run, it looks like Congressional Democrats are warming to the idea or reining in 527 organizations. Regardless of the details of the new restrictions of these political committees, should the Democrats pass such legislation it should impart in the FEC (and perhaps the Justice Department, as well) the power to hand out significantly larger fines and even jail time for the worst offenders, like those who ran Progress for America. This would not likely solve all of the problems with the way we finance our federal campaigns (and, indeed, there are a lot of them), but at the least it would make folks think twice before they consciously broke campaign finance law to help a particular candidate.