On the Right - Feeling One's Way on Finance Reform.(political campaign finance reform debate)(Brief Article)

NEW YORK, MARCH 20

It isn't exactly correct that conservatives oppose any limitations on political spending on the grounds that such limitations are unconstitutional slights on the First Amendment. Oddball interpretations of the Constitution are the licensed property of constitutional ultramontanists, the kind of people who grew up on the mother's milk of the American Civil Liberties Union, or Americans United. They're the people who tell you that because the Constitution guarantees the separation of church and state, you can't have a benediction at a public high-school graduation ceremony. Or that because free speech is guaranteed, you can show Deep Throat at the corner movie theater. There are many conservatives who say that kind of thing is spinach and the hell with it. Indeed the current discussion over political financing almost begs for a confrontation with the Supreme Court, and is probably headed for that, whichever course is adopted by Congress.

Sen. Mitch McConnell, who is a persuasive advocate of leaving things as they are, summed up his position on Monday in the initial debate: "The only way to really get at the core of this problem, if senators believe that the influence of money in politics is so pernicious, is to change the First Amendment. . . . The nub of the problem is you can't do most of those things as long as the First Amendment remains as it is."

But that isn't so, as we have seen. There is now, in the law, and okayed by the Supreme Court in Buckley v. Valeo, a provision that limits individual contributions to an election candidate to $1,000. If the First Amendment absolutists were correct in what they say, that 1974 law would have been struck down as unconstitutional. There is one out that the ACLU types have. It is that although the Supreme Court okayed the restrictions in Buckley, it oughtn't to have done so. And ...