Sen. Chuck Schumer is pushing hard to limit corporate campaign spending — and to maximize his own campaign’s take from corporations. But that hypocritical chutzpah is entirely fitting when it comes to the so-called DISCLOSE Act — which is a naked effort to squelch the speech of Americans who might criticize Democrats in this year’s campaign season.
Democrats are trying to rewrite campaign-finance law to limit corporate (and grass-roots) spending on politics. And Schumer — who faces no meaningful opposition this fall — is looking to raise every buck he can from the folks he wants to crack down on.
In a fund-raising letter sent last month to Wall Street and various corporate political action committees (PACs), he says, “We’ve been making terrific progress with our DISCLOSE Act, the legislation we’ve proposed that would rein in corporate spending on elections.” Then the demand: “But while all that’s going on in Washington, right now I need your help with my campaign.”
The end of June, Schumer explained, would mark a deadline for Federal Election Commission reports — and thus his “last chance to dissuade a well-funded challenge from a corporate-backed candidate.”
In other words, he was bragging about his hopes to ban independent political advocacy by the very people he was hitting up for donations — in order, he claimed, to intimidate out of the race any candidate whom the same sorts of people might back.
As it happens, Schumer is one of the Senate’s biggest corporate fund-raisers. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, he’s the No. 1 congressional recipient of contributions from individuals and PACs from the finance, insurance, real estate, securities, entertainment, business services and alcohol industries (among others). In this election cycle, only two senators — Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) — have accepted more PAC money than Schumer.
The DISCLOSE Act is supposedly intended to overturn the recent Supreme Court ruling that threw out the ban on “independent expenditures” by both corporate and union giving, a ban that extended to “corporations” that are plainly grass-roots political groups. Yet the DISCLOSE bill would muzzle the grass-roots and the corporations — but not the unions.
So great is Schumer’s chutzpah that he (along with Wisconsin’s Russ Feingold and Vermont’s Pat Leahy) is using discloseact.com — a Web site that’s supposedly dedicated to backing the campaign “reform” bill — to build a fund-raising database.
Thus far, the trio has collected the e-mails and ZIP codes (essential for fund-raising purposes) of some 25,800 Americans. Deep in the fine print of the privacy-policy statement is the note that the information they enter will be “provided to the sponsoring campaign committees,” which will share the data with “allied organizations and campaigns.”
That’s what the DISCLOSE Act is about: helping the campaigns of congressional Democrats this fall.
Despite its gimmicky title, the bill isn’t about disclosure. Hours before the vote, with no debate, House Democrats inserted a provision to let unions not have to report funds they transfer to other groups for political purposes.
Unlike the McCain-Feingold law, which was passed in spring 2002 and only went into effect after that fall’s elections, DISCLOSE would go into effect within 30 days — even if the Federal Election Commission didn’t have time to write regulations to implement the law. That would leave grass-roots groups risking an after-the-fact crackdown if they dare criticize incumbents this fall.
Schumer’s outrageous effort to write a permanent political advantage into law illustrates why the Framers wrote the First Amendment to read, “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech.”
Bradley A. Smith, a former Federal Election Commission chairman, heads the Center for Competitive Politics, which protects First Amendment political rights.