Posted by Juan Non-Volokh:
Pew Denies "Campaign Finance Conspiracy":
In response to Ryan Sager's charges that the Pew Charitable Trusts
helped orchestrate an astroturf campaign for campaign finance reform,
Pew released a press release stating in part:
As part of its mission to serve the public interest, and to help
increase public trust and confidence in U.S. elections, The Pew
Charitable Trusts has invested over the last nine years in
nonpartisan efforts to help reform the role money plays in
campaigns. We are pleased that our involvement, along with that of
many others, could play a positive role in helping to spark a
national dialogue and ultimately, agreement on options for change.
. . .
Any assertion that we tried to hide our support of campaign finance
reform grantees is false. As we do with all of our work, we have
fully disclosed our support for grantees working on campaign
finance reform in a variety of forms over the last nine years, . .
.
The full release can be viewed at [1]Rick Hasen's Election Law blog
[2]here. Hasen also posts his own comments, suggesting the charges are
"much ado about nothing" [3]here.
A D.C.-based attorney with experience in campaign finance is also
skeptical of Sager's claims. He writes, in part
The problem isn't the foundation funding, it's Sager's assumption
or assertion that Congress, or some members of Congress, thought
there was a groundswell of popular support for campaign finance
reform in the late 1990s/early 2000s, and that such perceived
groundswell was a result of Pew's "conspiracy."
I've followed campaign finance reform pretty closely, and worked on
McCain-Feingold issues for clients. No one pretends that campaign
finance reform is anything but an argument among knowledgeable
specialists. It's inside baseball. There's no massive popular
movement one way or the other, and no belief that any such movement
exists - all the participants in the debate, as far as I know,
recognize it's a technical regulatory matter and argue about it on
those terms. Naturally the participants recognize that it has
crucial public policy consequences - free speech, the nature of
democratic procedures, etc etc - but it doesn't engage the public
mind like, say, Social Security or Medicare or the death penalty,
and no one claims it does. . . .
I reject Sager's suggestion that anybody in Congress, on either
side of this issue, thought they were responding to any massive
popular demand for "reform." McCain et al. certainly pushed it
because they believed in it, but I don't think even McCain ever
claimed he was riding some tidal wave of popular discontent.
Perhaps. Yet I certainly think it's fair to argue that the sheer
volume of media coverage made it seem as if there was a groundswell
for "reform" of some sort. After all, was this not part of the basis
for McCain's 2000 presidential bid? Was this not why President Bush
signed McCain-Feingold? Campaign finance experts, like Hasen or my
correspondent, may have been in the know, but would the average Wall
Street Journal reader or NPR listener have reached the same
conclusion? I'm skeptical. Moreover, if there was not a widespread
perception that there was grass-roots support for campaign finance
reform, then the charge that incumbent politicians supported "reform"
out of self-interest is that much stronger.
I would also note that Pew has been accused of this sort of thing
before. Both local environmental activists and property rights
advocates have accused Pew of constructing astroturf environmental
groups to redirect environmental advocacy on issues about which Pew
was particularly concerned.
Campaign-finance reform was justified, in part, on the grounds that
big money wields disproportionate influence on public policy.
Ironically, the success of Pew's efforts seem to support that claim.
Whether Pew's activities amounted to a stealth "conspiracy" or not,
there efforts prove that large philanthropic foundations are capable
of shaping public debate and influencing the course of public policy
-- perhaps even taking it where the public does not particularly want
to go.
References
1. http://electionlawblog.org/
2. http://electionlawblog.org/archives/003135.html
3. http://electionlawblog.org/archives/003148.html
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