Senator McCain later stated that this support culminated in action by hundreds of thousands of people. “When we had an amendment but also had people trying to cut off debate and block consideration of our legislation, we literally could tie up phone lines all over America with people calling to protest,” he told a forum on money and politics at Carnegie Corporation in January 2004.

Defending Reform in the McConnell v. FEC Case

Within months of passage, reformers faced an onslaught of legal challenges to the new restrictions on campaign money by McCain-Feingold. More than 80 plaintiffs filed 11 different lawsuits against the U.S. Justice Department and Federal Elections Commission (FEC), challenging every provision of the new law. Consolidated into one case, McConnell v. FEC, the plaintiffs ranged from Senator McConnell and Congressman Ron Paul (R-TX) to the Republican National Committee, the AFL-CIO, ACLU and the National Rifle Association.

The plaintiffs argued before the U.S. Supreme Court that the new law violated First Amendment rights to free speech and assembly and other rights. However, The New York Times warned, “If the Supreme Court holds that Congress cannot make these small but critically important fixes, it will be condemning the nation to a democracy forever held captive to the corrupting influence of monied special interests.”

Besides the law’s principal sponsors, numerous organizations joined the defense as interveners and amici, including the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, which also provided considerable scholarship, public education and litigation resources to reformers.

Most important, defenders of McCain-Feingold provided the court with abundant documentation of the undemocratic influence of campaign contributions on federal policymaking, including affidavits from current and former members of Congress, and extensive research done in recent years by scholarly and other expert organizations.

For example, the CED amicus brief (which included such individual business leaders as Warren Buffett, Paul Volcker and Jerome Kohlberg) cited not only its own research, such as public opinion polls and in-depth interviews with contributors and politicians, but also studies by the Center for Responsive Politics, Campaign for America and Public Campaign. The brief documented how political leaders have extracted soft money contributions to support a system of “access for sale”; how corporations fear retribution if they don’t contribute, and how such contributions are, therefore, not voluntary; how the contributions often do not reflect the true ideals of contributors but are intended for purely commercial self-interest; and how the system distorts the marketplace of ideas, which deserves protection.

The CED brief concluded with this flat declaration: “The coercive soft money system . . . has corrupted solicitor and contributor alike. It has engendered understandable public cynicism regarding both business and government. It has interfered arbitrarily in the functioning of the economy. Business leaders increasingly wish to be freed from the grip of [this] system . . .”

The strong case presented by defenders helped to persuade the Court to embrace both their arguments and conclusions in a nearly 300-page decision, which The Washington Post called “a strong affirmation of Congress’s authority to regulate the flow of money in politics.”

Enacting and Defending Public Financing of State and Local Campaigns

One of the greatest impacts of the coalition has been engendered by its array of national, regional and state organizations promoting public financing of campaigns at the state and local level, where targeted grassroots efforts have achieved some important victories. These victories were all the more remarkable because most of the organizations that helped to bring them about either did not exist or had little influence at the beginning of the 1990s.

Coordinating many of the reform efforts has been Public Campaign, founded in 1997, and dedicated to enacting “clean money” laws in state and local governments that would provide full public financing for candidates. In turn, much of the grassroots work has been carried out by regional organizations such as the Western States Center, Midwest States Center, Northeast Action and Democracy South; they helped mobilize local and state citizen groups around the country, develop ballot initiatives where possible, educate public officials, and provide technical assistance.

Playing a key role in expansion of the grassroots movement is the Piper Fund, a project of the Proteus Fund, a collaboration of individual donors and small and large foundations supporting state organizations working to implement comprehensive campaign finance reform.

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