WASHINGTON, Feb. 14 (UPI) -- WASHINGTON, Feb. 14 (UPI) -- The UPI Think Tank Wrap-up is a daily digest covering brief opinion pieces, reactions to recent news events, and position statements released by various think tanks.
The Cato Institute
WASHINGTON--Shays-Meehan Anti-Democratic, Scholar Says
Early Thursday, the House of Representatives approved the most sweeping changes in campaign finance laws in nearly three decades. After a marathon 16-hour debate, the House voted 240-189 to approve a bill to ban unregulated "soft-money" donations to national political parties and restrict broadcast ads before an election.
John Samples, director of the Cato Institute's Center on Representative Government, had the following comments:
"In the bottom of the ninth inning of a political game that ran until the early hours of Thursday morning, campaign finance reform advocates hit an anti-democratic triple: they made future elections even less competitive, weakened political parties, and ran roughshod over our constitutionally protected freedom of speech.
"The ban on soft money contributions to the political parties will surely reduce the competitiveness of our elections. Two political scientists, Ray La Raja and Thad Kousser, closely studied limits on contributions to political parties passed by 15 states. They found that such restrictions have reduced election competition in those states. Restrictions on giving to parties make it harder for challengers to find the money needed to run against incumbents. The incumbents who voted for Shays-Meehan yesterday can breathe easier about the 2004 election cycle.
"The bill also prohibits labor unions, corporations, and non-profit groups from running ads mentioning a candidate two months prior to an election. This is an astonishing attack on democracy. If democracy means anything, it means the right to criticize people who stand for election. Shays-Meehan lets members of Congress decide if, when, and how they may be criticized during an election campaign. The Supreme Court has clearly stated that the people, not the politicians, control elections in America. The Shays-Meehan ban on free speech will not withstand close constitutional scrutiny."
WASHINGTON--Shays-Meehan Ad Nauseam
By Robert A. Levy
Campaign finance reform is about to hit the House floor.
"Enron focuses the debate," proclaimed Rep. Richard Neal (D-Mass.), as he supplied the 218th -- and decisive-- signature on a discharge petition to force the Shays-Meehan bill out of committee.
Maybe Neal was right about the Enron debacle. Both parties are conspicuously reaffirming their commitment to rein in campaign finance abuses. But back in the real world, there's no evidence so far of political chicanery.
All the same, "reformers" insist on regurgitating Shays-Meehan for the umpteenth time. Their zeal endures, notwithstanding consistent Supreme Court pronouncements over a quarter-century that curbing corruption is the only reason to restrict political expression. Yet nobody identifies who has been tainted by so-called soft dollars, much less who might sell out for a paltry $1,000 in hard dollars - a limit that has persisted for 27 years despite being gutted by inflation.
A bill like Shays-Meehan, which bans soft dollars and leaves the cap on hard dollars pretty much in place, will only divert the riches to some other loophole. Besides, would-be supporters know that the political risk is huge, especially if your party needs soft dollars and the other guys have a big lead in raising cash.
That's the dilemma facing reformers in the House. To make matters worse, the bill they're being asked to pass trashes the First Amendment by prohibiting most radio and TV ads unless voting day is so far away nobody cares. Naturally, that prohibition doesn't apply to the media. So Philip Morris can't mention the name of a candidate in an ad within 60 days of an election. But if the company acquires a newspaper, somehow the speech restrictions vanish.
The idea is to stop big bucks--except media big bucks, of course--from buying votes. Predictably, however, dollars flow to politicians who share the donor's views. In other words, the cash follows the views, not vice-versa.
One would think that a campaign finance reform bill would try to expand, not contract, the opportunity to participate in the political process. By that standard, Shays-Meehan surely doesn't qualify. Still, in past voting, 252 members backed the legislation. That's because they knew that the Senate's counterpart bill, McCain-Feingold, would die. And it did.
This time, however, there's no free vote. McCain-Feingold redux is a done deal. No wonder, therefore, that the "reformers" backed off when Speaker Dennis Hastert (R, Ill.) insisted on separate votes on 14 last-minute amendments that Rep. Chris Shays (R-Conn.) and Rep. Meehan (D-Mass.) hurled at the Rules Committee. Most of the Democrats, including the Congressional Black Caucus, yielded to political reality and postponed their anti-corruption charade.
Evidently, here's the controlling campaign finance principle (if you can call it that): Better no reform bill than a bill that handicaps our party's fundraising. Minority Leader Dick Gephardt (Mo.) offers a more elegant, albeit disingenuous, exposition: "Two important values [are] in direct conflict: free speech and the desire for healthy campaigns; you can't have both."
Nonsense. Free speech is the quintessence of a healthy campaign. Both can be destroyed by regulation. Far from granting power to government, the First Amendment is intended to withhold that power. Otherwise, politicians will decide what we can say about them.
As for money, it's just a symptom. Overweening government has wormed its way into nearly every aspect of our lives. Our pervasive regulatory and redistributive state creates huge incentives for profiteering. Because of the big government problem there's a big money problem. By cutting government down to size, we can minimize the influence of big money.
Restoring the Framers' notion of enumerated, delegated and thus limited powers will get the state out of our lives and out of our wallets. That's the best way to end the campaign-finance racket, and root out venality without jeopardizing political expression.
Until then, let's protect political ads at least as much as we protect Internet porn and flag burning. The suppression of political speech is intolerable in a free society. Not surprisingly, when the state clamps controls on political information, powerful forces work to outwit the system. That's the way it should be if the First Amendment means anything.
(Robert A. Levy is senior fellow in constitutional studies at the Cato Institute.)
The Hoover Institution
STANFORD, Calif. -- Crime Statistics: The Only Game in Town
By Joseph D. McNamara
The American public likes to believe that police officers are above partisan politics, but is this really the case?
During my more than 30 years as a cop, I produced and sometimes created crime statistics. I started my police career almost half a century ago walking a solo beat in Harlem. My first arrest as a flatfoot was for first-degree murder by virtue of the fact that I bumbled into arresting the perpetrator while the victim lay dying on the sidewalk. During my next ten years in Harlem, I found that cops who were not so lucky but who reported robberies, rapes, burglaries, or other serious felonies with no arrest were unlikely to remain on the force.
No official order was ever given to underreport or not report crimes that weren't cleared, but an officer following the rule book would soon find out from his sergeant that he had an attitude. Once sergeants decided you had a wrong attitude it was time to look for another job. One cop I worked with had an outstanding felony arrest record; eight out of 10 of his arrests, however, were for assaulting him after he had created an altercation -- crime created by a police officer.
Approximately 16 years after my first arrest, I had risen to be the director of crime analysis for the NYPD. Stationed a few blocks from the World Trade Center with the responsibility for compiling and analyzing crime statistics for the city of New York, I found that things hadn't changed much.
The mayor didn't like high crime stats with no arrests. Thus, the police commissioner didn't either. The precinct captains knew their careers depended on the amount of crime reported, and, of course, the sergeants knew quite well what the captains wanted. Consequently, it was a bad idea for a rookie to report a robbery with no arrest -- much better to make it an unfounded report. It was not illegal, and we had become cops to avoid working in an office and dealing with paperwork.
So are the 30 and 40 percent crime reductions for which Bill Clinton and Rudy Giuliani claim credit phony or real? Some analysts credit full employment, additional police, mandatory sentences, maturation of the crack market, and better policing. Neither human nature nor politics, however, has changed through the years.
Next time a candidate or "expert" tells us we need to spend more money to reduce crime, remember the old vaudeville joke:
First man: "I saw you playing in that crap game last night. Didn't you know it was crooked?"
Second man: "Sure, but it was the only game in town."
In most towns, local politics is the only game in town when it comes to precisely counting crime.
(Joseph D. McNamara a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is the former chief of police for San Jose, California and Kansas City, Missouri, and the former deputy inspector in charge of crime analysis for New York City.)
