The Los Angeles Times Editorial: Finish Campaign Reform

On Tuesday, the Republican Party smashed soft-money fund-raising records by wooing corporate chieftains at a dinner headlined by President Bush. About $30 million, the lion’s share of it soft money, was collected.

If any further proof were needed of the importance of the campaign finance reform that Congress passed in March, the dinner provided it. But as a bipartisan task force created by the group Democracy 21 shows in a lengthy report called “No Bark, No Bite, No Point,” the campaign laws, which go into effect after midterm elections, will be meaningless unless the toothless Federal Election Commission is shut down and replaced by a new regulatory agency.

The six-member commission’s public mandate is to enforce campaign finance law. But Congress actually designed the commission, established in 1974, to be
ineffective and impotent, fearing it could damage individual member’s careers. Structural problems abound. For one thing, the commission can have no more than three members of the same political party. On high-profile decisions, deadlock has resulted. The commission found, for example, that the 1996 Dole for
President Committee had received illegal contributions from the Republican National Committee but tied 3 to 3 on whether to pursue enforcement action.

To see the complete editorial, see The Los Angeles Times at: http://www.latimes.com .