Money greases the wheels of American politics from the local level
to the White House. In the 2004 presidential campaign, President
George W. Bush alone raised nearly $400 million in private and
public funds--nearly twenty times the combined total raised by John
Kennedy and Richard Nixon in 1960--to defeat challenger John F.
Kerry, further fueling anxiety over the power of money to dictate
political results.
Melvin Urofsky, one of our nation's most respected legal
historians, takes a fresh look at efforts to rein in campaign
spending and counter efforts in the courts to preserve the status
quo. He offers a thoughtful and balanced overview of campaign
finance reform and the legal responses to it, from the Progressive
era through the Supreme Court's landmark ruling in McConnell v. FEC
(2003) and its impact on the 2004 election.
Urofsky focuses especially on the 1971 Federal Election Campaign
Act and 2002 McCain-Feingold or Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act
(BCRA), and on challenges to both in the Supreme Court. In Buckley
v. Valeo (1976), the Court upheld contribution limits but struck
down expenditure caps on First Amendment grounds. In McConnell it
upheld the key provisions of McCain-Feingold. In both cases,
however, opponents argued that congressional control of campaign
financing was an unconstitutional infringement of the free speech
rights of campaign contributors. Urofsky deftly steers the reader
through this contentious and complex history, revealing how both
Congress and the courts have navigated uneasily between the Scylla
of potential corruption and the Charybdis of suppressing political
speech.
Ironically, despite the Court's decision upholding
McCain-Feingold, the 2004 presidential election was the most
expensive in history-because, as Urofsky notes, money is the
mother's milk of politics and both candidates and donors will
always find ways to keep it flowing. His book provides an excellent
and succinct guide to the controversies and historical debates
emerging from that fact.
General
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