Between 1986 and 2002, Congress debated campaign finance reform legislation almost every year, yet strong partisan differences over the best way to rewrite the laws made it impossible to agree on new legislation.
As with many other reform efforts, the most recent was sparked by financial abuses and controversies over the undue influence of money in the political process. The 1996 presidential campaign was replete with questionable fundraising practices, including contributions to party committees from foreign nationals, the "selling" of access to the White House by offering coffee meetings and sleepovers in the Lincoln bedroom to large soft money donors, the creation of non-federal PACs by federal candidates, and corporate and labor funding of candidate specific "issue ads". These practices led many legislators to conclude that campaign finance laws were being widely circumvented and, in some cases, openly violated. Three separate federal investigations were launched into the financing of the 1996 presidential race and campaign finance reform once again became a high priority for Congress.
The principal legislative proposal to address the problems that characterized the 1996 election was sponsored by Senators John McCain of Arizona and Russell Feingold of Wisconsin and was dubbed the McCain-Feingold bill. In the House, this legislation was sponsored by Representatives Martin Meehan of Massachusetts and Christopher Shays of Connecticut. Versions of this bill were presented in every session of Congress between 1996 and 2002, but the sponsors were unable to overcome procedural obstacles until March of 2002, when the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (BCRA) was finally adopted and enacted into law.
Securing final passage of BCRA over the determined opposition of the House leadership and anti-reform Senators proved to be an unusual and challenging process. After the Senate voted in favor of the bill, the House supporters had to force a floor vote on the proposal by relying on a discharge petition (a rarely used procedure in which a majority of the House of Representatives sign a petition that moves a bill out of committee and brings it directly to the House floor). The House eventually approved a revised version of the bill after a late-night session in which supporters turned back multiple attempts to defeat the bill. Senate supporters decided to have the Senate pass the House bill, rather than allow anti-reform congressional leaders to appoint members to a conference committee to reconcile differences between the bills. The Senate ultimately approved the bill by a 60 to 40 vote and on March 27, 2002, President George W. Bush signed the bill into law without the traditional public ceremony.
Primarily, BCRA did two things. First, it reinstituted limits on the sources and size of political party contributions; and second, it regulated how corporate and labor treasury funds could be used in federal elections. Specifically, BCRA resolved the problem of soft money by prohibiting national party committees from raising or spending soft money. Under the new rules, national party committees can only use hard money raised in accordance with federal contribution limits to pay for their political activities. To address the problem of candidate-specific issue advertising, BCRA sets forth a new definition of electioneering communications that provides broader regulation of the monies used to pay for campaign advertising. This new definition is designed to restrict the use of corporate and labor union money to pay for campaign advertising.
As this history demonstrates, BCRA was not a wild departure by Congress to regulate activities that it had previously not regulated; rather, BCRA merely reinstated the FECA limits on contributions to political parties that had been destroyed by the flood of unregulated soft money over the prior decade and restored the nearly century-old ban on corporate money (established in the Tillman Act of 1907) and the half-century-old limits on union treasury expenditures in federal elections (established in the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947).
