Inside the Campaign Finance Battle: Court Testimony on the New Reforms

Editors' Note: An Explanation of This Volume

An Explanation of This Volume The testimony submitted by some of the country’s most knowledgeable political scientists and most experienced politicians in the legal challenge to the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (McCain-Feingold/ShaysMeehan ) constitutes an invaluable body of knowledge about the complexities of campaign finance and the role of money in our political system . Unfortunately, only the relatively few lawyers, political scientists, and other practitioners actually involved in the litigation have seen most of this writing until now. Our goal with this volume is to make testimony in this historic case available to a more general readership. We three editors have all been deeply involved in researching and analyzing campaign finance issues for a number of years and have been supporters of reform efforts and defenders of the new law. However, we have taken care to ensure that this book selects the best of the material submitted by both sides of the debate: our credibility and success as editors depend on our ability to give the reader a fair, but concise, summary of the political finance questions. Some of those excerpted here are well known to students of political science or observers of national politics, others are less visible political practitioners with particular inside knowledge they have shared in this court case. What these witnesses all have in common is a willingness to provide the court with sound empirical and practical information on political finance and the possible effects of the new legislation. For reasons of length, we excerpted only portions of the fact and expert witness reports included in this volume. We lightly edited each excerpt for consistency of citation form, grammar, and punctuation. All court filings ix Editors’ Note 00 1583-8 frontmat 3/26/03 1:32 PM Page ix in the McConnell v. FEC lawsuit are available in full on the Campaign Legal Center’s website (www.campaignlegalcenter.org). The institutional affiliations listed for each academic contributor are provided for identification purposes only and in no way reflect any endorsements of or support for the work underlying these reports. Producing this volume from a court record of tens of thousands of pages in only the few months since the record was closed in late 2002 has been an enormous task. The Campaign Legal Center, a Washington-based nonprofit associated with the Campaign and Media Program at the University of Utah, served as the organizing entity for this volume. Its work could not have been accomplished without the heroic efforts of Marianne Viray, managing director of the Campaign Legal Center, who supervised each stage of the production of this book. Mark Glaze and Glen Shor, associate legal counsel of the Legal Center, and Lana Price, associate managing director, also made significant contributions to this work. We are also grateful for the extraordinary efforts of Janet Walker, managing editor at the Brookings Institution Press, editors Vicky Macintyre and Tanjam Jacobson, and Larissa Davis, research/web assistant at Brookings , which made possible the expedited publication schedule necessary to produce this volume in a timely way. Funding for this volume was provided by The Pew Charitable Trusts through the Coalition to Promote Civic Dialogue on Campaign Finance Program at Colby College. The opinions expressed in this book are those of the editors or the original authors and do not necessarily reflect the view of The Pew Charitable Trusts or Colby College. Additional funding for the Campaign Legal Center’s participation in this project was provided by Straight Talk America, Senator John McCain’s former political action committee, which distributed its funds to charities and other organizations in December 2002. Anthony Corrado Thomas Mann Trevor Potter x editors’ note 00 1583-8 frontmat 3/26/03 1:32 PM Page x inside the Campaign Finance Battle 00 1583-8 frontmat 3/26/03 1:32 PM Page xi 00 1583-8 frontmat 3/26/03 1:32 PM Page xii ...