Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (13 page)

The parties also lost some of their coherence and internal discipline. Especially after 1968, primaries proliferated, thereby undermining the power that party leaders had once enjoyed over nominations. No longer relying heavily on party endorsements or party funding, candidates for major offices—the presidency, the Senate, and governorships—tended increasingly to depend ever more heavily on new cadres of professionals, notably managers and pollsters who specialized in image-making and political maneuvering, and to reach voters through the expensive media of radio and television. Grass-roots efforts to register and mobilize voters declined. A more candidate-centered, television-driven, and entrepreneurial politics was taking center stage.
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So was a politics of bigger and bigger money. This had incensed many Americans in the 1972 election, when Nixon had raised large sums from lobbies and pressure groups doing business with the government. Determined to curb these practices, good-government groups such as Common Cause pressured Congress to act, and in late 1974 the lawmakers approved amendments to existing campaign finance law concerned with federal elections. These set up a Federal Election Commission (FEC) as a watchdog group, established a system of public financing for presidential elections, and placed limits on the size of campaign contributions that individuals and political committees might give to presidential candidates who wished to qualify for federal funds in primaries and general elections.
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Candidates for president and vice president were barred from spending more than $50,000 of their own money on campaigns. Federal officeseekers were required to disclose virtually all their campaign contributions. Ford reluctantly signed the bill in mid-October.

Almost immediately, however, opponents of the law challenged its constitutionality, and in January 1976 the Supreme Court partly agreed with them. In a complicated, controversial ruling of 137 pages, the Court upheld most of the law’s public financing provisions, its requirements for disclosure of contributions, and its caps on contributions but ruled that the placing of limits on how much of their own money candidates might spend (except candidates who accepted federal matching funds under the public financing provisions) violated First Amendment rights of free expression. The decision upset advocates, who charged that money was corrupting American politics. Justice Marshall, dissenting, observed dryly, “It would appear . . . that the candidate with a substantial personal fortune at his disposal is off to a significant ‘head start.’”
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As later events were to demonstrate, Marshall and others had a point: Rich people continued to enjoy great advantages in politics. In 1992, H. Ross Perot, a billionaire businessman, rejected federal funding and used his personal fortune to run for the presidency. John Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee in 2004, had millions in family money at his disposal and (like his opponent, President George W. Bush) dispensed with public financing during the primary season. Thanks to the Court’s decision, which remained the law of the land, it continued to be an unconstitutional infringement of free expression to limit what presidential candidates might spend of their own money.

Curbing excesses in campaign spending was but one of many efforts that reformers undertook in the somewhat frenzied political aftermath of American involvement in Vietnam and of the Watergate scandal. Indeed, House liberals had already been scoring minor victories during the early 1970s in their struggles to advance openness in the conduct of House business and to weaken the power of autocratic committee chairmen. In 1973, Congress passed the War Powers Act, which attempted to curtail the president’s authority to send troops into battle without congressional authorization. A Budget and Impoundment Control Act established the Congressional Budget Office to provide independent advice on government finance, created two budget committees on the Hill, and restricted the imperiousness of presidents who (as Nixon had done earlier) impounded congressional appropriations. The Freedom of Information Act, passed over Ford’s veto in September 1974, offered citizens, scholars, and journalists greater access to federal documents.

Congressional reformers, buoyed by the outcome of the post-Watergate elections of 1974, became especially boisterous thereafter. A huge influx of freshmen Democrats—seventy-five in all—arrived on Capitol Hill in January 1975. In the Senate the newcomers included such figures as Gary Hart of Colorado, an avid environmentalist who had managed George McGovern’s presidential bid in 1972, and Patrick Leahy, the first Democrat from Vermont to be sent to the Senate since the 1850s. Hart was then thrity-six years old; Leahy, thirty-five. Freshman House Democrats in 1975 included Tom Harkin, a legal aid lawyer from Iowa; Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts, who had served as a Peace Corps volunteer; and Harold Ford, the first black congressman ever to hail from Tennessee. In the late 1970s, and later, the Democratic House retained a strongly liberal cast.

Many of the “Watergate babies” of 1975 represented a new breed of national legislator. Products of the civil rights revolution and of protests against the war in Vietnam, they were highly rights-conscious, reform-minded, and comfortable with the medium of television. Liberal staffers on the Hill, having increased in number and assertiveness during the 1960s, egged them on. As one such staffer explained,

I’ll tell you the frame of mind we all had. We had lived for three years under Richard Nixon, and under being told no, no, no, no, no by an executive branch which was totally unresponsive to the programs of the sixties. . . . We were angry at the Nixon administration. . . . It was an important thread running through everything that was done at those times. It was: I’ll get those sons of bitches, they don’t want to show any positive inclination toward doing things at all, then we’re going to really stick it to them. And in the process, help people.
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Especially in 1975–76, when the Ford administration was finding its way, Congress seized the initiative. Perceiving the states as unimaginative and conservative, and states’ rights ideology as anachronistic, members of Congress took the lead in passing legislation, such as aid to handicapped children and bilingual education, that enhanced federal power via-à-vis the states. Congress, they believed, must carefully define the ways in which federal money would be spent, set national standards, and closely scrutinize the activities of state officials who were charged with administering federal laws. The vigor of congressional activists, most of them liberals, in the midand late 1970s helped to ensure that a great many reforms of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society were retained and that new entitlements were passed.

Liberal Democrats were especially feisty in the House. In January 1975, they abolished the House Un-American Activities Committee, long the bane of civil libertarians. Because most of the new Democrats had been elected in traditionally Republican districts, they felt the need to display their independence from party leaders. They showed notably little deference to committee chairmen, many of them conservative southerners, who had traditionally ruled on the Hill. Taking charge, they succeeded in revamping rules that had previously awarded chairmanships to the most senior members. Henceforth, the chairs were to be chosen by secret ballot of the Democratic caucus at the start of congressional sessions—a change that led to the removal of three unregenerate committee chairs in 1975.
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In March 1975, reformers in the Senate also scored a victory, changing the rules governing filibusters: Only 60 percent of the Senate, not two-thirds as in the past, would be needed to cut off debate. A common denominator of these reforms, in the House as well as in the Senate, was the sense that concentration of authority was dangerous. The reformers sought to disperse power, both away from the executive branch and from the congressional barons who had dominated Capitol Hill.
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Three years later, in 1978, reformers embedded a final stone in the edifice that they were erecting against abuse of power: the Ethics in Government Act. The measure toughened restrictions on lobbying by former government officials and tightened financial disclosure regulations. It included a little-discussed provision that authorized the attorney general to take steps for the appointment of special prosecutors who would have the power to investigate criminal allegations against high-ranking White House officials. A Carter administration spokesman, pressing for the bill, explained that its purpose “was to remove all sense of politics and therefore restore confidence in government.”
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None of these laws accomplished as much as reformers had expected, and most of them had unintended consequences. Ford and his successors, arguing that the War Powers Act was unconstitutional, refused to abide by it, and presidents remained preeminent in foreign affairs. Though changes in congressional procedures helped topple a few titans on Capitol Hill, their most significant effort was to increase the number of committees and the resources and power of subcommittee chairs, whose numbers, both in the House and the Senate, escalated in the next few years. In 1975, the House had 154 committees and subcommittees. The number of congressional staffers exploded thereafter—from a total of 10,739 in 1970 to approximately 20,000 by 1990.
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With power decentralized, “subcommittee government” often took over on the Hill, and Congress became if anything more susceptible than in the past to the influence of interest groups that formed political alliances with long-term staffers and subcommittee chairmen. The provision for independent prosecutors, developing a political strength that no one had anticipated at the time, became an often used and sometimes abused partisan weapon over the years. Before Congress allowed the law to lapse in 1999, twenty such special prosecutors had been appointed, including Kenneth Starr, whose probes over the course of four and a half years led to the impeachment of President Bill Clinton in 1998. These twenty prosecutions cost taxpayers a total of $149 million.

The reforms did not stem a dominant trend of post-Watergate political life: expansion in the number and power of interest groups.
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Given the growth of government—and of bureaucratic organizations of all sorts in the modern world—this was an understandable development. Moreover, some of the new groups, such as Common Cause and the Children’s Defense Fund, sprang from the egalitarian social movements of the 1960s. Then and later, these public interest groups supported a range of liberal causes, including environmentalism, social welfare, civil rights, and good government. Some contemporary pundits believed that the rise of groups such as these was a sign that political power in the United States was becoming more democratic.

Like most other lobbies in these and subsequent years, the majority of these public interest groups were not cross-class in membership; they did not have very deep local roots; and they rarely convened large-scale, face-to-face meetings where people could talk things through. Instead, these groups tended to operate from the top down, relying heavily for support on wealthy contributors and on tax-exempt foundations, which proliferated in these years. They became adept at gaining publicity in the media, purchasing mailing lists, and collecting checks from distant members. Their well-educated, upper-middle-class, and professional managers fashioned sturdy careers as activists and lobbyists who roamed the halls of Congress, state legislatures, and regulatory agencies.
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Unanticipated consequences of the new campaign finance reforms further advanced this rise of interest groups, especially private groups.
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What well-meaning reformers did not fully understand was that candidates for political office would willy-nilly find financial support. As House Speaker Thomas “Tip” O’Neill of Massachusetts noted, money was “the mother’s milk of politics.” Like water, it always flowed down into the coffers of parties and political candidates. Officeseekers, barred from accepting sizeable contributions from individuals, turned to political action committees, or PACs, which were permitted to receive larger sums. PACs generally represented private interest groups. In 1974, when the campaign reforms were passed, the most important of these PACs were linked to the AFLCIO—which is one reason why many Democrats, who had ties with organized labor, had supported the changes and many Republicans had resisted them. (Behind most “reforms” are partisan interests.) After 1974, corporate leaders retaliated by forming a host of new PACs, most of which tended to favor Republican candidates. Many Democrats later rued the day that the campaign finance law had passed in 1974.

Advocates of campaign finance reform underestimated the ingenuity that candidates soon demonstrated in raising so-called soft money. This was money that individuals, corporations, labor unions, and other interest groups were allowed to give in unlimited amounts to state and local party committees under more lenient state laws. When the FEC ruled in 1978 that soft money could legally be redirected to party leaders of federal campaigns, it opened up another large loophole, through which presidential candidates began to race in the late 1980s. Thereafter the growth in soft money, reaching some $500 million by 2002, excited all manner of outrage among reformers. So did the upward surge in general of contributions to campaigns, which relied ever more heavily on paid professional advisers and pollsters, expensive computer technology, and highly expensive radio and television advertising. Democrats and Republicans thereafter engaged in periodic efforts to curb the evils, as reformers saw them, of Big Money in politics. But incumbents, coping under existing laws, did not fight hard for reforms that might level the playing field for challengers, and when apparently substantial reforms were enacted in 2002, they, too, failed to curb the cost of campaigns.
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