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Campaign Financing
Private financing of political campaigns has always raised questions about potential corruption and influence buying in the halls of Congress and the White House as well as in state legislatures. If a person or an organization gives a candidate for public office one hundred dollars in campaign contributions and another gives the same candidate one million dollars, whose telephone call does the politician take first once in office? Bribery and outright buying of votes are illegal under federal and state election laws, but spending enormous sums of money to persuade voters to vote for a particular political party or candidate is not only acceptable, it is just about the only way to get elected today.
The media's importance in modern life has driven up the cost of running for office, and campaigns last much longer, seemingly never ending. They now begin shortly after an election and extend the length of the winner's term of office—two, four, or six years in the case of candidates for the House of Representatives, the presidency (see President), and the Senate, respectively. Vehicles for contributing money to an American campaign have also become more complex. This is partly the result of the decreasing role of the two-party system and the rise of numerous political-interest groups: from consumers and environmentalists to Christian fundamentalists, pro-choice and pro-life supporters, and soccer moms. Parliamentary systems do not have these problems. Their elections are usually conducted in a relatively short period of time: they are held after a vote expressing a loss of confidence in the current government or after a fairly long period of time, generally from four to five years, barring any no-confidence votes in the parliament.
Campaign Finance Reform
On the matter of campaign financing and even political parties, the Constitution is silent. In the early days of the republic, there was little public concern about campaign financing. The administration of Andrew Jackson (1767–1845), who was elected president in 1828, marked the beginning of the political patronage system—the practice of filling government jobs with party loyalists, regardless of their qualifications. By the end of the 1830s political parties were forcing government workers to contribute a percentage of their pay to the party in power. An 1839 proposal to prohibit campaign contributions from federal officials died in the Senate. In 1867, however, Congress did prohibit the solicitation of campaign contributions from government employees at navy yards.
The Civil Service Act (1883) curbed the spoils system by requiring competitive examinations for most federal government jobs, as well as prohibiting solicitation of political contributions from these employees. Investigations into large contributions to the campaign of President Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) led him to call for campaign finance reform, declaring, “There is no enemy of free government more dangerous and none so insidious as the corruption of the electorate. …”
In 1906 Roosevelt asked Congress to forbid “[a]ll contributions by corporations to any political committee or for any political purpose. …” Congress responded with the Tillman Act (1907), which, among other things, prohibited nationally chartered banks and corporations from making “a money contribution with any election to any political office” and made it illegal for corporations to contribute to elections of the president or members of Congress. The law, still in effect today, has been weakened by creative fund-raising practices, including the use of “soft money” earmarked for general political activities, such as voter registration and voter turnout drives, rather than specific candidates.
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