Republican campaign finance reform zealots like Senator John McCain and Congressman Chris Shays promised a cleaner election process as they successfully lobbied for passage of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (BCRA).
What they have helped create instead is a one-sided system that threatens their own incumbent president’s chances of re-election and undermines key social and cultural issues critically important to their party’s religious base.
It should not be surprising that BCRA significantly aids John Kerry and left-wing causes and severely threatens President George W. Bush and conservative issues like life and marriage. The “bipartisan” coalition pushing these election reforms back in 2001 and 2002 consisted primarily of liberal Republicans like McCain in the Senate and Shays in the House along with a plethora of left-wing elected officials, foundations, think-tanks and extraordinary wealthy individuals.
Prior to passage of BCRA, the American Conservative Union (ACU) released a report, “Who’s Buying Campaign Finance Reform,” which concluded that “the campaign finance reform ‘campaign’ is controlled and financed by liberal foundations and wealthy donors to the Democratic Party and Democratic candidates, with a decidedly liberal public policy agenda on substantive issues.” The report continued that there “is a liberal agenda which the reformers think would be more easily accomplished if they could just ‘lower the pitcher’s mound’ — rewrite the rules of engagement for politics and politicians in order to accomplish their substantive, philosophical objectives.”
Ironically, these “reformers” dumped more than $73 million mostly at the Federal level, according to the ACU report, to supposedly lobby to remove the influence of money from politics. The report identifies a vast web of individual donors and “core group of liberal foundations who also finance other ultra-liberal organizations and causes, such as: abortion rights, anti-business/anti-corporate environmentalism, gay and lesbian rights, drug legalization, and gun control, among others.”
Topping the list of wealthy individual “reformers” is the infamous George Soros, who shelled out $4.7 million of his own money for the campaign finance reform movement from 1997 to March 2001, according to the ACU report. Soros is “chairman of Soros Fund Management LLC, the world's biggest hedge-fund group,” according to a Bloomberg article last year and has a net worth of $7 billion according to Forbes.
He is also founder of the Open Society Institute (OSI), which “is a private operating and grantmaking foundation…that serves as the hub of the Soros foundations network, a group of autonomous foundations and organizations in more than 50 countries,” according to their website.
Rachel Ehrenfeld, author of “Funding Evil,” quoted in Insight Magazine last year, said “Soros uses his philanthropy to change — or, more accurately, deconstruct — the moral values and attitudes of the Western world, and particularly of the American people.” She pointed out that he spent millions in the 1990s to legalize illegal drugs and put up $15 million of start-up money for Project Death in America, “a grant-making organization to promote euthanasia and physician-assisted suicides.”
Adds Richard Poe in a May NewsMax cover story, Soros’ philanthropic efforts total nearly $5 billion, which continue to undermine “traditional Western values. His giving has provided funding of abortion rights, atheism, drug legalization, sex education, euthanasia, feminism, gun control, globalization, mass immigration, gay marriage and other radical experiments in social engineering.”
In an interview with the BBC last September, Soros called for “a regime change in the United States.” He added in a New York Times story in May, “I have come to the conclusion that the greatest contribution I can make to the values that I hold would be to contribute to the defeat of George W. Bush in 2004.” According to the Times, Soros has committed $15.8 million of his own money to anti-Bush groups and will give more if necessary to achieve his objective.
Poe adds that for Soros, the “2004 election is not about Iraq, nor about any other specific policy of President Bush. In November, Americans will choose sides in a mighty culture war, a contest pitting globalist elites against heartland Americans who love their country and traditions.”
And how are Soros and his like-minded friends able to exert so much influence over the American campaign finance system with its new reforms that were aimed at eliminating millions of dollars of unregulated political contributions? The short answer is BCRA, which created a huge loophole enabling vast networks of “527” groups to emerge as political powerhouses.
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, “527 groups are tax-exempt organizations that engage in political activities, often through unlimited soft money contributions.” Continues the Center, most of these “are advocacy groups trying to influence federal elections through voter mobilization efforts and so-called issue ads that tout or criticize a candidate's record.”
Poe adds that 527s are no more than “front groups designed to circumvent the McCain-Feingold ban on ‘soft money’ contributions to political parties. The Federal Election Commission places no limits on donations to the shadowy 527s and requires no disclosure of the donors and the amounts they have given.”
An unprecedented amount has already been raised by 527 groups, with the vast majority of it going to left-wing fringe groups from people like Soros and other wealthy liberals. According to a June 28 CNSNews.com article, “Only one of the top 25 donors to political 527 groups has given to a conservative organization, shedding further light on the huge disparity between Democrats and Republicans in this new fund-raising area.” The June article points out that liberals had a 10-1 advantage — nearly $80 million to $8 million — in 527 fundraising, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
The Center’s latest data shows that left-wing Democratic groups are continuing on this 10-1 pace. The top two 527 industry categories are Democratic/Liberal, which raised $131.2 million and Misc. Unions, which raised nearly $26 million for a combined $157.1 million. This does not even count other liberal industries lower down the list like environmentalists and pro-abortion groups. Republican/ Conservative 527’s were in third place with only $16.4 million raised.
In terms of individual donors, Peter Lewis, who according to last fall’s Bloomberg article owns $1.4 billion in Progressive’s shares, tops the list with over $14 million in 527 donations. He joined George Soros, according to Bloomberg, to form a “new political organization, America Coming Together. The group's aim: mobilize people to vote against the president by raising $75 million — more money than any political committee has assembled for a campaign, aside from the Democratic and Republican national organizations themselves.” In addition to contributing nearly $3 million to America Coming Together, Lewis also contributed to other left-wing groups like MoveOn.Org and the Marijuana Policy Project.
Soros is the second highest 527 contributor at $12.6 million, which includes contributions to America Coming Together and MoveOn.org. He also gave $4.55 million to the Joint Victory Campaign, a group opposed to the “Bush Republican” agenda, which they claim has unleashed “a steady stream of new policies to turn back the clock on economic progress, security at home and abroad, civil rights, reproductive freedom, the environment, civil liberties and much more,” according to their website.
Campaign experts like Kay J. Maxwell, president of the League of Women Voters, have petitioned the FEC to close the loophole for 527s. In a letter sent last April to the FEC, she said, “The League of Women Voters strongly urges the Federal Election Commission to limit Section 527 organizations from receiving and expending ‘soft money,’ the unregulated electoral monies from corporations, unions and wealthy individuals.”
No one expects the FEC to do anything in time for the fall elections and even if it did, it’s too late anyway. In an election that some experts predict could be as close as the 2000 presidential race, left-wing extremists spending hundreds of millions of unregulated dollars on television ads and ground troops aimed at turning out their voters could mean the difference for President George W. Bush's re-election. It could also tip control of the U.S. Senate from Republican to Democrat.
This would be a tremendous blow to pro-life legislation, traditional marriage protection, and bans on embryonic stem-cell research as well as push the U.S. Supreme Court significantly left for years to come. It would also step up the attacks on America’s religious institutions and ideals.
St. Thomas More, pray for us.
© Copyright 2004 Catholic Exchange
Craig Richardson is the founder of the recently launched Catholic Action Network, an organization committed to calling Catholics to authentic and faithful citizenship particularly on issues of life and family. He has twenty years of national, state, and local political experience and is currently the principal of Richardson Consulting, LLC, a political fundraising firm based in Washington, D.C. He was confirmed as a Roman Catholic in 2000 and in the fall of that year he enrolled in a master’s of arts program in Catholic Systematic and Moral Theology at the Notre Dame Graduate School affiliated with Christendom College. He is married to Elizabeth Richardson and is the father of two boys.
