|
 t
appears that the Enron meltdown may be the proximate cause bringing
before the House the Shays-Meehan campaign-finance-reform bill.
For easily two weeks now, the press has reported the enormous sums
supposedly lavished upon official Washington by the Houston-based
company. The coverage of this issue has so confused the facts and
present rules that it is nearly useless.
For starters,
Enron doesn't contribute to federal candidates — not Bush,
not the Texas delegation, not committee chairmen, not anyone. Enron's
activity in federal elections is governed by a number of rules,
the primary one being that corporations may not make direct contributions
to federal candidates or federal PACs. It can however establish
a PAC through which executive and administrative employees can pool
their contributions (up to $5,000 a year). This PAC can then contribute
up to $5,000 per candidate per election to candidates. If individual
employees at the company make contributions (to candidates or to
the PAC), they must be from their own money, and cannot be a result
of coercion from the company. Individuals may contribute up to the
princely sum of $1,000 per election per candidate, and up to $25,000
in an election cycle. Enron can also contribute so-called corporate
"soft money" to political parties for nonfederal purposes.
The media's
coverage of Enron's campaign activity typically describes how the
company spread its money to Republicans and Democrats alike, bathing
the Capitol in green to the tune of millions of dollars. Nowhere
is the accurate, and more complicated, picture revealed — that
but a portion of this money is truly "Enron" money. A
significant share of the total bandied about is money that individuals
who happen to work at Enron contribute out of their own pockets,
for their own reasons. Another portion is Enron PAC money, which
— again — is from the pockets of Enron executives and
administrative personnel.
How is it that
individual donors' contributions get picked up into the Enron total?
Whenever a person contributes to a federal campaign, the campaign
is required to ask the person for his or her occupation and employer.
In the analysis of Enron, anyone with "Enron" as an employer
has been swept into the total attributed to the company. No one
is suggesting that Enron orchestrated these contributions, or can
explain why this individual personal contribution activity should
be amassed in this way. But, this method does inflate the Enron
total, and make for more dramatic reporting.
To be sure,
Enron has been a soft-money player with its own money. That's no
secret either — soft-money contributions are fully disclosed
by the national parties, and in some rare instances, such as in
California, these contributions may trigger state reporting by the
donor. Disclosure is supposed to shine sunlight on the system, requiring
recipients to defend their fundraising if things turn ugly. In fact,
some party committees have chosen to contribute their Enron dollars
to Enron-employee charities in response to the scrutiny. Before
becoming too excited about requiring recipients to return the other
"Enron" money, one should consider that many of the Enron
employees with the extra cash to contribute to candidates may also
be the folks who bailed out as the company was tumbling southward.
Letting Congressman Whatshisname keep his $1,000 from an Enron executive
may be a fairer result than returning that money to the donor.
Sloppy coverage
of the Enron-campaign angle poses several problems. First, individual
donors exercising their First Amendment rights to contribute may
be swept into a press feeding frenzy for no good reason. We should
encourage individuals to exercise civic responsibility through the
political process, not teach them why they should stay away from
the process. True, most of the people I know would prefer to put
their extra dollars with Charles Schwab rather than Charles Schumer,
but a healthy privately financed political system requires the participation
of individual donors. Second, the media's oversights contribute
to the public's misunderstanding of the existing campaign-finance
system, and build unnecessary cynicism for politics. Third, the
hysteria also provides an excuse for the Reformistas to gin up their
legislative agenda, by using existing disclosure requirements to
make a case for new restrictions. So, it remains up to citizens
to educate themselves, rather than rely on television's talking
heads or the paper's editors to get them the story.
|
