ONCE again, it is campaign-reform season on Capitol Hill. Congressmen are busily crafting a campaign-reform bill with an arcane mixture of regulations, subsidies, spending limits and new taxes—but this time, there is a difference. In 1992 campaign reformers were free to propose measures designed essentially for public relations, secure in the knowledge that the President would veto whatever they produced. But the new President has enthusiastically signaled his intention to sign into law any campaign reform that Congress places before him. This explains the delicate, secret, internal negotiations that Congress has been conducting for months.
The most significant recent congressional reforms—the disclosure of signatures on congressional discharge petitions and the institution of term Emits in 15 states—have not been the result of efforts by the congressional leadership; they have been engineered by rank-and-file congressmen or by activists beyond the Beltway. In fact, the congressional leadership bitterly fought such measures whenever possible: the leadership convinced some supporters of discharge-petition reform to remove their names from the petition in question, and authorized the use of public funds to fight against term Emits in court. The leadership’s goal is obvious: its members wish to entrench themselves by removing any possibility of a fair fight in public view—both between incumbents and challengers and between the majority-party leadership and pro-reform congressmen of both parties.
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