Political Eye: Big PAC Attacks

You’ve probably heard of John Glenn, because he was an astronaut, and Howard Baker, because he’s Majority Leader. And Bill Bradley because he played basketball, and Harrison Williams because he’s a crook, and Edward Kennedy because he’s a Kennedy. But you’ve probably never heard of Paul Sarbanes.

Paul Sarbanes, like the others mentioned above, is a U.S. Senator. A Democrat from Maryland, to be precise, first elected to the Senate in 1976 after serving several years in the House. The number of years doesn’t really matter, because no one ever heard of him there, either. News photos make him look a little bit like George C. Scott; no one ever accused George C. Scott of looking like Paul Sarbanes (the name is pronounced “SAR-bains”).

The unheralded Mr. Sarbanes, however, has recently gotten more publicity than he ever dreamed of by becoming the Number One target of the National Conservative Political Action Committee, or NCPAC (pronounced “nick-pack”). NCPAC has decided that Sarbanes must be defeated in 1982, and has begun a $400,000 campaign of television advertisements in the state of Maryland to convince voters that Sarbanes isn’t fit to clean cages at the National Zoo, let alone represent them in the U. S. Senate. NCPAC’s major complaint against Sarbanes is that he is the most free-spending liberal in the Senate, consistently voting for taxing and spending increases — a charge substantiated by the spending ratings of Senators and Representatives published by the National Taxpayers Union. NCPAC uses this datum with the subtlety of an ax murderer. One TV ad shows a man preparing his income tax returns, tormented by the knowledge that if it weren’t for Paul Sarbanes, he wouldn’t have to pay as much because, the ad says, “Paul Sarbanes voted to raise your taxes 238 billion dollars.” Another ad shows a purported truckdriver — and not a very bright one, either — grunting into the camera that he’s finally figured out that the key to happiness is the defeat of Paul Sarbanes. It’s not too hard to imagine a third ad, this one featuring George C. Scott as Paul Sarbanes, shooting mules and slapping soldiers around.

I’m not prepared to argue on behalf of Sarbane’s fitness to be a U.S. Senator, or even his fitness to clean cages at the National Zoo, although a point in his favor is that he was one of a tiny group of Senators to vote against the confirmation of Alexander Haig as Secretary of State. To me, the more interesting question is how it came to pass that a group like NCPAC is able to launch an expensive campaign against him a year and a half before the election, before Sarbanes or any other candidates of any party have announced their candidacies.

NCPAC is, of course, a Political Action Committee, one of the few legal forms of political organization allowed by the U.S. government under the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA). Ten years ago there were no PAC’s in the current sense, but the FECA established them to permit groups other than political parties to contribute to campaigns. There are business PAC’s, labor PAC’s, and “ideological” PAC’s — hundreds of PAC’s in all — and NCPAC is the largest, having raised and spent over $7 million in 1980.

NCPAC and a few other “ideological” PAC’s of the conservative persuasion took credit for the defeat of such well-known liberal Senators as George McGovern, John Culver, Birch Bayh, and Frank Church last year. They say they accomplished this by doing what NCPAC is now doing to Paul Sarbanes — spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in each targeted race expressly advocating the defeat of the Senator in question.

NCPAC’s tactics can be charitably described as “hard-ball politics.” In the anti- Church campaign, for example, its TV ads stated flatly that Church had voted in favor of a Congressional pay increase, when in fact he had voted against it. In the anti-Mc- Govern campaign, the ads showed a target of the kind found on shooting ranges superimposed over McGovern’s face. And now, with Sarbanes, it’s telling Maryland voters that their Senator has raised their taxes $238 billion all by himself. It’s arguable whether NCPAC actually deserves full credit or blame for defeating their targeted gang of four in 1980, and it’s equally questionable whether the early campaign against Sarbanes won’t backfire by giving him visibility and issues he wouldn’t otherwise have had. But it’s certainly true that NCPAC and other conservative PAC’s have had some effect, if none other than scaring the hell out of liberal members of the Senate.

The irony here is that most of the Senators and Representatives who are now the victims of “Big PAC Attacks” were responsible for creating the very legislation — the FECA—which has allowed the PAC’s to become powerful. They are, in a phrase, hoist with their own petard.

“Hoist with one’s own petard” literally means “blown up with one’s own bomb.” A petard is a small explosive device, like a grenade.

That faulty Congressional bomb known as the Federal Election Campaign Act became law ostensibly to limit the influence of rich corporations, rich unions, and rich individuals on the political process. Democrats liked it because it prohibited corporations from contributing directly to Republicans. Republicans liked it because it prohibited wealthy liberals like Stewart Mott and Max Palev-sky from contributing hundreds of thousands of dollars to Democrats. Both Republicans and Democrats liked it because it made the political system nice and neat and orderly, freezing the two major parties into a position of perpetual dominance, and, best yet, permitting the presidential candidates of these two parties to raid the U.S. Treasury for $20 million apiece, to be adjusted for inflation.

The FECA also mandated disclosing names, addresses and occupations of contributors, a complex procedure of federal matching payments for major party candidates in presidential primaries, a required structure for PAC’s, and prohibition of individual contributions to candidates in excess of $1,000 — not adjusted for inflation.

In 1975, a broad coalition of liberals, conservatives, and libertarians challenged the constitutionality of the FECA, principally on First Amendment grounds, claiming that its requirements and prohibitions denied or inhibited freedom of speech and association. The case, Buckley v. Valeo, went all the way to the Supreme Court, which upheld most aspects of the FECA while extending freedom beyond FECA restrictions in two areas. One permitted candidates themselves to spend unlimited amounts of their own money. The other allowed individuals or PAC’s to make unlimited independent expenditures to advocate the election or defeat of a particular candidate, so long as the expenditures were in no way coordinated with a candidate’s campaign. Groups like Common Cause now refer to these extensions of freedom as “loopholes,” in the same way, presumably, that governments which practice censorship create “loopholes” when they allow certain newspapers to publish.

It’s the independent expenditure loophole which has allowed NCPAC to take off after its liberal targets, and would just as easily permit liberal PAC’s to blast away at conservative candidates. They may spend unlimited amounts of money at their own discretion to advocate the defeat of certain candidates so long as there is no apparent coordination with any other candidate’s campaign.

Without the maze of rules and regulations in the FECA affecting other aspects of campaigns which shut off other channels of political expression, groups like NCPAC would be far less influential. Under the present law, PAC’s are the only available alternative for anyone who wants to make a sizeable contribution to a candidate’s campaign. But if anyone could contribute any amount directly to a candidate, who would need NCPAC?

Predictably, liberal victims of conservative PAC’s are muttering that these things shouldn’t be allowed to happen and they’d better close up that loophole—the same mutterings we’d hear from conservatives if liberal PAC’s were clobbering them. They’re going out of their way to evade the fact that it was their own damn law in the first place that made it possible for PAC’s to become powerful. Hoist with their own petard.

The problem with the FECA isn’t the loopholes, it’s the loops—the twists and turns of regulatory machination which preserves and fossilizes the political system and systematically abridges the First Amendment for rich and poor alike. The loopholes shouldn’t be closed, but rather widened all the way out, past the edges of the FECA. Then perhaps Senators like Paul Sarbanes can gain fame or oblivion through the actions of free individuals exercising their full rights of political expression, rather than through the activities of artificial structures created and sanctioned by the State. ▪

Chris Hocker is the publisher of LR. His “Political Eye” column appears monthly.