US Senate must end stalemate on campaign-finance reform

Add needed campaign-finance reform legislation to the laundry list of worthy measures torpedoed by the filibuster-happy U.S. Senate of 2010.

Shortly before recessing this week until mid-September, the Grand Old Party in the upper chamber of Congress again refused to stop the yakking and start some acting by sending the worthy Disclose (Democracy is Strengthened by Casting Light on Spending in Elections) Act to a full floor vote.

This measure — just like 349 other bills approved by the House this session — will likely languish before dying this fall in the final days of the second session of the 111th Congress.

That would be unfortunate for fair-minded, democracy-loving Americans.

As President Barack Obama put it, opposition to Disclose “is nothing less than a vote to allow a corporate and special-interest takeover of our elections.”

What’s more, expeditious passage of the bill would serve to rein in a zealously activist Supreme Court that once again strayed far from its constitutional domain as an interpreter of law and trespassed into the legislative arena as a maker of law.

High court ruling

The Disclose Act, sponsored chiefly by U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., was introduced this spring in reaction to the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Citizens United vs. the Federal Elections Commission early this year.

In a contentious 5-4 vote, the justices gave well-heeled corporations the right to donate unlimited millions of dollars toward political campaigning, thereby nullifying essential provisions of federal campaign-finance law enacted over the past three decades and diluting the impact of the majority of comparatively poor Americans and groups in getting messages out to the masses during campaigns.

Specifically, Disclose seeks to increase transparency of corporate and special-interest money in national political campaigns. It would require organizations involved in political campaigning to disclose the identity of the large donors, and to reveal their identities in any political ads they fund. It would also bar foreign corporations, government contractors and government contractors from making political expenditures. The bill would exempt all non-profit organizations with more than 500,000 members from having to disclose their donor lists.

Those exemptions have unleashed the wrath of Republicans. Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, lamented, “It is clear this bill is written to benefit special interests because it exempts unions, the National Rifle Association, the Sierra Club and others from its requirements,” he said.

Bipartisan amendment?

Voinovich’s concern may be overstated, but if removing the exemptions can advance the other meritorious aspects of the bill, we would encourage him — and urge his constituents to encourage him — to work with Democrats on crafting just such an amendment to the bill.

Although it is unlikely such a compromise and passage of Disclose would come in time to have any direct impact on this fall’s critical midterm elections, passage by late this year would go a long way toward ensuring long-term openness and fairness in American elections, the very foundation of our democracy.