Two distinguished Republicans, former senators Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and Warren Rudman of New Hampshire, have made an appeal to Congress to pass the Disclose Act of 2012. The legislation would require the public identification within 24 hours of any individual or organization that spent $10,000 or more on “campaign-related” advertising or other political “disbursement.”
Rudman and Hagel point out that anonymous individuals, corporations and trade unions already have spent more than $160 million trying to influence the outcome of the presidential election in this election cycle — with nearly four months still to go.
They contrast this total with the $36 million spent in the same period in 2008.
“What alarms us about this situation,” they wrote in an op-ed article in Tuesday’s New York Times, “is that we can’t find out who is behind these blatant attempts to control the outcome of our elections. We are inundated with extraordinarily negative advertising on television every evening and have no way to know who is paying for it and what their agenda might be. In fact, it’s conceivable that we have created such a glaring loophole in our election process that foreign interests could directly influence the outcome of our elections. And we might not even know it had happened until after the election, if at all.
“This is because unions, corporations, ‘super-PACs’ and other organizations are able to make unlimited independent expenditures on our elections without readily and openly disclosing where the money they are spending is coming from. As a result, we are unable to get the information we need to decide who should represent us and take on our country’s challenges.
“Unlike the unlimited amount of campaign spending, the lack of transparency in campaign spending is something we can fix and fix right now — without opening the door to more scrutiny by the Supreme Court.”
RUDMAN AND HAGEL go ahead to note that the disclosure bill introduced by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat of Rhode Island, was being debated this week in the Senate. It was, however, kept from advancement Monday by a party line vote, which saw every Republican in the Senate — including Sen. John McCain, whose name once was synonymous with campaign reform — voting to protect donor anonymity.
The bill, however, is not dead. It is merely short of the 60 votes it needs for the super-majority the Senate requires of itself to act.
Kansans should let their Republican senators — Pat Roberts and Jerry Moran — know that they favor transparency in campaign finance and ask them to switch their votes to yes.
Hagel and Rudman put the matter succinctly: “ . . . No thinking person can deny that the current situation is unacceptable and intolerable. We urge all senators to engage in a bipartisan effort to enact that critically needed legislation. The Disclose Act of 2012 is a prudent and important first step in restoring some sanity to our democratic process.”
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
