Do We Need An Election Commission?

George Will is one of the most infuriating columnists I see on a regular basis. He gets especially annoying when he goes off on the topic of campaign finance reform, which he sees as a conspiracy against freedom of speech. He touches on that issue only tangentially in the column that appeared in today's Albany Times Union. In this piece, his beef seems to be with the existence of the Federal Election Commission.

"Most of the rules [the FEC makes and enforces] are constitutionally dubious abridgements of freedom of speech and association," Will writes, "so sensible citizens should rejoice about the disarray of the FEC."

The disarray he refers to is a difficulty in filling one of the six seats on the commission. Those seats are shared equally by Republicans and Democrats. Regardless of what Will thinks, there's something wrong right there. It looks fair only if you assume that the Republican and Democratic parties are permanent features of the political landscape, or somehow embedded in the foundation of our republic. If you see them as interested parties in perfect position to abuse their power to perpetuate their privileged standing, then disarray (even General Disarray) might be welcome in such a setting.

Will would like to be rid of the FEC because once it was gone, he supposes, millionaires would have complete freedom to influence public opinion. He believes that the wealthy are the only feasible challengers to the political establishment, and views the campaign finance reform movement as an effort by incumbents of both parties to suppress "grass root" challenges. He sneers at the notion that money corrupts politics, without addressing the real complaint against money's influence.

As long as Will can point out cases where the candidate who spent the most money failed to win an election, he presumes that money has no real influence over politics except as a medium of free speech. He fails (or refuses) to appreciate that money's corrupting effect isn't as an unfair advantage, like steroids in baseball, but as a false standard of viability. When political campaigns are conducted chiefly via paid TV commercials, a class system evolves that separates those who can afford saturation campaigns from those who can't. Those with little or no TV exposure are unlikely to be seen (no pun intended) as serious candidates, regardless of the merit of their ideas. If you assume that any good idea will attract money, none of this will bother you, but then you're assuming that money is an objective unit of measuring political merit, as if it were part of the metric system. Money is no such thing, and once you concede that point, you should recognize a need to regulate money's influence in politics.

George Will, however, tells us, "Government regulation of politics, as of most things, is perverse." Translated from conservative-ese, that means "The people's regulation of politics is perverse." What's really perverse, of course, is thinking such a thing. We might agree with Will that the existing FEC, which dates back only to 1975, can be dispensed with, but to think we can now do without some sort of regulatory body is self-servingly naive. What we should want is a commission dedicated to vigilance against the influences of wealth and partisanship alike, and we should begin to think about how we can bring that about.