JACKSON - Mississippi in 2000 couldn't stop the nation's most powerful business lobby from running roughshod over the state campaign finance disclosure law. But now it may have gotten help from a surprise source: the U.S. Supreme Court.
Namely, the Supreme Court's recent monumental 5-4 decision upholding the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, the first major overhaul of restrictions on political campaign spending enacted in 30 years.
Even though McCain-Feingold applies to the election of federal officeholders rather than state candidates, the outcome of the case was keenly watched by state election authorities in Mississippi in hopes of strengthening the state's hand in enforcing its own 1996 campaign finance law.
Chiefly curbing the phenomenal flow of "soft money" into national political parties, the massive 300-page-plus court decision contains one other major premise. It rejects the argument that free speech under the First Amendment gives interest groups license to raise and spend campaign money without regulation.
Free speech was what the U.S. Chamber of Commerce used to beat down this state's legal move three years ago seeking to make the giant Washington-based lobby disclose the source of $1 million it spent on state Supreme Court races.
Secretary of State Eric Clark and Attorney General Mike Moore challenged the Chamber to come clean on where the funds came from and how they were spent to launch an unprecedented TV advertising blitz and mailings a month before the November 2000 judicial elections.
The Chamber claimed its incursion into Mississippi was merely to educate voters and that its TV spots were "issue ads" that did not expressly advocate voting for any particular candidate. Thus, the Chamber contended, the ads were protected by the First Amendment and immune to the state's campaign reporting law.
Jackson-based U.S. District Judge Henry Wingate, however, held that the Chamber ads were actually "thinly veiled exhortations" to vote for certain candidates and were not about issues. He ruled against the Chamber and supported the state's effort to require the Chamber to comply with state disclosure law.
But a battery of Chamber lawyers went to the 5th Circuit Court and won a reversal of the Wingate order. The Supreme Court later allowed the appeals ruling to stand. However, this was before the court ruled on McCain-Feingold.
In light of the new Supreme Court decision, some legal watchdog authorities such as the Brennan Center at New York University say that appeals courts around the country will now have to revisit previous rulings knocking down state campaign disclosure laws.
Not unnoticed down here in Mississippi was that the U.S. Chamber was a leading plaintiff seeking to strike down the McCain-Feingold law in the Supreme Court.
Also of note is that Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, one of the dissenters to the ruling, was the judge the Chamber went to in order to initially block the Wingate order. In his dissent, Scalia fulminated that the majority of the Supreme Court rejected the argument that unlimited corporate and advocacy groups' campaign expenditures were free speech.
Still a sore subject with Secretary of State Clark is the U.S. Chamber's masking of its $1 million TV blitz in the 2000 judicial races under the sham of being "issue ads."
Clark said his staff is still analyzing the lengthy U.S. Supreme Court decision, but he said, "it's my hope it will give us a handle on these so-called 'issue ads' which in reality are attack ads."
A keen student of government (he holds a Ph.D. in American history), the scholarly Clark is obviously outraged that the U.S. Chamber, at least up until now, has been able to use this device to circumvent the state's law and refuse to make public the names of contributors for its political campaign spending in Mississippi.
"These attack ads disguised as 'issue ads' are highly offensive to me because they are destructive of the fundamental principles of our government," Clark declared.
"I'm hoping this decision (McCain-Feingold) will give us more ground to stand on to require disclosure of campaign spending by such big non-profit interest organizations as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce," he added.
Help to unmask issue advertising could be on the way in a significant provision of the McCain-Feingold law upheld by the Supreme Court.
It establishes a new category of "electioneering communications" that can be paid for only with registered "hard" money. Advertising falls into this category if it refers in any way to a specific candidate and is broadcast within 30 days of a primary or 60 days of a general election.
Perhaps this is why the U.S. Chamber, which used unregulated "soft money" for its 2000 Mississippi ads, strongly fought McCain-Feingold before the Supreme Court.
