Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act

I'm responsible for Harriet Myers not being on the Supreme Court.

I helped impugn the McCain-Feingold bill.

I helped torpedo the McCain-Kennedy bill.

And look, I was Laura Ingraham's executive producer and then Monica Crowley's right up until even after you showed up in D.C.

Uh, and, you know, uh, uh, one, one example, uh, kind of to tie it back to the, uh, discussion about About Lincoln and about, you know, who gets to say what the Constitution means.

Uh, back when, uh, George W. Bush was president, uh, you may recall, well, you're probably too young to recall, but I recall anyways, uh, you know, when they signed the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law-

Mm-hmm

... uh, and, you know, this was through Congress and, and President Bush signed it and, and very problematic constitutionally, parts of that law.

Right.

You can go back to Mitch McConnell on the floor of the U.S. Senate when they were passing Bikra, the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform Act, accurately saying that the result of this is not going to be to get money out of politics.

It's going to get money out of the parties.

And we really first saw this in 2016 in that you had two candidates of the three largest vote getting candidates in the primaries, two of the three, the parties should have told to go to hell.

No, not really.

I think Citizens United had accelerated some things, but trends were going in this direction ever since the McCain-Feingold reforms back in the 2000s kind of pushed money away from parties and candidates to these interest groups.

So that was the original sin, I think.

But Citizens United did accelerate it.

It has nothing to do with small donors, but, you know, The answer is probably, you know, I'm skeptical whether we're going to change Citizens United.

There are other things we might be able to do, though, to improve the situation.

You mentioned McCain-Feingold, which was a campaign finance reform bill, I guess we're going back in the late 80s, early 90s, which was supposed to solve a lot of these problems.

If we had not done anything, would we be better off with the old system?

And I know everybody really mad about it, but if you think about it, it makes perfect sense, because the case before the court, Citizens United, was whether a group, an anti-Hillary Clinton group, could put a documentary out in the airwaves right before the election about Hillary Clinton.

And the Federal government tried to tell them no under the McCain-Feingold law, the campaign finance law, that that was a campaign expenditure that's regulated.

They couldn't do that.

Went to the Supreme Court where the government got destroyed because the justices asked very salient questions about, they couldn't write a book about the election? That'd be campaign? Well, of course not.

It was a case against...

the McCain-Feingold Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act right near the beginning of the century.

And while we were in district court, there was a special accelerator process where there was a three-judge district court panel set up, and our attorney got five minutes to make a presentation.

His name was Herb Titus.

And when you start talking about banning books before an election, I'm like, okay, you've lost me.

Where I think the Citizens United thing was bad was that I think Citizens United plus campaign finance reform, McCain-Feingold, What it did, I think Mitch McConnell was right.

The problem with it, he predicted on the Senate floor, he said, what this is going to do is it's not going to take money out of politics.

It's going to take the parties out of politics.

So in, in 2002 or 1, uh, John McCain and Russ Feingold, who were senators at the time, got a campaign finance law passed that severely restricted the ability of people to coordinate with political candidates from outside, whether it was independent expenditures or, or, uh, party coordination.

And they passed something called the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act.

I was involved in a plaintiff group that was called Paul v. FEC.

I was the organizing plaintiff.