Hillary Clinton Announces Campaign Finance Overhaul Plan
By AMY CHOZICK and NICHOLAS CONFESSORESEPT. 8, 2015
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Hillary Rodham Clinton spoke at a campaign event in Portsmouth, N.H., on Saturday. This week she announced proposals for campaign finance reform. Credit Ian Thomas Jansen-Lonnquist for The New York Times
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In a plan intended to upend a “political system hijacked by billionaires and special interests,” Hillary Rodham Clinton presented a set of proposals on Tuesday that would curb anonymous political donations and bolster the influence of small donors through a federal matching program, her campaign said.
“Our democracy should be about expanding the franchise, not charging an entrance fee,” Mrs. Clinton said in a statement, reiterating her call to overturn the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling.
The issue of campaign finance reform has galvanized voters on both sides of the political aisle amid a roiling bipartisan debate about what democracy means in an era when “super PACs” can raise and spend billions in support of candidates. And two candidates — Donald J. Trump and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont — have struck a chord by railing against the influence of such groups in politics.
Mrs. Clinton’s multiprong plan includes a push for federal legislation that would require greater public disclosure of political spending, establish a matching system for congressional and presidential candidates and support a Securities and Exchange Commission rule requiring publicly traded companies to disclose political spending to shareholders.
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Graphic: Which Presidential Candidates Are Winning the Money Race
Mr. Sanders has, in his calls for campaign finance reform, rejected money from super PACs and relied on low-dollar online donations. Mr. Trump has accused his Republican rivals of being captive to billionaire donors’ supporting their candidacies.
Other candidates, ranging from the Republican senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, to former Gov. Martin O’Malley of Maryland, a Democrat, have also called for campaign finance reform. One candidate, Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard professor, said on Sunday that he would enter the Democratic race for president on that single issue.
Mrs. Clinton’s plan, announced as polls show a rising threat from Mr. Sanders in New Hampshire, amounts to a broad wish list of different ideas long advocated by critics of big money in politics, none of them elaborated in great detail by Mrs. Clinton’s campaign on Tuesday.
For example, Mrs. Clinton proposed to match contributions by small donors with additional taxpayer funds, which would in theory diminish the influence of big donors by enhancing the collective financial clout of small ones. Her campaign did not offer many specifics for such a system, such as the amount of the match or — more crucially for critics — what such a program might cost.
Mr. Sanders has advocated a more wholesale, and politically difficult, approach, calling for full public financing for federal elections and describing the current system as little more than “legalized bribery.”
Nevertheless, Mrs. Clinton’s announcement was hailed by supporters of tighter financial rules for candidates, who have struggled to make political money a burning campaign issue despite surveys showing widespread disgust with current rules.
“What she has proposed is both good policy and good politics,” said David Donnelly, the president of Every Voice, a Washington group that supports tougher campaign-finance and influence-peddling restrictions. “That’s why Clinton should actively campaign on this platform and push these solutions to the center of the debate in the days, weeks and months to come.”
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Mrs. Clinton’s efforts to address the issue comes even as she works to help Priorities USA Action, the main super PAC supporting her candidacy, raise hundreds of millions of dollars to compete with Republican groups that have far outraised their Democratic counterparts. Last month, Priorities said it had secured $20.5 million in commitments since July.
Republican critics were quick to call Mrs. Clinton’s plan hypocritical.
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“Hillary Clinton stopped making calls to her own super PAC donors long enough to call for an end to super PACs,” said Jeff Bechdel, a spokesman for the conservative super PAC America Rising.
But Democrats say forgoing super PAC money would be tantamount to handing the election to Republicans, erasing any chance to reform the system. To that end, Mrs. Clinton frequently reminds donors that the only way to enact her plan and reform the system is to get a Democrat elected. President Obama used the same argument in his 2012 re-election fight, which relied heavily on the support of Priorities USA Action.
“If it’s been said once, it’s been said a million times: ‘We can’t unilaterally disarm,’” said Christopher Gates, president of the Sunlight Foundation, a nonpartisan group that advocates for open government. But, he added, “If you always have to play by the rules of the current system, how is the system ever going to change?”
All of Mrs. Clinton’s proposals face significant obstacles to becoming a reality.
Mrs. Clinton said she would support new disclosure legislation, seeking to unearth the hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign money that now flows through business trade groups and nonprofits, neither of which have to disclose donors. She also backs a new Securities and Exchange Commission rule requiring publicly traded companies to disclose political activity.
Additionally, she said she would sign an executive order requiring federal contractors to fully disclose all political spending.
But each proposal has run into fierce resistance from Republicans and business groups. Shareholder activists and labor unions have been pushing for the S.E.C. rule for more than two years, with little to show for it. Republicans have filibustered a legislative approach, known as the Disclose Act, offered by Democrats. Congressional Republicans also included a rider in a recent spending bill aimed at stymieing a disclosure rule for federal contractors, something President Obama has signaled in the past that he might issue.
Mrs. Clinton herself is a past master of the current system. She is an energetic fund-raiser, and her campaign directly raised $47.5 million in its first three-month period of her candidacy, more than any other candidate on either side of the aisle.
The campaign has tried to expand its donor base as it heads into the costly fall season, asking for smaller checks of $1,000 and less and enlisting former President Bill Clinton to headline fund-raisers across the country, beginning with an event in Chicago on Sept. 17.
Both Mrs. Clinton and the Republican candidate Jeb Bush, onetime governor of Florida, have disclosed the names of their “bundlers,” or volunteer fund-raisers who typically host parties to pick up $2,700 donations — the maximum direct donation allowed by law for the primary — from friends and supporters.
Federal law does not require candidates to disclose bundlers but by volunteering that information, candidates can appear more transparent and help ease voters’ concerns that anonymous billionaires finance their campaigns.
It was during Mrs. Clinton’s last run for president, in 2008, that the conservative group Citizens United tried to stop her with a critical documentary that led to the Supreme Court ruling that paved the way for super PACs.
Mrs. Clinton has recently started to remind voters of this personal connection to the case and the cause. “They took aim at me but they ended up damaging our entire democracy,” she said at a Democratic dinner in Iowa last month, her voice breaking after delivering a fiery partisan speech. “We can’t let them pull that same trick again.”
Those remarks have been incorporated into an online video the campaign released Tuesday to explain Mrs. Clinton’s plans to reform campaign finance laws. “Hillary’s passionate about overturning Citizens United because she knows first hand what it’s done to our democracy,” Kristina Schake, a campaign aide, says in the video.
Mrs. Clinton’s frequent refrain that she would push for a constitutional amendment to overturn the Citizens United ruling has been met with particular skepticism.
“A lot of folks read today’s announcement and with all due respect to the secretary and her team, 90 percent of those things aren’t going to happen any time soon,” said Robert J. Jackson Jr., a law professor at Columbia who has advised Mrs. Clinton in the past.
Mrs. Clinton’s embrace of campaign finance reform might not only help her shore up support among liberals who are increasingly captivated by Mr. Sanders, but also help the Clintons shed their image as overly cozy with the donor class.
In recent years, the Clintons have come under criticism for their paid speeches to Wall Street banks and foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation. Under Mr. Clinton’s administration, donors were wooed with rounds of golf and nights in the Lincoln Bedroom.
“I think she has to turn around and be an aggressive reformer,” Mr. Lessig said in an interview. He compared Mrs. Clinton’s opportunity to push for reform to President Lyndon B. Johnson’s championing the Civil Rights Act after being seen as an intolerant Southern lawmaker for much of his career. “There was an opportunity to flip his character,” Mr. Lessig said. “She could do the same thing on this issue.”
