Campaign Contributions Of The Federal Election Campaign Act

Each year billions of dollars are spent on getting candidates of various offices of government elected. Many candidates have had tremendous success through the efforts of much needed monetary contributions to their campaign. Contributors range from unions, religious leaders, organizations such as Mothers Against Drunk Drivers (MADD), the National Rifle Association (NRA), and senior citizens groups. When these groups, known as special interest groups, donate to candidate’s campaign, they expect the candidate to respond to their issues. Because special interest groups, as well as private citizens donate more and more money to campaigns, there is some concern that there is a great need for campaign finance reform.

From the very first elections held in the United States, there has always been a strong link between money and politics. During the first elections in the late 1700’s you had to be a white male landowner over the age of 21 in order to vote, meaning that you had to have money in order to have your vote counted. It seems today that we cannot go a day with out seeing campaign finance in the media, whether or not it is through advertisements for politicians in the media or asked to donate money to help let your favorite candidate win. Because campaign finance has always been on the back burner of political issues, there has hardly been any change to the large influence money has over the election process and politicians. While money has it’s

The right of free speech granted to all citizens in the first amendment, the necessity of funding expensive political campaigns, and the fact that small donations make a candidate responsive to the needs of their constituents, all make any restrictions on campaign financing unneeded and onerous. Congress should strike down any bills attempting to reform this essential part of the U.S. election process. Any further restrictions on donations to political campaigns will prove detrimental to the United States functioning system of elections by limiting individuals’ freedom of speech, making our candidate’s campaigns underfunded and unresponsive to the needs of the American people.

In 1974, FECA–the Federal Election Campaign Act–a campaign finance law, was amended to place legal limits on campaign elections to a maximum of $1,000 per individual and $5,000 per PAC–political action committee–for each primary, election and runoff. However, FECA neglected to take into account the effects of inflation. Since 1974, inflation has caused $1,000 today to equate to only $240 in 1974, less than a fourth of the originally intended amount. Due to this, candidates need to raise four times the amount of money that they did 41 years ago when the act was amended. Consequently, candidates must focus more on fundraising and have less time to meet citizens and tend to their official

The 1970s began a more active era of campaign finance reform. The passing of the Revenue Act of 1971 allows citizens to contribute one dollar to a presidential candidate’s campaign fund by checking a box on their federal income tax returns. Along with the Revenue Act of 1971, the Federal Election Campaign Act was also passed in 1971. This law institutes disclosure requirements for federal candidates, political parties, and political action committees of donations more than $100. This law also sets a spending limit of $50,000

Regulating soft money has been difficult because of constitutional issues that protect First Amendment rights, and Congress’ rights over regulating political parties must be focused on preventing fraud or corruption (Mason, 1997). Soft money is used to mobilize campaigns by using the money to support voter registration drives, and other similar activities designed to jump start a candidates’ campaign (Brennan Center, 2000). For this reason, soft money is important to an election campaign, and recently the amount of soft money raised for campaigns has skyrocketed. It has become a concern because it is largely unregulated and can be used to gain an unfair

The current network of campaign finance is a complicated web involving individual contributors, soft money and hard money, and political action committee influence. In the aftermath of the crooked Watergate scandal, anxiety over campaign finance led to the passage of two major reform bills—the Revenue Act of 1971 and the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1974—that have set the guidelines and regulations for campaign finance. Although many other laws and acts have been passed in effort to regulate campaign finance, these two acts set the main standards for campaign finance regulation. The main ideas of the acts stipulate that candidates for the two houses of Congress receive no public funding, candidates in the presidential primaries receive matching dollars, and candidates

Following the Watergate scandal, the Federal Elections Campaign Act of 1974 was amended to create the regulatory agency, known as the Federal Elections Commission, in 1975. The duties of the FEC consist largely of enforcing regulation, limitation, and prohibition on financial contributions to federal campaigns, candidates, political parties, and political action committees. The Act has thoroughly set limits on the amount of money a person or committee may donate to the previously mentioned situations. For example, an individual can donate no more than $2,600 to any federal campaign per election, and a combined limit of $10,000 to local and state parties every calendar year. The case at hand involves Shaun McCutcheon challenging the aggregate limits as a violation of the First Amendment right of expression. An Alabaman Conservative businessman, McCutcheon expressed that he wished to donate more than the contributions he was able to make in the last election cycle. He wanted to contribute an amount that would stay within base limits but surpass aggregate limits set by the FEC.

The Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 is a "law that requires all candidates to fully disclose all contributions and expenditures in excess of $100." (pg.161) This law proved very helpful because in 1968, before they really started pushing disclosure, candidates would report spending $8.5 million but four years later candidates were reporting that they had spent about $88.9 million. It was a giant leap in what they were spending, over ten times the said amount. The FECA also made it to where "it was permissible for corporations and labor unions to set up separate, segregated funds that could be used for a political purpose." (pg.161) Having this created a lot of PACs that would give political parties and interest groups money to running

With the introduction of “soft” money in politics, elections no longer go to the best candidate, but simply to the richer one. Soft money is defined as unregulated money that is given to the political parties that ends up being used by candidates in an election. In last year’s elections, the Republican and Democratic parties raised more than one-half of a billion dollars in soft money. Current politicians are pushing the envelope farther than any previous administrations when it comes to finding loopholes in the legal system for campaign fundraising. The legal limit that any one person can contribute to a given candidate or campaign is one thousand dollars. There is, however, no limit on the amount of money one

People search far and wide all the time to find the truth. According to Shana Lebowitz, “humans actually judge people psychologically based on their face, if they are able to trust another person” (P1). Americans in-particular have had an issue all throughout their country with both corruption and money flooding their political system ultimately preventing positive social change. The questions on campaign finance reform stems in two very different directions in political debate. One, is “Money Free Speech?" Two does it actually promote corruption like some political observers say and if so can it be stopped? Politian’s are first and foremost supposed to be a servant to the people regardless of their background, not to business and or themselves.

Efforts to regulate campaign finance, in particular, the Federal Election Campaign Act, have been based on mistaken assumptions about the role of money in politics and on the mistaken belief that eliminating or reducing money will in some way make the process more fair, the playing field more level. In fact, spending on political campaigns is hardly extravagant, amounting to only a few dollars per eligible voter every two years. Because there is no a priori correct allocation of political advantages, including money, efforts to control this one feature of the political landscape have tended to have serious detrimental side effects, including the entrenchment of incumbents and the stifling of new, alternative political choices. FECA and its

Since the 1980's, critics of the soft money system have strived to close the perceived loophole. In 1984, Common Cause petitioned the Commission for stricter rules regarding soft money allocation, hoping to close the loophole. When the Commission concluded that the evidence of soft money abuse was insufficient to rationalize the suggested changes, Common Cause filed a suit that led to a Court order for the FEC to clarify its allocation regulations. In 1990 the Commission approved of new regulations that would require all national party committees to provide full disclosure of the soft money accounts, and all committees (with federal and non federal accounts) to use specific formulas to "determine the amount of federal funds required to be spent for any activity that benefits both federal and non federal candidates" (FEC).

Another aspect of FECA was to limit hard money. The philosophy behind this was to restrict the amount of money one individual could give directly to a PAC so they would not have too much influence in the outcome of an election. As a reaction, the PACs started investing into media outlets and began creating commercials. By doing this PACs were able to maintain their influence while still obeying the campaign laws (Hughes 4:30-5:00).

FECA put limitations on campaign advertising by political candidates. Lastly FECA created the Federal Election Commission to oversee and regulate campaign financing (The FEC). With all the restrictions placed on direct campaign contributions to political candidates, this type of contribution is known as “hard money”. One would assume this would make political campaign fundraising a difficult task, but in the 2008 presidential campaign one billion dollars was raised by candidates (Banking). Cleary “hard money” cannot be the only thing bankrolling our politicians.