The debate also signals the ever-expanding role of money in politics and the lengths to which many lawmakers will go to preserve the system that brought them to office. In the aftermath of Watergate, lawmakers in the mid-1970s adopted measures to curb the influence of money in public decision making. But even as they set out to democratize elections and empower ordinary citizens, the lawmakers ignored soft money, creating a loophole for the nation's wealthiest individuals and corporations. Twenty-five years later, soft money makes up a large chunk of U.S. campaign spending. Gifts come in a wide range of amounts from corporations and individual citizens.
Donations often are in the hundreds of thousands of dollars and occasionally in the millions.
The parties, they say, work around regulations to direct general donations to individual candidates. A version of the soft-money ban, often tacked onto broader reform measures, has floated through Congress for four years. Republican Senators have blocked it. But in a sign that reform might be gaining momentum locally, a Michigan Senate committee is expected tomorrow to vote on a campaign finance bill that would bind elections statewide. On the federal level, Abraham's new reform package involves three major approaches to reduce the influence of money.