March 24, 2001
A friend of mine voiced a most
interesting observation in the early 1990s when some Jewish leaders
were taking New York Mayor David Dinkins to task for his association
with some black leaders who spoke in vitriolic terms against Jews.
“Tom,” the fellow told me, “my policy is one of strict
neutrality in this dispute. I’m just a spectator looking at the
events.” Well, I’m observing my own policy of strict
neutrality toward the increasingly open warfare between President
Bush and Arizona Senator John McCain over a number of issues,
including McCain’s flawed, unconstitutional, unjust
campaign-finance reform bill, which he has co-sponsored with Senator
Russell Feingold (D.-Wis.).
Mind you, it is well known by now
that I carry absolutely no brief for President Bush. Naturally, I pray for
the president and vice president and their wives and family members. I
pray for their conversion to the true Faith so they can be true
instruments in the pursuit of the standards of objective justice
founded in Truth. Unlike a lot of other folks, however, I have no
expectation that the new administration will attempt anything other
than a little tinkering on the margins of the life issue. I hope and pray I
am proven wrong. I hope I am proven wrong for the sake of the
innocent lives that are being snuffed out under cover of law and for
the sake of the common moral good of our country, whose conversion
to the Social Kingship of Jesus Christ we must try to advance by our
prayers and our efforts in the midst of the world in which we live. As I
wrote recently, I do not place my trust in princes, whether of the civil
or ecclesiastical variety. That way, you see, I am more than pleasantly
surprised when some prince in either realm actually gets it right!
But with the Bush-McCain
brouhaha, one can simply take a seat in the stands and watch the
amazing spectacle unfold. McCain, though a certified hero of the
Vietnam War, has become a prima donna of the highest order. The man
seems incapable of facing the simple fact that he lost the Republican
presidential nomination last year to then-Governor George W. Bush of
Texas. McCain labors under the delusion that there is a great popular
groundswell of support for him personally and for his cherished goal of
campaign-finance reform, neither of which is the case at all. Encouraged
by a media throng that helped create his image for him, McCain is
bound and determined to press ahead on his particular issues without
regard for anything else. As was the case last year with his failed
candidacy for the nomination, he gets more than a little petulant when
he faces criticism.
Thus far, Bush himself has
avoided all mention of McCain, believing quite correctly that to pay
attention to his nemesis would only exaggerate McCain’s sense
of self-importance in the making of public policy. Bush has embraced
the concept of campaign-finance reform sponsored by a former McCain
supporter, Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel — a reform that would
ban the so-called soft money that can be contributed by corporations
and labor unions to a political party’s national committee
apparatus — but the president has steadfastly refused to
endorse McCain-Feingold. A growing number of Democrats are also
emerging in opposition to McCain-Feingold, fearing that their own
sources of campaign contributions would atrophy under the measure.
Undeterred, McCain holds one news conference after another to try to
snatch some of the limelight away from the new administration. McCain
has now surpassed former Vice President Gore as the chief resident of
Fantasyland: even Gore has accepted the fact he is not president and
has faded from public view, at least for the moment. McCain labors
under the impression that he is Bush’s equal.
All of that having been duly
noted, however, the whole issue of campaign-finance reform is phony
from the outset. As I’ve noted several times in the past few
years, no level of government (national, state, or local) has any
business interfering with a citizen’s efforts to support the
candidates of his choice with his own private property, including his
money. Individuals should be free to donate as much as they want to a
particular candidate or political party. The only reasonable requirement
that government could place on donations to candidates or political
parties would be full disclosure of the donors and the amount they
donated. However, that is it. Period. The whole business of federal and
state election commissions is unjust and socialistic. The bureaucratic
paperwork required by federal and state election laws makes it
especially difficult for candidates of conscience to run campaigns
unencumbered by needless bureaucratic oversight, the slightest
infraction of which can result in heavy fines or criminal prosecution.
Campaign-finance reform
emerged in this country as a result of the hue and cry over the abuses
associated with President Nixon’s Committee to Re-Elect the
President (CREEP) in 1972, including the break-in at the headquarters
of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate Hotel on June
17, 1972; money-laundering; and efforts to sabotage the campaigns of
candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination that year. Two
campaigns especially targeted were those of Maine Senator Edmund
Muskie, who had run for vice president alongside Hubert Humphrey in
1968, and South Dakota Senator George McGovern, who had mounted
a last-minute challenge to Humphrey at the 1968 Democratic
Convention in Chicago, trying to claim the mantle of the assassinated
New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy.
In the wake of Watergate,
Congress created the Federal Election Commission in 1974. In 1976 the
Supreme Court struck down the part of the law dealing with the
appointment of the commissioners, in the case of Buckley v.
Valeo, but the justices upheld as constitutional the concepts
of the commission itself and of limitations on personal contributions to
federal campaigns. Naturally, Buckley v. Valeo was as
wrong-headed as Roe v. Wade. However, if a court can
permit the killing of little babies in the sanctuaries of their
mothers’ womb, what’s the big deal about permitting
other things that are in plain violation of the Constitution, a natural-law
understanding of the purposes of civil government, and just plain,
old-fashioned common sense?
Since that time, as we know,
there have come to light a number of notorious violations of existing
campaign laws, including President Clinton’s White House
“coffees” in 1995 and 1996 (which featured international
arms merchants, drug dealers, wanted criminals, and agents of the Red
Chinese); his dealings with Lippo Group Chairman James Riady; the
illegal fundraising phone calls made from the White House by Al
“No Controlling Legal Authority” Gore; the Buddhist Temple
non-fundraiser fundraiser; and the whole business of contributions
made on behalf of the Red Chinese government in exchange for
American missile technology, which will one day haunt this country
terribly, perhaps exacting a price in blood from us for the killing that
continues unabated under cover of law in this country every day. A
bevy of Lockean liberals and social engineers — refusing to
understand that a political system premised upon the lie of careerism
and religious indifferentism is the problem — believe that it is
necessary to reform a system of campaign-finance regulation that is
flawed from its very inception and in all of its component parts.
No amount of so-called
campaign-finance reform is going to resolve the problems associated
with money in American politics. American politics itself is the
problem. Corporate giants and Big Labor both believe that
government exists to help them advance their own respective
interests. Most of those who run for office believe they have a
God-given right to get elected to whatever office they are seeking (or
to be re-elected to whatever office they hold) and are willing to sell
themselves to the highest bidder according to the exigencies of
practical political expediency. Thus, for the most part those who run
for office — along with many of the big rollers who donate huge
sums to political parties — are men and women who believe in the
Machiavellian principle that the ends justify the means. Our elections
and our national discourse are thereby reduced to a clash of interests
among various oligarchies, leaving no room for Christ the King and for
any serious discussion of First Causes and Last End as the foundation
for order in the life of individual citizens and in the larger life of a
nation itself.
Although the American system of
government and politics is fundamentally flawed, it is what we have at
present. Those committed to right principles do have an opportunity,
however limited, to speak to the defense of the just moral order as
the foundation of the just state in the forum of partisan politics. But
the current election laws — with all their unnecessary and failed
regulations — make it difficult to mount any real challenge to the
perpetual oligarchies of business, labor, and the major parties as the
serious players in American politics.
Real campaign-finance reform,
therefore, would entail ending all restrictions on donations, ending all
state and local and national election commissions created to supervise
such donations, and publishing the names of those who donate with
the amount donated. Period. That would permit private individuals of
substance to support candidates of conscience, providing them with
the means to buy media time for purposes not so much of being
electorally viable but rather of trying to break through the media shield
and speak to issues of fundamental justice founded in the splendor of
Truth Incarnate. Although electoral politics is nothing but a sideshow
(replete with its own freaks and circus acts), it does provide us with a
forum to speak to issues of fundamental justice founded in truth.
However, current election laws make it almost impossible for anybody
but a wealthy candidate (who can spend as much of his own money as
he wants on his own campaign) to gain media access.
I repeat: the only reason we
should be involved in this flawed system is to speak to the truth. When
spoken in love and with conviction, truth has the power by the grace
of God and the light of natural reason to help plant the seeds that
might result in the changing of hearts and minds. Indeed, the truth
spoken in love and with conviction in the forum of electoral politics
might do more concrete good to help souls see themselves clearly as
redeemed creatures who must abide by God’s immutable laws
than anything a person could accomplish in elected office.
The graces won for us by our
Lord by the shedding of His Most Precious Blood on the wood of the
Holy Cross remain as powerful now as they were nearly two thousand
years ago when the Apostles went out into the known world to preach
the Gospel. We must rely on those graces to help us — who took
the task of apostleship upon ourselves when we were baptized and
confirmed — to use every opportunity we can find to proclaim the
Cross of our Crucified and Risen Savior to the world in which we live.
We can thus be instruments of the only sort of reform that helps any
society: the reform of individual lives by free-will acts to love God
through His true Church — and that is never a matter of strict
neutrality. That is a matter of discharging our duties to be soldiers in
the army of Christ, duties that should prompt us to be steadfast in
prayer and earnest in our desire to bring all men and all nations into
the One Sheepfold of Peter.
Viva Cristo Rey!
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