Sue 'Em Back to the Stone Age: The RNC Files Suit to Reverse the Small Donor Revolution

It's a bizarre time for the RNC to be arguing that it needs to be taking more - not less - money from corporate interests. Just last week, Public Citizen released a report showing that bailed-out banks have spent $6 million in federal campaign contributions since the election. If the soft money ban is lifted, we can expect these figures to increase exponentially, for special interest domination of federal politics to attain new heights, and for the small donor revolution to face extinction.
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To the millions of grassroots activists and fundraisers who came of age in the 2008 election, the year 2000 seems like the era of the dinosaurs - a time when the fundraising landscape was the fiercely guarded territory of corporate behemoths, whose massive footprints and titanic struggles for dominance made any grassroots level activity seem pathetically minuscule. But last week, a three-judge panel of the D.C. federal court heard oral arguments in a case where the RNC is seeking to turn back the clock to a time when Obama's much-vaunted "small-donor revolution" would have been drowned in a flood of largely unregulated corporate "soft money" donations.
Back in the bad old days of soft money (i.e., donations to political parties to which federal contribution regulations did not apply), neither party had much of an incentive to reach out to small donors. After all, why bother building an entire organizational infrastructure to solicit donations $10 at a time when Enron is thrilled to cut you a six- or seven-figure check? Political fundraising at this time was a noisome swamp of influence peddling - an era in which pharmaceutical companies wrote multimillion dollar soft money checks to kill the Generic Drug Bill in committee, a $1 million soft money contribution preceded a $280 million tax break for Amway, and a torrent of soft money fundraising scandals engulfed both major parties. A soft money donor - unconfined by the strict monetary limits on direct donations to candidates - could give hundreds of thousands of dollars to the party, and enjoy a range of perks including golf outings with Senators and nights in the Lincoln Bedroom.
Cue the meteor -- the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, popularly known as McCain-Feingold, which changed the climate of federal political fundraising by draining the swamp of huge corporate soft money donations. To continue the metaphor, the national parties were forced to adapt to this colder, drier fundraising landscape by turning to the grassroots, and especially to the small donors who had not warranted much attention in the soft money era. McCain-Feingold meant that small donors finally mattered in federal fundraising, and both parties built grassroots machines to harvest small donations. In 2004, the RNC took the initial lead in small donor fundraising, with Bush's bundler rodeo of "Pioneers," "Rangers," and "Mavericks." LinkHere