Campaign finance reform

In a roundtable discussion, Scott Harshbarger, Frank Clemente, Charles Lewis, Nick Nyhart, and E. Joshua Rosenkranz discuss campaign finance reform. According to Harshbarger, as the Senate engages in a discussion of the McCain-Feingold bill, the discussion sometimes rises to Jeffersonian levels, but more often leaves people wondering whether representatives are protecting their own offices and their own campaign and funding advantage, rather than advancing the public interest. According to Lewis, one of the problems in the entire discussion is disingenuousness by politicians. No one ever acknowledges the effect of money on policy, and so journalists and the public are caught in a cat-and-mouse game of trying to catch them, and it gets beside the point. According to Rosenkranz, The Federal Election Campaign Act limits contributions that candidates raise for their own campaigns. Soft money is a complete end run around those limits.