Democracy vs. free speech?

• Position: Campaign finance reform

Never has the power of money in politics been more obvious. A 1992 poll showed that 74 percent of American voters thought "Congress is largely owned by the special-interest groups," and 84 percent agreed that "special-interest money buys the loyalty of candidates." In the last four years, things have only gotten worse. In the 1996 campaign, Senate candidates spent between $5 million and $30 million to win their seats. And the Presidential campaign was the most expensive in history, running up a tab of $800 million.

Everyone agrees that we need to do something about the way money has corrupted our political process. The question is, what?

Common Cause, legal scholar Ronald Dworkin, and former Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey are among those leading the current movement to cap campaign spending. But the ACLU opposes such caps, arguing that they violate the First Amendment rights of candidates and their contributors.

"I think the ACLU is wrong," says Ed Garvey, a liberal Democrat from Wisconsin, who has run for Governor and Senator. "Anyone who equates money and speech is ignoring the real world, because money is now what drowns out the middle- and low-income people in this country," Garvey says. "What happens in the real world is that Herb Kohl [the independently wealthy Democratic Senator from Wisconsin] can spend $50 million, but you, my friend, are not financially articulate."

Bill Bradley makes a related argument: "If you've got a good idea and $10,000 and I've got a terrible idea and $1 million, I can convince people that the terrible idea is the good one."

Thus a fundamental conflict appears to arise between democracy and free speech. Bradley has proposed a constitutional amendment that would make campaign-spending limits the law of the land. The theory is that ordinary citizens with good ideas would have a better chance of being heard when they run for political office, and that corporations and wealthy donors would no longer get the best candidates their money can buy.

But appealing as it sounds, amending the Constitution to limit campaign spending is a bad idea. The ACLU is right: Capping this spending not only abridges free speech, it interferes with the most privileged of all speech--political debate. In our capitalist society, unfortunately, one of the only ways people can communicate their views to their fellow citizens is through the paid media. When you limit how much individuals can spend to communicate those political...