McCain puts finance reform on Senate plate

By Anne E. Kornblut, Globe Staff, July 2, 1999

WASHINGTON -- Senator John McCain, who this week made campaign finance reform the center of his presidential campaign platform, has indicated he will shut down the Senate if the issue is not addressed.

Republican leaders are reluctant to debate flaws in the way campaign funds are raised, and Republican aides said yesterday that any procedural maneuvers by McCain would be cast as a publicity stunt. But McCain, who lags far behind Texas Governor George W. Bush in presidential primary polls, said he would "make every effort" to bring his bill to the floor in July, suggesting he would use the Senate procedure of filibustering other pending legislation in the meantime.

"I hope we can take it up in an orderly fashion. But we'll try to make every effort to get the issue addressed," said McCain, a Republican from Arizona.

"I believe he is ready and able and willing to shut down the US Senate," said Representative Martin T. Meehan, Democrat of Lowell, whose campaign finance bill is stalled in the House. "Our original strategy was to pass the bill early in the House and send it to the Senate. Now, I think John is just anxious to move things along."

The campaign finance measure in the House, sponsored by Meehan and Republican Representative Christopher Shays of Connecticut, is 12 votes away from being brought to the floor. Last year, 51 senators voted in favor of the legislation sponsored by McCain and Democratic Senator Russell Feingold of Wisconsin -- shy of the three-fifths majority needed to overcome a threatened filibuster by Majority Leader Trent Lott.

Many in both parties are skeptical the legislation will pass. The first hurdle, however, is getting the bill to a vote. House Speaker Dennis Hastert has said he will allow a vote on campaign finance after Labor Day. In the Senate, Lott has not set a time frame, mainly, a spokesman said, because McCain "hasn't pushed it yet, hasn't even introduced it yet."

"You can't really schedule something that hasn't been introduced," Lott spokesman John Czwartacki said. Furthermore, he added: "We've got a pretty full July," including eight appropriations bills, a bankruptcy measure, and managed health care legislation sponsored by Senator Edward M. Kennedy.

Congressional resistance might work to McCain's political advantage, several Republican aides said. If McCain's primary goal is to stir debate -- and to thereby draw attention to not only the issue of campaign fund-raising but also his presidential bid -- then conducting a protracted battle on the floor of the Senate could serve his purposes well.

"This has been his plan for a while," one Democrat said. And Lott's spokesman said he would not be surprised if McCain turned the legislation into an event. "I know he has the courage of his convictions," Czwartacki said. "Of that we have no doubt."

McCain insisted his timing was not based on strategy, but on the holdup in the House. As for the schedule, McCain blamed Kennedy for the jammed calendar, after a week in which the Massachusetts Democrat held up business to demand a hearing on his own health care bill, known as the Patients Bill of Rights.

But even Republican senators in favor of altering campaign fund-raising rules in theory were skittish about the idea of using divisive procedural moves to bring it about -- especially in the context of one senator's presidential race, as well as in the wake of accusations that the 106th Congress has failed to accomplish anything. Olympia Snowe, Republican of Maine, said the Senate "should really have an opportunity to debate it without having to engage in a filibuster because there's so little time left."

Ultimately, however, the debate might have as much to do with McCain's campaign as the issue of fund-raising in general, Republican and Democratic aides said. Having thrown down a gauntlet of sorts, declaring his determination to bring campaign fund-raising to the fore, McCain will now "have to make some kind of demonstrable and very visible display," one senior Republican aide said.

"How long he'll keep it up, I don't know," the aide said. "But he's got to make a big deal out of it, even though nobody has any interest right now."