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The Timely Demise of Unity08
Published on January 17, 2008
Category: Contributions & Limits, Enforcement, Other, Political Parties
We can’t help but note the plight of Unity08, now on its deathbed. The culprit: campaign finance laws.
Unity08, you may recall, hoped to become a new, moderate, bipartisan force in American politics. The problem is, starting a new political party takes lots of cash – start up cash. Like any business enterprise, you need start up capital – you can’t fund a new party on the basis of small contributions from members when you are new and have no members.
And in this enterprise of raising start-up cash, Unity08 was stymied by the Federal Election Commission, which really had no choice – the law plainly limited contributions to Unity08. After McCain-Feingold, soft money – i.e. money for the much-maligned “party building” - to political parties was banned.
As Unity08’s founders write on their website, “We were caught in a peculiar catch-22; we wanted to break the dependence on big money by getting lots of small contributions from millions of members, but needed some up-front big money to help generate the millions of members to make the small contributions. And the FEC … didn't let that happen.”
Yeah, duh. That’s what some of us have been saying for years. Unity08 tries to make it sound as though this is some rogue FEC decision, but not so – it is the straightforward application of campaign finance laws to Unity08’s situation. Unity08 planned to nominate candidates for office and give them financial support. (making it different from this case). And that qualified them as a political party, subject to party limits. Yes, this is a rare situation where we here at CCP agree with the denizens of the so-called “reform community,” (click on link and then click on comments of Democracy 21 and Campaign Legal Center) at least on what the law actually is, if not what it should be (being more tolerent than the "reformers," we’d be happy to let Unity08 spend to its heart’s content.)
None of this, however, seems to have shaken the faith of Unity08’s founders in the noble enterprise of campaign finance reform. They offer not a word of criticism of the law that appears likely to lead to the organization's death, only of the executioner, sworn to carry it out, yet so often maligned for the lack of enthusiasm with which it undertakes such duties. Like those who want to extinguish mankind to preserve a “pure” earth, Unity08, it seems, would rather die than renounce the purity of campaign finance reform. In which case, it seems to us, it is a noble death, unfortunate, but nonetheless well deserved.
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