Chamber fires back at Obama's campaign finance reform push

August 23, 2010

The Hill

Susan Crabtree

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is firing back at President Barack Obama’s renewed call to pass a campaign-finance reform bill before the November election.

Chamber Vice President Bruce Josten on Saturday said Democrats are trying to push the legislation as a way to protect their own jobs in Congress rather than focusing on creating jobs for Americans across the country.

He also said the measure, called the DISCLOSE Act, would “stifle” the free speech rights of corporations that the Supreme Court affirmed in the Citizens United case earlier this year. The decision lifted restrictions on corporate and union spending on political advertisements.

Republicans and business interests argue that some of the bill’s provisions would give unions a political advantage over corporations.

“The disparity in how businesses and labor unions are treated by this legislation is staggering—and likely unconstitutional,” Josten wrote in a statement. “By favoring union speech over corporate speech, the bill’s authors are departing from past campaign finance legislation that treated business and labor equally.”

In his Saturday radio address, Obama called on Congress to complete its work on the bill, which is currently stalled in the Senate.

Obama criticized this summer’s rash of “attack ads” run by groups with names that reveal no information about who is funding them. The DISCLOSE Act would require corporations and unions to identify the source of the funding and stand by the ads as federal politicians must do.

Josten said Obama failed to mention the role of unions, which predominantly favor Democrats, in funding political advertisements and any advantage the DISCLOSE Act may give them.

“With no mention of labor unions, the President stated that the goal of the legislation is to reduce corporate influence in elections by stopping the practice of corporate free speech support for candidates,” he said. “We disagree with the President in this regard. Free speech does not corrupt our politics, but efforts to limit it do.”

Democratic leaders added carve-outs for the NRA and the Sierra Club, and Republicans have argued that corporations will be forced to disclose their top donors in ads while some unions get a pass.

Democrats had hoped to pass the bill in both the House and Senate by the July Fourth recess but the measure faced unanticipated delays in the House in the face of opposition from myriad groups, from unions to the Chamber and the National Rifle Association. It eventually passed the House on a mainly party-line vote, but it failed to attract enough support in the Senate to overcome procedural hurdles.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has vowed to hold another vote when the Senate returns in September.

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