David Firestone: The Senate bill approved on Tuesday purports to spend $126 million over 10 years on research by the National Institute of Health on pediatric cancer and other childhood illnesses, paid for by eliminating public money for the two political conventions. It was requested by Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, the biggest opponent of public financing and disclosure in Congress, and approved on a unanimous voice vote — any Democrat could have spoken up and stopped it, but none did. The bill might seem like a great tradeoff — a better place to spend taxpayer dollars, you might think, than on those two useless pep rallies and quadrennial media events. But the conventions aren’t going to stop, and guess who’s going to pay for them if the president signs the bill: big corporations and the rich. They already pay for three-fourths of the conventions’ bills, and will happily write huge checks to the two parties for the rest, putting politicians further in their debt and amplifying their ability to affect public policy. Reducing the influence of big money is why public financing of elections and conventions was enacted after the Watergate scandals, but that principle has been steadily eroded by the Supreme Court and the ferocious demand for money by members of both parties. What makes the measure particularly contemptible is that it doesn’t really give the convention money to pediatric research at all. As several Democrats pointed out when it passed the House in December, the bill says the money will be available to the N.I.H., but does not raise the cap on research spending, imposed by Republicans in 2011, which is the real reason why N.I.H. funding has declined. If lawmakers really want to spend more on cancer research — and they should — they can just vote to spend it, or to raise the caps. But ending public financing was the real goal of this bill, not the research. If President Obama doesn’t veto it, both parties will be fully complicit in helping to turn American politics over to those with the most money.
Posted on: Thu, 13 Mar 2014 12:42:12 +0000
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