114 AUTUMN 2002
Ideas and Action: Fighting for Campaign Reform at the Brennan Center for Justice The passage of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act—more commonly known as McCain-Feingold—was a great victory for the reform movement, and, more important, for our democracy. This new law is an important first step toward the goal of protecting the integrity of our elections and making elected officials responsive to everyday voters rather than to monied interests. The Brennan Center at NYU Law is proud to have played a role in this sevenyear battle, along with numerous other advocates, and now is thrilled to be part of the legal team defending the new law on behalf of the sponsors against a barrage of lawsuits. The McCain-Feingold litigation and victory is a validation of the Brennan Center’s founding premise: to create a new breed of public interest organization that lives comfortably in the world of ideas and in the real world, just as Justice Brennan himself combined an uncanny ability to rethink entire areas of the law with a pragmatist’s insistence that law should be an engine for social change. Skeptics thought it couldn’t be done, predicting the Center would ultimately have to choose to be either a think tank or an activist organization. But the Brennan
Center’s role in McCain-Feingold proved them wrong, for the Center’s involvement has spanned the full arc from ideas to action. From the start, the Brennan Center injected important new legal and policy ideas into the campaign finance debate in the form of numerous books, monographs, and articles in legal and political science journals. Also, with the guidance of Professor Burt Neuborne, the Center coordinated the distribution of letters signed by former American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) leaders and top First Amendment scholars, arguing in favor of the constitutionality of the McCain-Feingold legislation. Another significant intellectual contribution to the debate came with the Center’s unprecedented empirical work. In partnership with Professor Kenneth Goldstein of the
(r-l): Senator Russell Feingold and his counsel Bob Schiff, with Brennan Center President Joshua Rosenkranz
University of Wisconsin, the Center amassed the single largest database of political advertising ever developed. Armed with this data, the Brennan Center then played a role in crafting a key legislative proposal that became one of the law’s cornerstones, the “Snowe-Jeffords” provision, aimed at closing the loophole that allows electioneering ads to masquerade as issue advocacy. The Center also defended the bill in numerous committee hearings and helped staff the “war room” on the Hill each time the legislation was debated in the House or Senate. The Congressional Record was rife with references to the Center’s data and analyses at every step of the way. So was the popular press. From the New York Times to the Los Angeles Times, journalists and editorial boards consistently turned to the Center, both for legal comment and empirical support. Now the Center finds itself living the ultimate dream of any activist organization: the sponsors of the bill have asked the Brennan Center to join an all-star legal team defending the new law against a barrage of legal challenges. The defenders of the reform law are up against some of the most powerful and well-financed forces in politics—the National Rifle Association, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the ACLU, the AFL-CIO, and the National Right to Life Committee, to name just a few. And the stakes are about as high as they could be. After all, the case, which is headed for the Supreme Court in a matter of months, is sure to be the single most important campaign finance case in a generation. Not since the Court’s 1976 landmark decision in Buckley v. Valeo (which, incidentally, was written by Justice Brennan) has there been a case that will have as profound an impact on the future of campaign finance reform at all levels of government. In this ultimate forum, the legal analysis the Center has been conducting for years and its groundbreaking empirical studies will once more play a critical role. Combining advocacy with research and scholarship—and doing it all under one roof—is a model put to work by the Brennan Center whenever the opportunity presents itself. Advocacy on behalf of local “living wage” initiatives, which insist that businesses create family-supporting jobs when they benefit from government subsidies, is being supported by the research and analysis of the Brennan Center’s Dr.