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The end of a nightmare
After her husband was killed in Chile's bloody coup, Joyce Horman thought the only justice would come from telling her story. Now she has reason to hope those responsible will be forced to face the truth.
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[10/18/99]

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McConnell raised $37.6 million in soft money between January 1997 and June 1999 -- it's one of the major ways that he's been able to help the GOP both win and maintain control of the Senate.

The NRSC is his own personal fiefdom, where he steers cash to the opponents of reformers -- like former Rep. Mark Neuman, R-Wis., who ran against Feingold last year -- and away from pro-reformers, like Rep. Linda Smith, R-Wash., who lost in her challenge to Democratic Sen. Patty Murray with almost no help from McConnell or his NRSC.

Likewise, Torricelli, as chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, is happy with the friends and alliances his ability to raise soft money garners him. From January 1997 through June of this year, the DSCC has raised $23.5 million in soft money. To his colleagues, Torricelli's abrasive personality and general slipperiness are overshadowed by the big bag of campaign cash he holds in his dirty hands.

So when Torricelli stepped forward Friday to offer an amendment replacing McCain and Feingold's pared-down bill with the more comprehensive House bill offered by Reps. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., and Marty Meehan, D-Mass., everyone on the reform side smelled a rat.

"The opponents of comprehensive reform oppose even the most elemental reform," McCain said on the floor Tuesday. "And Mr. President, those opponents abide on both sides of the aisle -- if not in equal numbers than in sufficient numbers."

Three from those sufficient numbers were Torricelli, Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., and Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., who gummed up the works on Friday by offering a series of confusing amendments that tied up what McCain and Feingold had hoped would be a clean amendment process.

But the Democratic leaders were just the jab in a one-two punch. The day before, McConnell and Sen. Robert Bennett, R-Utah, trying to derail whatever meager momentum McCain-Feingold had, feigned offense at McCain's assertion that the prevalence of $100,000 soft-money checks rendered the political process "corrupt."

"For there to be corruption, someone must be corrupt," McConnell said on the Senate floor on Thursday. McConnell challenged McCain to cite specific unseemly quid pro quos.

McCain demurred. "I do not intend to let this debate, which is about banning soft money, get into some kind of personal discussion. ... This system makes good people do bad things. ... I am not in the business of identifying individuals. I am attacking a system. I am attacking a system that has to be fixed and that [according to a poll by the Pew Charitable Trust] has caused 69 percent of young Americans between 18 and 35 to say they are disconnected from their government, that caused in the 1998 election the lowest voter turnout in history of 18- to 26-year-olds."

On Friday, McConnell and Bennett's crocodile tears were replaced by the fake caring smiles of Torricelli, Dachle and Reid. By trying to substitute McCain-Feingold's legislative pragmatics with a bill that had not a candy bar's chance at a fat farm of making it through the Senate (the more comprehensive Shays-Meehan House bill), the three liberal Democratic senators, according to McCain, "filled up the [amendment] tree, making other amendments meaningless."

McCain had anticipated the Democratic sneak attack. His speech decrying the Democrats' tactical maneuver last Friday had been written a full week before.

Next page | What do you really think, senator?