Your Excellency:
I am a life long, ardent supporter of unborn children's right to life. The votes I have cast throughout my fifteen years of service in the United States Congress are a strong testament to the steadfastness of my opposition to abortion.
I am also an outspoken advocate of campaign finance reform, and am proud to be the lead sponsor of the main campaign finance bill currently being debated on the floor of the Senate.
I believe passionately in both of these causes, and yield to no member of Congress either in my support of legislation to protect the rights of the unborn or of legislation to clean up a system of campaign financing that has clearly become dysfunctional. I do not believe these two separate positions are inconsistent. Indeed, I believe they are largely unrelated issues. The only conceivable connection between the two is that current election laws allow both defenders and opponents of abortion to advocate their views through the medium of paid advertising, a practice which, contrary to misinformation spread by the National Right to Life Committee, my legislation preserves.
Despite possessing what I believe to be a solid record of opposition to abortion, officials at the National Right to Life Committee have accused me and any other supporter of campaign finance reform of impeding their defense of the unborn. They have run advertisements distorting the intent and effect of our legislation. And they have persistently refused to recognize that our legislation explicitly exempts their organization's voter guides and scorecards from the campaign activities that our legislation affects.
The effect of their opposition, and the inaccurate, indeed, dishonest arguments they have employed to advance their argument has been to discourage a great many pro-life Americans from supporting campaign finance reform out of the mistaken fear that such support constitutes a new assault on the rights of the unborn. Regrettably, a great many Catholics now believe that they cannot be both pro-life and pro-reform.
I hope your Excellency will agree that a pro-life Catholic can embrace the cause of campaign finance reform without undermining the admittedly more important cause which has properly been a primary concern of your Church. I salute the Church's efforts to protect unborn children, and pledge my continued help in your efforts.
But I also pledge not to abandon the right of Americans to know they are served by election laws which discourage corruption, and do not deprive ordinary people of an equal voice in the governance of their country; a voice equal to the privileged; to the special interests; and to the voice of officials at the National Right to Life Committee who appear increasingly less interested in the cause which they were organized to defend, and more interested in the pursuit of political power for its own sake.
I ask you, respectfully, to make clear to Catholic congregations in your diocese that they may support the cause of campaign finance reform without fear that they have hurt the cause that you and I agree should be our greatest concern -- the sanctity of human life. After all, it was no less a defender of human dignity than His Holiness, Pope John Paul II who said:
"Certain demands which arise within society are sometimes not examined in accordance with criteria of justice and morality, but rather on the basis of the electoral or financial power of groups promoting them. With time, such distortions of political conduct create distrust and apathy, with a subsequent decline in the political participation and civic spirit of the general public, which feels abused and disillusioned."
I hope Catholics would feel proud to support campaign reform, confident that an honestly and fairly elected government is most responsive to the concerns of its citizens. I hope Catholics who have worked tirelessly to defend life would let officials at the National Right to Life Committee know that their opposition to campaign finance reform does not help advance the pro-life cause, and that they do not speak on this issue for the majority of pro-life Americans.
I thank your Excellency for the thoughtful consideration I am sure you will give my request.
Sincerely,
John McCain
United States Senator
The National Right to Life Committee sent the following response to each Roman Catholic bishop on March 5, 1998..
Recently, you received a letter dated February 25 from U.S. Senator John McCain (R-Az.), in which Senator McCain criticized the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) for opposing his "campaign reform" bill (the McCain-Feingold bill), and urged you to take certain actions in support of such legislation. With all due respect to Senator McCain, we must dispute a number of the claims made in his letter, including his representations of the actual legal restrictions contained in his proposed legislation and the reasons why NRLC has vigorously opposed this legislation.
The issue at hand is not Senator McCain's personal voting record on abortion policy(1), but his championing of legislation that, if enacted, could cripple the pro-life movement in the United States.
The McCain-Feingold bill has appeared in numerous versions, each differing in important respects from its predecessors. Yet, each version -- including the version that failed on the Senate floor on February 25 -- has contained provisions that would place sweeping restrictions on the right of private citizen groups to communicate with the general public regarding the positions and voting records of specific, named politicians on right-to-life issues (or indeed, on any issue).
NRLC has considerable expertise in this area of the law, because over the past 15 years NRLC and its affiliates have repeatedly gone to court to battle attempts by politicians and political appointees to suppress dissemination of materials that explain and comment on the positions or voting records of specific politicians on right-to-life issues. There have also been numerous attempts to suppress commentary sponsored by other groups, including major labor unions.
Fortunately, so far the federal courts -- from the Supreme Court on down -- have held that in the United States, citizen groups such as NRLC (and labor unions) have a right to comment as they see fit regarding politicians' positions on issues, whether before elections or at any other time, without being subjected to government-imposed restrictions. The legal term of art for such commentary on politicians' positions is issue advocacy.
Despite this well-developed First Amendment doctrine, Senator McCain and many other politicians have convinced themselves that they have the authority -- and indeed, the duty -- to try to establish governmental control over the time, place, manner, and amount of communications to the public concerning their positions on issues. These proposals come wrapped in the appealing rhetoric found in Senator McCain's letter -- references to "corruption," to "special interests," to his desire for "an honestly and fairly elected government," etc. We do not suggest that this rhetoric is insincere, nor do we suggest that every campaign reform bill (or every provision of the McCain-Feingold bill) offends the First Amendment. But behind the rhetoric about "fair elections," woven into the actual legislative language of many of the proposals currently under consideration in Congress and various state legislatures, are provisions to "protect" politicians from having their constituents presented with information and commentary regarding their positions and votes on specific issues. These are often issues, such as abortion, that many politicians would prefer to avoid.
To the degree that such restrictions are put into effect, many pro-life citizens will become ever more dependent on the institutional news media as their sole source of information on the positions and actions of politicians on right-to-life issues. This means that pro-life citizens often would not receive such information at all, or would receive it in a form that is too compressed or distorted to be useful. In other cases, information on politicians' positions appears in the media only after it is too late to act on it. In order for the pro-life movement to effectively influence public policy, it is essential that we continue to enjoy the right to speak to the public directly, when and where we see fit, regarding the actions of those who hold or seek public office.
In Congress, the great majority of the lawmakers supporting the McCain-Feingold bill and other such speech-restrictive legislation are firmly pro-abortion. However, there are also more than a few legislators with pro-life or mostly pro-life voting records, such as Senator McCain, who believe they should be allowed to ration or otherwise regulate the amount of unflattering commentary to which they may be subjected by different groups. When Washington Post reporter David Broder asked Senator McCain, "Should you have the right to say, 'Dave Broder is running for office, but he has voted against the interests of the young people and the senior citizens in this country'?", Senator McCain replied, "To launch an attack on me . . . is their participation in a political campaign, and therefore, they might be subject to some kinds of limitations." (NBC Meet the Press, Feb. 23, 1997, transcript available)
In the same vein, Senator McCain justified a provision to restrict TV and radio ads that mention a politician's name by observing, "These ads are almost always negative attacks on a candidate and do little to further healthy political debate." (Sept. 26, 1997, Congressional Record page S10002, emphasis added)
We do not believe that Members of Congress have authority to restrict political commentary on grounds that it is "negative" or fosters what some politicians may consider "unhealthy" debate. There is great danger in bestowing upon politicians and political appointees the power to control, by force of law, the content, amount, or timing of such communications, under the guise of regulating "campaign spending."
To give one illustration: NRLC has disseminated millions of brochures and has employed broadcast advertising to ask citizens to urge specific, named members of Congress to reverse their opposition to the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, and vote to override President Clinton's veto of that bill. We assure you that the lawmakers named in such communications almost invariably regard them as "negative attacks" that "do little to further healthy political debate," to borrow Senator McCain's words. Such pro-abortion politicians would like to define such communications as "campaign expenditures" or "campaign contributions," and thereby severely reduce the amount of money that can be spent on such communications, and/or require that they be done under complex and burdensome regulations that would be beyond the means of most citizen groups, especially at the local level. The McCain-Feingold bill contains multiple provisions to accomplish this, as do other bills such as that proposed by House Democratic Leader Gephardt.
The multiple mechanisms by which the McCain-Feingold bill would restrict free speech about politicians are technically complicated and beyond the scope of this letter. However, NRLC is eager to provide, on request, detailed legal analyses of the McCain-Feingold proposal and other pending "campaign reform" bills that would restrict our right to communicate with the public. These analyses (also available on the NRLC website at www.nrlc.org) are not the work of any one person, but rather represent the collective expertise of NRLC, including NRLC General Counsel James Bopp, Jr., regarded by many as the nation's most successful litigator on First Amendment issues pertaining to federal election law. Mr. Bopp is the primary author of a law journal article summarizing the pertinent federal court decisions regarding the First Amendment's protections for commentary on politicians' positions, titled The First Amendment is Not a Loophole: Protecting Free Expression in the Election Campaign Context (UWLA Law Review, Vol.. 28, 1997) (also available from NRLC).
NRLC's objections to the McCain-Feingold bill are joined with those of various other organizations across the political spectrum. For example, the American Civil Liberties Union has provided members of Congress with a detailed explanation of how multiple provisions of the McCain-Feingold bill would infringe on the First Amendment. The ACLU is absolutely wrong on abortion, but it is also an organization that takes seriously the First Amendment right of citizens to disseminate information and commentary on politicians positions' on issues -- even issues that the news media often brands as "emotional" and "divisive," such as abortion.
Senator McCain has often issued sweeping denials that his bills would infringe on First Amendment rights, while ignoring the legal effect of the actual provisions of his legislation. Illustrative of this approach, in his entire rhetoric-laden letter to you, Senator McCain made only one statement describing a specific provision of his bill, and that statement was misleading: He asserted that NRLC has "persistently refused to recognize that our legislation explicitly exempts their organization's voter guides and scorecards from the campaign activities that our legislation affects."
NRLC "refuses to recognize" this because it is not true. As explained in previous communications sent to Senator McCain and other lawmakers, the so-called "exemption" to which he refers did not apply to the bill's most powerful provisions restricting free speech about politicians' positions on issues -- did not apply, for example, to a provision restricting communications to the public that are deemed to be "of value" to some lawmaker or officeseeker even if that politician is not named in the communication. Moreover, the so-called "exemption" was carefully crafted so as to grant congressional "permission" to publish congressional scorecards and voter guides only if they do not express a viewpoint regarding which sides of an issue are right or wrong -- a requirement that would effectively ban the "scorecards" and voter guides published by NRLC and most other issue-oriented groups.
Analysis of this so-called "exemption" is now somewhat academic, however, when one considers that on February 25 -- the same date as his letter to you -- Senator McCain voted for the Snowe-Jeffords amendment to his bill, which was adopted. The Snowe-Jeffords amendment, among other things, entirely removed the so-called "exemption" that Sen. McCain cites in his letter. Sen. McCain was, in fact, a co-sponsor of this amendment. (See Congressional Record, Feb. 24, page S906, and Feb. 25, page S1000).(2) From NRLC's perspective, the removal of the "exemption" was of little consequence, since the "exemption" was hollow and served mainly a cosmetic purpose anyway. But for Senator McCain to defend his legislation by invoking the exemption clause, on the very day that he voted to remove that clause, is illustrative of the Senator's troubling reliance on misleading rhetorical assurances about grave substantive problems with his legislation.
Regrettably, for more than two years, Senator McCain has failed to substantively address the objections voiced by NRLC, the Christian Coalition, the ACLU, and many others, regarding the provisions of his bill that would undercut our First Amendment rights. His main tactic has been to launch ad hominem attacks on his critics, such as those contained in his letter to you, which referred to "officials at the National Right to Life Committee who appear increasingly less interested in the cause which they were organized to defend, and more interested in the pursuit of political power for its own sake."
However, NRLC will not be intimidated by such attacks from politicians who wish to regulate and ration our public discourse. There is too much at stake here. If citizen groups' communications to the public had been restricted over the past 25 years in the ways that Senator McCain has proposed in his bills, abortion would not be anything like the major public policy issue that it is today.
As you are well aware, ever since the Supreme Court handed down Roe v. Wade in 1973 there have been many attempts by various political elites, including major elements of the institutional news media, to declare that abortion is a "settled" issue. But efforts to impose such a false "consensus" have failed in this nation -- in large part because groups like NRLC have been free to transmit to the public very specific information about specific politicians' positions and votes. We respectfully submit that Senator McCain seriously misappropriated the words of Pope John Paul II regarding the undue influence of "financial power." The political influence of the pro-life movement in general, or NRLC in particular, is hardly based on "financial power." To the extent that NRLC has a measure of political influence, it rests primarily on success in providing information to pro-life citizens in a manner that allows them to effectively express their wishes to their elected representatives -- and/or to those elected representatives accountable at the ballot box. Of course, this does require a good deal of money -- most of it provided in donations from individual pro-life citizens averaging less than $30 -- but it also depends the tireless work of pro-life citizen activists, often working under the auspices of NRLC and our 3,000 local affiliates. To our mind, this army of dedicated volunteers represents precisely the sort of "political participation and civic spirit of the general public" of which Pope John Paul II spoke with approval.
Your Excellency, some other nations have legislatures that are elected under laws that severely restrict spending on communications to praise or criticize specific politicians. Such laws give the leaders of political parties and the news media more power to collectively exclude undesired issues, such as abortion, from the political realm.
For example, the pro-life movement in the United Kingdom has long been severely impeded by laws that essentially prohibited spending money to disseminate legislators' voting records. One such law, the 1983 "Representation of the People Act," banned spending more than 5 pounds on "advertisements, circulars or publications; or of otherwise presenting to the electors the candidate or his views." The British government repeatedly prosecuted and fined Phyllis Bowman, executive director of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC), for violating this law by daring to disseminate literature describing how specific politicians had voted on abortion and fetal experimentation.
Recently, Phyllis Bowman carried a challenge to the law to the European Court of Human Rights. The British government told the court that the law was necessary "to ensure that candidates remain independent of the influence of powerful interest groups" and to prevent "the political debate at election times from being distorted by having the discussion shifted away from matters of general concern to centre on single issues." These justifications echo those of many supporters of the McCain-Feingold bill and other proposals to restrict the free speech rights of citizen groups in the U.S.. These arguments were rejected by European Court on Human Rights, which ruled last month that the British law infringes on the "right to freedom of expression" guaranteed by the European human rights convention.
In the U.S., however, the right to communicate with the public regarding politicians' positions on issues has never been under greater assault. The McCain-Feingold bill failed in the Senate -- but a narrow majority of senators, including every Democrat, voted to advance it. The House of Representatives will take up "campaign reform" legislation, probably including speech-restrictive legislation, the week of March 23. Various state legislatures are also considering measures to restrict independent speech about politicians (and Senator McCain has vowed to travel from state to state to promote such legislation).
In all of these venues, and in the courts, NRLC will continue to vigorously oppose efforts by politicians to protect themselves from criticism under the guise of protecting "the public" from "special interests." In this endeavor, we ask for your support. If we fail, the American pro-life movement could find itself living under the type of restrictions that for so long shielded Britain's pro-abortion politicians from public accountability. The harm to our cause would be devastating.
We thank you for your consideration of NRLC's perspective on this issue. Please do not hesitate to contact us if you would like to receive detailed analyses of the McCain-Feingold bill and other pending legislative proposals.
Sincerely,
Wanda Franz, Ph.D.
President
David N. O'Steen, Ph.D.
Executive Director
Douglas Johnson
Legislative Director
(1)However, since much of Senator McCain's letter consists of statements regarding his pro-life record, we must briefly address that matter. Senator McCain does not have, as he asserted on the Senate floor on February 25, a "hundred percent pro-life voting record." He has consistently voted for federal funding of research involving transplantation of tissues or organs "harvested" from aborted babies, a policy opposed by NRLC and the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, among others. In addition, in 1995, despite opposition by NRLC and the NCCB, Senator McCain voted for an unsuccessful proposal (referred to by NRLC and other opponents as the "teen mother's child exclusion") intended to discourage any state from using federal welfare funds to provide cash assistance for the care of babies born to unwed teen mothers. (1995 Senate roll call no. 419)
John McCain has been a member of Congress since 1983. We have found no record, during this 15-year period, of any pro-life McCain amendment to any bill, nor of Mr. McCain stepping forward as an initiator or leader on any pro-life issue. We mention this only because various passages of Senator McCain's letter -- "I . . . yield to no member of Congress . . . in my support of legislation to protect the rights of the unborn," "our greatest concern [should be] the sanctity of human life," "ardent supporter of unborn children's right to life," etc., might have led you to believe otherwise. Having noted these necessary qualifications, Senator McCain's overall congressional voting record is that of an opponent to abortion, and we have never implied otherwise.
(2)Among other restrictions, the McCain-Feingold bill, as revised by the Snowe-Jeffords amendment, would flatly prohibit corporations that hold IRS 501(c)(3) status from sponsoring broadcast communications that mention the name of a member of Congress or other "candidate" within 30 days of a primary or 60 days of a general election -- even if the communication deals with an upcoming vote in Congress. [Such a rule would have "blacked out" grassroots lobbying broadcast communications by 501(c)(3) corporations prior to the September, 1996 House and Senate votes on President Clinton's veto of the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act.] The Snowe-Jeffords provision would also substantially restrict such communications by 501(c)(4) lobbying groups. These restrictions are in addition to other provisions of the McCain-Feingold bill itself that would apply to both print and broadcast communications at any time of the year.