Although I like Sen. McCain for a lot of reasons, I absolutely despise his part in the so-called "campaign finance reform" of McCain-Feingold. In an attempt to remove money from influencing campaigns, they instead allowed money to have an even greater impact in campaigns through the use of "bundlers" like Norman Hsu, the Pioneers and Hillraisers just to name a few. And that's not counting every darn 527 organization that wants to poke its head into the fray.
Trying to get money's influence out of a campaign is like trying to stop the Mississippi. There is just too much pressure, and it will always find a way around any obstacle that you put in front of it. Does anyone think that capping the amount that you can give is really effective when you have people like Hsu and Feiger who hand the individual donations over as a lump sum. Those bundlers have much more influence than their individual donations, and yet we know almost nothing about them.
My proposal is to take all caps off of contributions, but make known each and every donor. In this way, it becomes obvious who is trying to buy access to a candidate. But I would also recommend a change to the law like I saw in Germany: No campaigning more than 60 days before an election.
This is not really an infringement on 1st Amendment rights, since the SCOTUS has already held that restrictions can be permitted. But what it would do, is to limit the amount of money that could be spent just based on time.
Plus, it would only annoy me for 60 days, instead of the perpetual campaign that we now have to suffer under.
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