Civil warrior, continued

text and photos by Ben Geman

In some ways, Bonifaz has benefited from the best of both his parents. Like his father, he's ventured into law and activism, but his strategy also draws from mother's teachings about how social-justice movements work. He understands, for instance, that the courts are only part of the equation. "Any legal movement has to be grounded in a grassroots movement," Bonifaz said after his speech at the clean-elections demonstration. "This is the core of making any kind of change happen."

By the numbers John Bonifaz and the National Voting Rights Institute want radical changes in an electoral system that consistently rewards the wealthiest candidates. Bonifaz also believes that the private election-finance system gives undue influence to monied donors at the expense of ordinary voters. But just how bad is the problem? The numbers below provides some examples of the high -- and rising -- admission price for office at the local, state, and federal levels. Boston: the most recent race for the Boston City Council shows that money helps determine who wins and who loses at the local level. After analyzing the 1999 Boston City Council election, the nonprofit Massachusetts Money in Politics Project found that: * in the at-large race -- that is, the race for the four seats selected by voters across the city -- the winning candidate spent an average of $115,358. By contrast, the average loser among those candidates who made it into November's final election spent $45,104. (These amounts do not include at-large candidate Andrea Morrell, who did not report campaign spending.) * in the district races for the seven contested seats, the average winner spent $40,696. Meanwhile, the average loser spent $22,147. It should be noted that some of the candidates faced only token opposition. Massachusetts: Figures compiled by the Massachusetts Money in Politics Project provide evidence that the "wealth primary" system prevails here. The group points out that candidates with spending advantages won 90 percent of state legislative elections and every statewide election in 1998. Its analysis also found that: * in contested races for the House of Representatives, the average winning candidates spent $38,729 in 1998. By contrast, the average losing candidate spent just $16,185. * in Senate campaigns, the differences are equally stark. In 1998's contested Senate elections, the average winning candidate spent $85,315. The average loser spent $35,938. The national picture: In federal elections, the wealth primary also dominates. That's true at the very top, where Texas governor George W. Bush's war chest scared off several challengers. The influence of wealth is made even clearer by examining trends in congressional races. Figures compiled by the Washington, DC-based Center for Responsive Politics show that: * in the 1998 elections, the higher-spending candidate failed to win in just 16 out of 435 races for the House of Representatives (44 of the races were unopposed). The same year, the higher-spending candidate won all but three of the 34 Senate races. * in 1998 races for the Senate, the winning candidate spent an average of $5,227,761. By contrast, the losing candidate spent an average of $2,839,813. * in 1998 races for the House of Representatives, the winning candidate spent an average of $650,428. The average losing candidate spent $210,614. -- Ben Geman

All of which has given Bonifaz some much-needed perspective on his battle to reform campaign finance. He's comfortable with the idea that full public financing or the collapse of Buckley v. Valeo may be decades away. Maybe the reason he's willing to wait is that he truly looks forward to living in a different kind of democracy. "What's wrong," he asks rhetorically, "with the coal miner, the teacher, the farmer running for president?" There's no hidden comfort with the establishment here.

THE EXPLICIT link between campaign finance and voting rights is about a decade old. In 1990, the connection between campaign finance and civil rights surfaced at a conference of the Working Group on Electoral Democracy. At that conference, civil-rights veteran Gwen Patton described the need to rid politics of private money as the "unfinished business of the voting-rights movement."

"That clearly captured the essence of the challenge, which was to think entirely differently about this issue and see it as part of the continuing struggle for an equal and meaningful vote for all citizens," says Bonifaz. He wasn't there, but a paper sparked by the conference caught his attention, and he went on to write his third-year law-school thesis on election financing. A few years later, while working at the Washington, DC-based Center for Responsive Politics, he expanded the issue and co-authored a paper on the wealth primary that serves as the basis for much of the National Voting Rights Institute's work.

Although campaign finance is often battled on First Amendment grounds, Bonifaz has expanded the debate. He sees the wealth primary on a continuum with other historical barriers to voting and running for office -- barriers such as property ownership, race, and gender (see "At the Ballot Box," page 18). One day, Bonifaz hopes, the wealth requirement for seeking office will also fall. Ellen Miller, director of the Washington, DC-based Public Campaign, a group that supports public financing for elections, credits Bonifaz's analysis with helping reshape the money-in-politics issue. "Most had thought of [campaign finance] as a sort of `good government' issue," says Miller, under whom Bonifaz worked when both were at the Center for Responsive Politics in the early 1990s. "He was the first to frame it as an issue of equality and ethics."

In discussing the influence of money over politics, Bonifaz likes to bring up the example of Annie Harper, a poor Virginian who, during the civil-rights movement, successfully challenged the state's "poll taxes," which were used to prevent blacks from voting. He talks about the Jaybird Democratic Association of Texas, which allowed only white voters to nominate primary candidates until the Supreme Court squashed the practice in 1953. That was a cousin to a series of cases targeting the "white primaries," which were knocked down by court decisions in the 1920s, '30s, and '40s. It's no coincidence, he says, that "wealth primary" sounds like "white primary."

Although meaningful campaign-finance reform has been elusive at the federal level, state-level reforms are providing some good models. Clean-elections laws have been approved in four states -- one being Massachusetts, where advocates fear the legislature will gut key provisions of the bill before it can be enacted. The others are Vermont, Maine, and Arizona. The various laws set forth a combination of spending limits and comprehensive public financing. They also contain provisions that encourage candidates to raise money through small contributions and discourage the influence of private "independent expenditure" campaigns and money from outside the candidate's district or state. The number of such laws could expand this year, as clean-elections proposals will go to the voters in Missouri and Oregon. Bonifaz believes that the recent clean-elections statutes passed in Maine, Massachusetts, and elsewhere will eventually prove that a publicly financed election system can work. "More and more candidates will see it's far better for them to engage in meeting with voters, talking about their ideas and visions . . . rather than going around to cocktail receptions," he says.

Today, the National Voting Rights Institute is involved in about half a dozen campaign-finance court cases around the country. It helped successfully defend Maine's clean-elections law on behalf of activists in that state, making arguments as a "friend of the court," and it defended a Cincinnati law limiting candidate expenditures, which was shot down. The group's most ambitious work may be in North Carolina, where the institute is working with several other groups on a lawsuit alleging that private election financing violates the equal-protection rights guaranteed by the state constitution. The lawsuit calls for replacing the current system with public financing. The case, filed late last year, embodies two key aspects of the strategy employed by Bonifaz and his allies: pushing for radical change in campaign finance, and winning it through the courts rather than merely pushing legislation.

In this sense, the voting-rights institute is a battering ram of sorts against the status quo. "They are the legal shock troops that press the courts to defend good laws and rewrite old decisions that get in the way of real reform," says David Donnelly, a friend of Bonifaz and director of Massachusetts Voters for Clean Elections, which led the successful 1998 state referendum that created a public-financing system for state elections.

A lot of people work on campaign finance, but it may be Bonifaz who has a mind sharp enough to make real headway. Eventually. "By pushing over and over and over again, I think that he may one day persuade the court that he is right, which would be a revolutionary change in the way the courts have been thinking about the role of money in politics," says E. Joshua Rosenkranz, head of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, another group advocating for the Supreme Court to revisit the Buckley decision.

"I don't think the court is ready for it now," he adds. "But the court was not ready to abolish `separate but equal' for many decades either."

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Ben Geman can be reached at bgeman[a]phx.com.