91麻豆天美app

By John Diaz
Editorial Page Editor, San Francisco Chronicle

Ann Ravel, vice chair of the Federal Election Commission, forced herself to pause for a quick primer on Watergate during a recent talk on money in politics. She acknowledged that some of the audience members at Cal State East Bay were too young to recall the hearings that riveted the nation for weeks in the summer of 1973. For others, the upshot of those revelations may have become lost in the haze of history.

"Most people think it was about the burglars, and it was about the cover-up and it was about President Nixon resigning," Ravel told the forum, sponsored by the League of Women Voters. "But, really, at its heart it was about campaign finance. That's what it was about. It was about people going with bags of money to the White House. And, of course, the bags of money at that time contained $250,000, which today is chump change. Right?"

Yes, it does seem almost quaint in comparison with the $400 million in "dark money" - contributions made outside of the disclosure and donation limits - on presidential, Senate and House races in the 2012 election cycle. The U.S. Supreme Court's landmark Citizens United all but eviscerated the principles of the post-Watergate reforms: that the amount of any single contributor's donation should be limited and the source of the money should be transparent. The justices said individuals, corporations, labor unions and other interest groups had a right to spend as much as they wished for or against a candidate as a matter of free speech.

The money flowed to an unprecedented degree in 2012, in enormous chunks (casino tycoon Sheldon Adelson spent an estimated $91 million) and, in many cases, without disclosure of the source.

Does anyone besides Ravel, who was a law student at the time, remember Watergate?

"That really got people angry," she said during her May 12 talk, which I moderated. "It created an amazing sort of widespread distrust of government. People believed then that the political process was corrupt and for sale to the highest bidder. This is what led to campaign finance reform."

Harry Rosenfeld certainly remembers Watergate. He was editor overseeing local news when two of his reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, broke open the Watergate scandal.

In the 1976 film "All the President's Men" (in which Rosenfeld's character was played by Jack Warden), a secret source whose newsroom nickname was "Deep Throat" advised Woodward that the key to unraveling the web of corruption was to "follow the money."

In an appearance for his new book ("From Kristallnacht to Watergate") at the Jewish Community Center in Los Gatos on Thursday night, Rosenfeld allowed that the famous mantra was not an exact quote. But Deep Throat's compass proved true: Money facilitated the wrongdoing and its trail led to the wrongdoers, ultimately in the White House itself.

In our on-stage conversation, I asked Rosenfeld about whether the lessons and reforms of Watergate were being lost in the aftermath of Citizens United, and a recent follow-up high court ruling that struck down a $123,200 overall limit on direct contributions to political parties and federal candidates. Now that that limit is gone, a single contributor can donate more than $3.5 million in a single election cycle.

"They're not being lost, they're being reversed - consciously reversed," Rosenfeld said. He suggested the majority opinion that money equals speech was a "farcical statement," especially for the conservative judges who claim to be "strict constructionists" in narrowly interpreting the U.S. Constitution.

"Read the Constitution: Show me where it says there's a relationship between money and free speech ... well, if it isn't in the Constitution and they imposed it on this country, they're not upholding their oath of office," he added.