Both publicizing and regulating donations

[Wendy King <wking@mailhost.tcs.tulane.edu>]

If you support only publicizing, but not regulating, campaign donations, you send the message that while educating voters about who benefits from donations is important, regulating those donations is not. Many would argue that regulating (and restricting) soft money donations violates contributors' first-amendment rights, by telling them to whom, and under what circumstances, they can donate money. I disagree. The reason campaign finance reform is so important is that the large amounts of soft money donated to political campaigns consistently skew the candidates' political positions to favor those who have given them the largest amounts of money.