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Cato Policy Report, November/December 1997

Cato Scholars a Presence on Capitol Hill

Campaign Finance, Social Security, Global Warming, and Medical Marijuana

As members of Congress returned from their summer break, Cato scholars were there to remind them of the importance of market-liberal principles.

Cato's president Ed Crane; Roger Pilon , director of Cato's Center for Constitutional Studies; and Cato adjunct scholar Bradley A. Smith testified on the need to deregulate, not tighten the controls on, campaign finance. Crane, testifying before the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee , pointed out that "there is a very dangerous precedent set by acting on the hysterical desire to take money out of politics. The people in this country have a constitutional right to petition their government. If we succumb to this misinformed, misguided hysteria, is the next step to take the media out of politics? To not let the press report on politics because we're sick of reading all the horse-race stories?" Smith told members of the Subcommittee on the Constitution of the House Judiciary Committee that "the First Amendment exists to prevent the government from attempting to distinguish 'legitimate' from 'nonlegitimate' commentary on public issues. As one commentator has noted, no nation has ever succeeded in creating a 'benign political police.'"

Cato also hosted a September 10th Policy Forum on Capitol Hill to discuss the constitutional implications of campaign finance reform. Among the speakers were Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.); Laura Murphy of the American Civil Liberties Union; and Lillian BeVier, author of the recent Cato paper "Campaign Finance 'Reform' Proposals: A First Amendment Analysis." McConnell later cited BeVier's paper in debate on the floor of the Senate and entered it in the Congressional Record.

On September 25th, as Crane testified before Sen. Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.), José Piñera, co-chairman of the Cato Project on Social Security Privatization, was on the order side of the Capitol discussing Chile's successful transition to a privatized pension system . He reported that "since Chile privatized its system on May 1, 1981, the average real return on investment has been 12 percent a year, more than three times higher than the anticipated yield."

Cato's chairman William A. Niskanen discussed the economics of a global warming treaty before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. He told committee members that "the costs of doing nothing appear to be quite small, while the costs of a commitment to limit the emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere appear to be very large. A global warming treaty in the next decade or so would be a rush to judgement."

Before the Subcommittee on Crime of the House Judiciary Committee, Pilon chided officeholders who selectively trumpet the importance of the Tenth Amendment in testimony on medical marijuana referenda . "For more than two decades the federalism movement has been calling for returning power to the states and, even more, to the people--which is nothing less than a call for restoring constitutional government in this nation," stated Pilon. "The medical marijuana referenda movement is a small part of that larger effort, but it brings to the fore the hypocrisy of those who invoke federalism selectively for their own political purposes. Federalism is a neutral principle. It applies to all issues, including this one."

This article originally appeared in the November/December 1997 edition of Cato Policy Report.