The controversial bill would ban the campaign finance loophole known as soft-money contributions; classify “sham issue ads” as campaign ads, thus requiring legal, “hard” dollars; and improve Federal Election Commission disclosure and enforcement, among other things.

(Soft-money contributions are donations to political parties, rather than individual candidates, and there is no limit on them. “Sham issue ads” are ads attacking a politician that purportedly
address issues rather than supporting a campaign, but in practice clearly advocate one candidate over another. Since they aren’t paid for by the campaign, the ads are not subject to contribution limits or disclosure requirements.)

This year’s debate was anti-climactic, according to GOP insiders. One leadership aide noted that last year, debate over the bill was much more vigorous, as members worried about how the final vote would go and how the result might affect their reelection chances.

The last time around, the GOP leadership, under then-Speaker Newt Gingrich, put up a host of roadblocks for the would-be reformers. “We had all those wacky rules,” the aide recalled. “All sorts of hoops and crazy things Shays-Meehan had to jump through, all those non-germane amendments.” Debate grew testy.

By contrast, “This year everybody was already locked in,” the aide said. “Outside of think tanks and editorial boards, where they might think otherwise, it’s pretty boring up here tonight. It’s a real snoozer. You got a handful of guys out there talking themselves silly, but attendance on the floor is pretty sparse.”

While agreeing that Wednesday’s debate “was more low-key” than last year’s battle, Shays maintains that “there was a very real effort to kill it. But the people who voted for it last year held firm and stood their ground.”

The debate over the bill — led by the soft-spoken Shays, the professorial Rep. Tom Campbell, R-Calif., and the fiery Zach Wamp, R-Tenn. — lasted almost until midnight. The three reformer Republicans were joined by Democrat Meehan — whose job was considerably easier than that of his GOP counterparts, because House Democrats marched in lockstep in favor of the bill. (Although it could be fairly observed, of course, that House Democrats had at least half a century to act on the issue and didn’t really seem to care about changing the system — until they lost control of the House in ’94.)

The Shays-Meehan team faced some powerful opposition, led by Majority Whip Tom DeLay, R-Texas, Rules Committee Chairman David Dreier, R-Calif., and House Administration Chairman Bill Thomas, R-Calif.

Opponents cast the Shays-Meehan bill as a strike against the First Amendment guarantee of free speech. “It continues to amaze me that members of Congress, newspapers and ‘senior scholars’ continue to advocate limiting free speech and prohibiting citizens from criticizing government officials in the name of ‘campaign reform,’” DeLay said on the floor of the House. “This is the mother of all government regulation and control over the political process. The Shays-Meehan bill will erect a Byzantine set of laws and over 275 new government regulations that will gag citizens’ speech.”

Additionally, Shays’ opponents continually cited the Buckley vs. Valeo Supreme Court decision, in which the court ruled that “the First Amendment denies government the power to determine that spending to promote one’s political views is wasteful, excessive or unwise.”

Realizing that that decision was an issue, Shays’ team relied on Campbell, a Stanford University constitutional law professor and resident expert, who assured them that their bill would hold up to judicial review.

In the end, Tuesday’s debate gave a temporary sense of closure to Shays, who has been slaving away at this seemingly Sisyphean task all year, at times possibly risking his job in the process.

Debate on the measure began shortly after lunchtime on Tuesday — a sunny, breezy day that must have tempted dozens of lawmakers to leave the stuffy, stodgy confines of the House floor (although, truth be told, plenty of members probably would have preferred being swept up in Hurricane Floyd’s torrential rains to being stuck inside, debating how to change the very campaign system that got them there).

Shays and his team didn’t seem even remotely beckoned by the outdoor splendor, however, as they fought off all the last-minute attempts to undermine their bill. Though the House leadership was finally allowing a vote on the measure, it also was allowing votes on 10 amendments and three substitute bills. The Shays team regarded many of the proposed amendments as so-called “poison pills” that would split the coalition supporting the bill and effectively kill it.

“We didn’t know what would happen on the amendments,” Shays said. “We were apprehensive.”

The first two were offered by Rep. Edward Whitfield, a Kentucky Republican who tried to triple the individual contribution limit, from $1,000 to $3,000, and the aggregate contribution limit, from the current $25,000 to $75,000. Plenty of Shays-Meehan supporters had no problem with increasing such limits, which were established during the post-Watergate campaign finance reform era and have yet to be adjusted.

But adding such provisions to the bill would have peeled away Democrat support and split the Shays-Meehan coalition. In the end, both of Whitfield’s amendments were defeated by overwhelming margins of roughly 3-to-1.

Shays was especially nervous about the next amendment, offered by Rep. John Doolittle, R-Calif., which targeted the “sham ad” provision of his bill. Doolittle’s amendment would have removed print and Internet advertisements that mention a candidate’s vote from categorization as election ads.

When Doolittle offered this amendment in the last Congress, it nearly passed, with 201 yeas to 219 nays. The Shays team got a better spread this year; when Doolittle’s legislation was defeated, 129-189, they all breathed a little easier.

The next amendment, offered by Nebraska Republican Doug Bereuter, would outlaw campaign contributions from anyone who is not a U.S. citizen, including legal permanent residents and “citizens in training.”

Some supporters of Shays-Meehan suspected that the Bereuter provision would be found to be unconstitutional. They therefore suspected that it could work as a judicial “poison pill” — especially if passed in tandem with an amendment from Illinois Republican Thomas Ewing, whose amendment would have negated Shays-Meehan in its entirety if any portion of the bill were to be struck down by the Supreme Court.

Bereuter’s amendment passed last year and was attached to the Shays-Meehan bill. It passed this year as well.

But Ewing’s amendment was slapped down, 259-167.

Delegate Eni F.H. Faleomavaega, a Democrat who represents American Samoa, emerged to clarify that Bereuter’s amendment did not deny the right of U.S. nationals — citizens of American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands — to make campaign contributions. Faleomavaega’s clarification was quickly adopted on a voice vote.

Rep. Clay Shaw, R-Fla., had been scheduled to present an amendment requiring candidates to raise at least 50 percent of their contributions from within their home state. But Hurricane Floyd necessitated Shaw’s attentions elsewhere, and he had California Republican Ken Calvert present the legislation for him.

“When you have to primarily rely on money from outside your home state, you no longer need to listen to the needs and concerns of your own constituents,” said Calvert.

“That’s an amendment I could support,” Shays said
afterward. “I get 96-plus percent of my money from in-state. But urban members don’t get 50 percent of their contributions from within state,” so again, the amendment would have split the Shays-Meehan coalition.

In the end, members of the House again refused to swallow the poison pill; Calvert’s amendment was defeated, 248-179.

The lawmakers did the same with a DeLay provision that would have
exempted Internet campaign activities from most election guidelines. DeLay’s Internet amendment died, 268-160.

Shays said he was “surprised” at the pulverizing DeLay’s amendment received. “The numbers of votes defeating the amendments were larger than I anticipated,” he said. “They weren’t even close.”

The one somewhat controversial amendment to pass, in fact, was an entirely irrelevant one from New York freshman Republican John Sweeney, who — with a certain first lady in mind — offered legislation to require non-federal office holders who use federal government transportation for campaign activities to reimburse the government for the full cost.

“It’s a mean-spirited, petty, politically partisan charged amendment that has nothing to do” with campaign finance reform, pointed out the somewhat daffy Upper East Side Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y.

That may be, but it passed, 261-167. Sorry, Hillary.

Having cleared the amendment hurdles, the Shays-Meehan bill was next threatened by three proposed substitute bills.

First came Doolittle’s “Full Disclosure Act,” an ideologically pure piece of libertarianism that would have eliminated all limits on campaign contributions while simultaneously requiring full and immediate disclosure.

Doolittle pointed out that former presidential candidate “Clean” Gene McCarthy was only able to scare Lyndon Johnson away from running for reelection in 1968 by raising $1 million from only 10 or so contributors — which he would never have been able to accomplish under the current congressional campaign finance laws. Doolittle said that targeting soft money was like a doctor addressing a symptom instead of the disease. We need a whole new set of laws, he argued, a completely new campaign finance system.

“We may be there someday,” Rep. Brian Bilbray, a fellow California Republican, reassured his colleague. “But we have Shays-Meehan in front of us … Before we try to scrap the old system and move on to a new one, let’s try to fix the old system.” Doolittle’s substitute was demolished, 306-117, with almost 100 of his fellow Republicans opposing it.

Folksy Arkansas Republican Rep. Asa Hutchinson then took center stage with his proposed substitute, born from the efforts of his work with three fellow Class of ’96 Republicans: class president Kenny Hulshof of Missouri, Kevin Brady of Texas and Rick Hill of Montana.

The Hutchinson alternative, which they called the “Campaign Integrity Act,” was built and sold from a foundation of pragmatics.
Hutchinson said that he and his fellow crafters abided by three principles: avoiding the extremes of the issue, abiding by the Constitution and, most importantly, being realistic about what could pass not only the House but the Senate. Shays-Meehan passed the House last year, but was basically filibustered to death in the Senate.

“You cannot get a better product,” Hutchinson implored his colleagues.

“We’re little like the girl next door,” seconded Brady. “When you tire of chasing the prom queen, the Hutchinson substitute is here.”

Argued Hulshof, most pointedly, “The definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over again and expect different results.” He called Shays-Meehan an “act of futility.”

But pragmatism was a tough sell on a night when lofty ideals were in the air. While Hutchinson’s bill would have banned federal soft money, it wouldn’t have touched soft money at the state level; and while it would have indexed contribution limits to the rate of inflation and strengthened the rules for disclosing such information to the public, it wouldn’t have touched “sham issue ads.” The Hutchinson bill was shot down, 327-99.

Hutchinson did a good job of presenting his bill as the common-sense alternative, Shays conceded, but in the end, “It had gigantic loopholes.”

Thomas, the House administration chairman, then provided his reformist measures, all of which seemed legit. Thomas’ bill would have made sweeping FEC reforms, including initiating election-year — rather than calendar-year — filing cycles; requiring suspicious contributions to be placed in a special FEC account; and prohibiting foreign nationals from contributing soft money (the latter two of which Shays-Meehan would accomplish as well).

But though many Shays-Meehan supporters voiced support for Thomas’ proposals, they also argued that none of them amounted to a sum total that was enough to replace the reform bill they were supporting. Thomas’ substitute was mashed, 256-173.

And then, finally, at 11: 40 p.m., came the anticlimax. After months and months of marinating in his angst, Shays was finally able to finally get a vote on his bill.

And it passed, 252-177.

“It’s pretty stunning to have maintained this incredible amount of bipartisan support,” Shays said in a phone interview right after the win. “And to have done it in the first year of the session rather than in the second! It’s very, very gratifying.”

He sounded jubilant, and completely drained.

Of course, now a new battle begins in the Senate — the elephant’s graveyard of House reform bills.

But the optimistic Shays says that it won’t be so easy for the Senate to kill campaign finance reform this time around.

“Last time, it was right before the ’98 election. What’s different now is they have a whole year until the next election, so they’ll have to bury it for a whole year.”

Shays also points out that last year’s campaign finance reform bill — sponsored then, as now, by Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Russ Feingold, D-Wis. — was voted on the day after the Starr Report came out. “It was a different environment,” Shays says.

McHenry has been one of the most completely shameless of House Republicans since his arrival in Congress, in 2005, when he immediately and publicly endorsed Tom DeLay’s brilliant plan to exempt himself from ethics rules as his connections to Jack Abramoff began to end his career. But he was born to be cheerfully corrupt: He’s a product of the College Republicans, an organization that trains little Lee Atwaters, Karl Roves and Grover Norquists in the arts of scorched-earth campaigning and wholly irresponsible “governing” on behalf of the monied interests that bought you your job. The ethos is win by any means necessary, legal or quasi-legal (or worse, as long as you never get caught), and McHenry was very good at that, according to Benjamin Wallace-Wells’ memorable profile of the then-freshman in the Washington Monthly.

After the College Republicans, and a failed state legislature race, McHenry moved on to truly insidious conservative astroturfing/push-polling/communications firm DCI, then worked for Rove, then took a political appointment in the Bush administration, then moved to the district he now represents, where he started a real estate company that did not actually buy or sell any real estate, so that he could run for Congress as “a small businessman.”

Once in the United States House of Representatives, McHenry personally intervened in a wild and bloody College Republican National Committee chair election, on behalf of a personal friend of his who’d become slightly toxic after he sent fundraising letters attempting to trick “elderly people with dementia” into donating to the CRNC. And he was successful! The horrible kid won, against all odds:

In other phone calls, McHenry was more blunt: “He told me, and several of my friends that we were done in politics if we didn’t support him,” another College Republican chapter president told me. (McHenry has admitted that he and Deans made the calls but denied that they threatened anyone’s career). Over the course of two weeks, after a couple of a dozen calls, McHenry prevailed upon those in the North Carolina delegation to change their votes, removing three votes from Davidson’s column and putting them in Gourley’s. Gourley ended up winning by six votes; had North Carolina voted the other way, Davidson might have won.

Another of McHenry’s first acts in Congress, Wallace-Wells writes, was to champion a bill that was specifically written to rip off a large portion of his constituents, by making it “much harder for government to regulate or block the conversion of credit unions into banks …” He is a close ally of major consumer financial institutions with a plum assignment to the Committee on Financial Services, which is great for raising money.

It’s only natural that Elizabeth Warren, whose mission is to protect consumers from unethical and predatory practices by these institutions, is Patrick McHenry’s enemy. You can complain on his Facebook wall all you like, but the Republican from North Carolina is incapable of feeling embarrassment.

And his treatment of Warren will only make him a bigger conservative hero and an even more attractive investment opportunity for major banks.

The charges arose after DeLay set up a PAC to funnel corporate money, which is barred in Texas elections, to candidates for the state legislature. The group raised $190,000 and funneled it through the national Republican Party, which then distributed the money to several state-level candidates in Texas.

To learn more about the case that brought DeLay down, I spoke with Lou Dubose, who co-authored “The Hammer,” a biography of DeLay. The former editor of the Texas Observer and the current editor of the Washington Spectator newsletter, Dubose covered the trial gavel to gavel in Austin. He was in the courtroom on Monday when DeLay gave a lengthy presentencing speech accusing prosecutors of having political motivations and claiming he had $10 million in legal bills. 

I asked Dubose whether DeLay, who is planning an appeal, will ever see the inside of a jail cell, and whether the former majority leader appears humbled by the ordeal of the trial.  The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Did you ever think that you would see this happen?

I really didn’t. This was a working class jury, and I think that made a huge difference.

What was the dynamic with the jury — why did that make a difference?

Gary Cobb, the assistant DA who tried the case, really dragged out the $50,000 checks and the flights on corporate jets with the same persons who had written the checks to DeLay’s PAC. The sort of life that Tom DeLay lived at the expense of the corporate lobby — I think that really made an impact. By their clothes and what we know about them, it was a real working-class jury.

Oddly enough, Tom DeLay spent the entire duration of the three-week trial in a motor home rather than the Four Seasons. He drove his motor coach over here and checked into a motor home park in south Austin, a long way from where he was playing golf at Saint Andrews in Scotland. Then there was also the fact of the way the DeLays dressed, the fact that Reverend Rick Scarborough was sitting behind them. There was a lot of bling there that these people on the jury didn’t have.

Was it possible to tell where the $190,000 ended up? Did it just go to the state GOP?

The money came back, and it went to the candidates in Texas for whom it was designated. The backstory, of course, is that the Republicans controlled everything in Texas but the statehouse. Therefore they could not control redistricting. So DeLay set this organization up in 2001 for the 2002 election and they had to win a majority in the house. They moved this $190,000 up to D.C. because they were specifically raising corporate money, which was easier to raise. They sent it to Washington with specific instructions to send it back to these designated candidates. The candidates got the checks in the exact amount of $190,000.

And DeLay personally raised the money?

Well, that was the question. He stayed in the background but the state proved that he was aware that that transaction had happened. He was probably involved in directing it, although they didn’t have direct testimony on that. They put the three men who did the money-laundering in a room together in Sugar Land, Texas, in DeLay’s district, before the transaction was made.

Remarkably, at one point in the trial, DeLay went out and talked to Laylan Copelin of the Austin American-Statesman, who is a really terrific reporter. And Laylan asked him if he could have stopped the transaction. And DeLay said, “I could have stopped it, but why would I?”

And that was used in the trial?

In the middle of the trial, the state called Laylan Copelin as a witness — really bizarre. He’d been sitting there most of the trial; two weeks into the trial they call him as a witness because of what DeLay had said. His story ran, and two days later he was on the stand testifying as to what he had been told.

So I think DeLay proved to be a terrible client for a storied criminal defense attorney, Dick DeGuerin. That said, the state did an incredible job putting on a case that had to be by nature largely circumstantial.

Do you think he will ever spend a day in jail?

No. Simply because the Court of Criminal Appeals is an elected court, it’s all Republican, it’s highly political. It’s known as a prosecutors’ court, but in this case I would bet that they’re going to rule for the defendant. The Third Court of Appeals, where the appeal will start, is also a Republican court.

What are the issues in the appeal?

These courts are going to have to find a creative way of setting Tom DeLay free. One argument that they once made that they might try to revive is that money-laundering didn’t apply to checks, it applied to cash. This involved checks. The problem with that at the appellate level is that there have been a number of convictions based on money laundering with checks. So are you going to overturn all these prior convictions in order to save Tom DeLay?

What is DeLay doing these days?

You know, nothing. He is struggling to remain relevant. DeLay was always the star at CPAC, the annual conservative conference in Washington. But he hasn’t been allowed to speak there. Two years ago at CPAC, he was trolling for interviews. At the last CPAC convention, he was shunned.

He’s become a pariah to the Republican Party, and I don’t quite understand why. The true believers hold him responsible, rightly, for the Bush Medicare prescription drug bill, which DeLay pushed through. But he’s of no use to them anymore, and he’s not wanted. So most of what he does is struggle to remain relevant, and he’s not. Dick DeGuerin, in his closing argument, said “This prosecution has rendered my client unemployable.” And to my knowledge, he’s not employed.

His media statements have been defiant, but has he changed?

I don’t think so. That’s what’s remarkable. This is the same Tom DeLay that I saw every day for a year and a half when I followed him in Washington. It seemed to me that it never occurred to him that he no longer had the power that he once exercised. He had no regrets — he’s the same guy, except that he’s driving in a motor home instead of sleeping in the Four Seasons.

“This is an abuse of power. It’s a miscarriage of justice, and I still maintain that I am innocent. The criminalization of politics undermines our very system and I’m very disappointed in the outcome,” DeLay told reporters outside the courtroom. He remains free on bond, and his sentencing was tentatively set to begin on Dec. 20.

Prosecutors said DeLay, who once held the No. 2 job in the House of Representatives and whose heavy-handed style earned him the nickname “the Hammer,” used his political action committee to illegally channel $190,000 in corporate donations into 2002 Texas legislative races through a money swap.

DeLay and his attorneys maintained the former Houston-area congressman did nothing wrong as no corporate funds went to Texas candidates and the money swap was legal.

The verdict came after a three-week trial in which prosecutors presented more than 30 witnesses and volumes of e-mails and other documents. DeLay’s attorneys presented five witnesses.

Prosecutors said DeLay conspired with two associates, John Colyandro and Jim Ellis, to use his Texas-based PAC to send $190,000 in corporate money to an arm of the Washington-based Republican National Committee, or RNC. The RNC then sent the same amount to seven Texas House candidates. Under Texas law, corporate money can’t go directly to political campaigns.

Prosecutors claim the money helped Republicans take control of the Texas House. That enabled the GOP majority to push through a Delay-engineered congressional redistricting plan that sent more Texas Republicans to Congress in 2004 — and strengthened DeLay’s political power.

DeLay’s attorneys argued the money swap resulted in the seven candidates getting donations from individuals, which they could legally use in Texas.

They also said DeLay only lent his name to the PAC and had little involvement in how it was run. Prosecutors, who presented mostly circumstantial evidence, didn’t prove he committed a crime, they said.

DeLay has chosen to have Senior Judge Pat Priest sentence him. He faces five years to life in prison on the money laundering charge and two to 20 years on the conspiracy charge. He also would be eligible for probation.

The 2005 criminal charges in Texas, as well as a separate federal investigation of DeLay’s ties to disgraced former lobbyist Jack Abramoff, ended his 22-year political career representing suburban Houston. The Justice Department probe into DeLay’s ties to Abramoff ended without any charges filed against DeLay.

Ellis and Colyandro, who face lesser charges, will be tried later.

Except for a 2009 appearance on ABC’s hit television show “Dancing With the Stars,” DeLay has been out of the spotlight since resigning from Congress in 2006. He now runs a consulting firm based in the Houston suburb of Sugar Land.