Eric Rasmusen’s Weblog

OpinionJournal has an interesting op-ed on how the Pew Trust tried to get Congress to think there was popular demand for the campaign-finance “reform” that led to the big role of millionaire money in the 2004 election:

Mr. Treglia urged grantees to keep Pew’s role hush-hush. “If Congress thought this was a Pew effort,” he confided, “it’d be worthless. It’d be 20 million bucks thrown down the drain.” At one point, late in the congressional debate over McCain-Feingold, “we had a scare,” Mr. Treglia said. “George Will stumbled across a report we had done. . . . He started to reference the fact that Pew was playing a large role . . . [and] that it was a liberal attempt to hoodwink Congress. . . . The good news, from my perspective, was that journalists . . . just didn’t care and nobody followed up.” The hoaxers–a conspiracy of eight left-wing foundations, including George Soros’s Open Society Institute and the Ford Foundation–have actually spent $123 million trying to get other people’s money out of politics since 1994, Mr. Sager reports–nearly 90% of the spending by the entire campaign-finance lobby over this period.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 27th, 2006 at 5:32 am and is filed under G406: Reg, Economics, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.