Last week, the two men joined forces to try to muscle House members into voting for the legislation, which would ban unregulated "soft money" contributions to national parties. (It totaled $487 million in the 2000 election.) Gephardt worked the phones to stanch hemorrhaging by Democrats, who provide the bulk of support for the bill. McCain, who shepherded a similar measure through the Senate last April, targeted some 40 GOP congressmen who've backed reform in the past. His Straight Talk America PAC, for example, sent e- mails to 200,000 supporters across the country urging them to flood the congressional offices with phone calls.
Each man also had his own style behind closed doors. Thursday morning, with the first vote on the bill just hours away, McCain raced his car to the Capitol Hill Club to crash a breakfast meeting Environmental Protection Agency Director Christine Todd Whitman was having with a group of GOP congressmen. As Whitman droned on about Bush's environmental policy, all eyes in the room shifted to McCain who darted from table to table extracting whispered pledges of support from four moderates. Three blocks away, Gephardt huddled with Democrats in a packed basement room off the House chamber, waving a news story reporting that the National Republican Congressional Committee had raked in $39 million the first six months of this year, twice what its Democratic counterpart collected. Republicans are winning the money chase and unless Democrats halt it with campaign reforms, "we're going to loose" seats in the House Gephardt agrued. "That's the bottom line."
To try to keep 56 members of the Hispanic and Congressional Black Caucuses from defecting, the bill's chief sponsors, Republican Christopher Shays and Democrat Martin Meehan, added last-minute sweeteners to allow these groups to raise some soft money for their get-out-the-vote programs. But House Speaker Dennis Hastert had managed to drain support for the Shays-Meehan bill with a substitute drafted by GOP Rep. Robert Ney which capped soft-money donations to national parties at $75,000. With the outcome too close to call, Hastert ordered the Rules Committee to rig the floor procedure for considering the measure so that Shays and Meehan faced 22 potentially hostile amendments (including the Ney bill as a substitute) before they could have a final vote on their bill.
Democrats cried foul. "They get 22 shots at our bill and none at theirs," Gephardt told me Thursday morning. Knowing they probably couldn't survive the fusillade, Gephardt mobilized to defeat the "rule," which governed floor activity. He could count on practically all Democrats supporting a procedural vote the party's leadership wanted. But to win, some Republicans had to be convinced to defy their Speaker, a heresy Hastert wouldn't forget. McCain dialed up the pressure. At one point he hauled seven GOP congressmen into Gephardt's Capitol office and, looking each one in the eye, asked if they'd "vote against the rule." Each said yes.
Nineteen Republicans eventually defected and the rule was defeated 228-203. In the arcane wars of the House, this was a victory for Gephardt and a stinging blow for Hastert. But Hastert, who controls what legislation gets to the floor, held the trump card for the moment, announcing that he had "no plan to bring up this bill now." But with 19 GOP rebels now in his camp, Gephardt will pressure Hastert this week to change his mind. If Hastert doesn't, Gephardt will try to get a majority of House members to sign a "discharge petition," which can force a vote on a bill the leadership refuses to bring to the floor. Gephardt used discharge petitions to force the House to pass campaign reform in 1998 and 1999. The pressure on him to deliver again now increases — as it does for McCain. If both decide to run for president, they'll need the bragging rights.