Editorial: Voluntary caps on spending must be enforced

The Undergraduate Students Association Council did a service to
UCLA students Tuesday by voting to include voluntary spending caps
in this year’s USAC election. Although the policy of
voluntary spending caps has some inherent weaknesses, USAC’s
decision is a good, preventative measure to stop money from
steering elections away from the pertinent student issues.

Though previously functioning under mandatory spending caps,
USAC called for voluntary caps instead because the regional U.S.
District Court recently ruled that imposing mandatory spending
limits on student government campaigns is unconstitutional. The
case involved students at two other University of California
campuses ““ Irvine and Riverside. Candidates for student
government offices at both campuses were disqualified after
exceeding university-set mandatory spending limits.

The District Court based its recent decision on the 1976 Supreme
Court case Buckley v. Valeo, where the high court held spending
limits in violation of First Amendment free speech rights. However,
the Supreme Court did not necessarily find regulating federal
campaign contributions to be a speech infringement. Rather, it
upheld specific caps on how much a person is allowed to contribute
to a candidate, and during elections as a whole. Buckley set
individual federal campaign contribution limits at $1,000 per
election for a single candidate, and at $25,000 as an overall cap a
person can spend per election.

But spending by candidates, or by individuals on behalf of
candidates, faces no similar caps. Thus, the weakness in
USAC’s policy ““ the inability to curtail excessive
spending on behalf of candidates ““ is not unique to it, or
something it can necessarily resolve. The legal regulation of
contributions, but not expenditures, has been regarded as an
ambiguous position in Buckley ever since the case was decided
““ especially since making a contribution is technically
“spending.”

Money used to support a candidate ““ but that does not come
from the candidates themselves ““ cannot be accounted for and
included in the spending tally reported to students. Any student
can spend as much as he or she wants to support a candidate’s
campaign effort this spring, without affecting that
candidate’s compliance with the voluntary spending caps.

But just because some aspects of a policy can be circumvented
does not mean the policy as a whole should not be enacted. The
voluntary spending caps are valuable as a preventative measure
because they create a glaring obstacle for slates or candidates who
want to spend inordinate amounts of money on their campaigns in
order to make the election a high school popularity contest, rather
than a debate on campus issues.

The best way for the voluntary spending caps to work effectively
and uphold the higher purpose for which they were established is to
have slates check themselves and each other and report breaches in
the spending agreements to the public. As stated during the USAC
meeting, USAC will not punish slates which do not respect voluntary
spending caps, but at least students will know when candidates
can’t keep their promises ““ before they are
elected.