The Regulatory Accountability Act of 2011 would reform the way federal agencies make rules in order to “reduce unnecessary burdens on job creators.” Opponents of the bill, which was introduced Thursday, say it will stifle health, safety and environmental standards.

Under the proposed legislation, a new regulation would need to have advanced public notice and public comment and be based on scientific and technical evidence. Regulations would also have to undergo a cost-benefit analysis, and agencies would have to adopt the “least costly” alternatives.

The bill creates a class of “high-impact” regulations that would be subject to hearings and would be held to standards that are higher than those set for courtrooms.

“While it is difficult to enact a new law, it’s even harder to get a regulation written correctly,” Peterson said. “In many cases, interest groups try to use regulation to interpret the law in their best interest, instead of following the intent of the law. By bringing transparency and accountability to the regulatory process, the American people will be allowed to have a voice in these policy decisions.”

Andrew Liveris, CEO of Dow Chemical praised the bill.

“We applaud [the lawmakers] for starting Congress down the path toward smarter regulation,” Liveris said in a statement. “America’s business leaders have identified unnecessary and overly prescriptive regulation and the overly burdensome federal regulatory process as major impediments to job creation and growth. The bipartisan Regulatory Accountability Act is a smarter approach to regulation that will meet society’s goals while lessening the economic burden of complex, expensive and often inconsistent rules.”

Liveris was speaking on behalf of the Business Roundtable (BRT), a conservative political group made up of the CEOs of major corporations such as Wal-Mart, GE and Exxon Mobil.

John Engler, president of BRT, praised lawmakers.

“The Regulatory Accountability Act is an important milestone on the road toward meaningful federal regulatory reform,” Engler said. “We stand ready to work with them to achieve smarter regulation and put America back to work.”

But Rick Melberth, director of regulatory policy for the government watchdog group OMB Watch, said the bill is problematic.

“If the provisions of the proposal become law, they will result in a near-moratorium on rules by creating even more obstacles for agencies to overcome in issuing standards that keep us safe from contaminated food, product defects, and polluted air and water,” Melberth wrote. “In addition, the proposal would shift the locus of regulatory decisions to the courts and out of agencies’ hands by providing multiple new opportunities for deep-pocketed corporate interests to challenge agencies at nearly every step of the process.”

He added, “When such special favors are granted to special interests, everyday Americans are further shut out of the regulatory process, giving them less of an opportunity to participate in this essential function of democratic governance.”

The bill contains most of the provisions that the BRT has been lobbying for; on Wednesday, the day before the bill was introduced, the BRT released its own very similar plan.

Meanwhile, other billionaires and multi-millionaires who have used their wealth to fund a similar agenda have managed to slip under the radar. Among them are the Fanjul family, Florida sugar magnates who also happen to be friends and neighbors of David and Julia Koch.

Like the Kochs, Alfonso “Alfy” and José “Pepe” Fanjul are two of four brothers who inherited a massive conglomerate from their father, in their case, Cuban sugar kingpin Alfonso Fanjul, Sr., who fled Cuba when Fidel Castro came to power. Unlike the Kochs, Alfy and Pepe are by all accounts still on good terms with their brothers, Alexander and Andrés, though Alfy and Pepe are higher profile and are the top executives at Flo-Sun, Inc., the family sugar empire.

Flo-Sun owns resorts in the Dominican Republic but gets most of its revenue through its American Sugar Refining division. ASR owns the C&H, Florida Crystals and Redpath Sugar brands, but its largest and best-known subsidiary is Domino Foods, Inc., producer of Domino Sugar. All told, Flo-Sun is estimated to pull in about $2.5 billion annually.

The Fanjuls, however, are not necessarily the easy targets that the Kochs are; to begin with, Alfy is a devoted Democrat. In the run-up to the 2010 election, he gave $37,230 to nine Democratic candidates for U.S. Congress. The biggest recipients of his largess were Kendrick Meek, who lost in his Senate bid to Marco Rubio despite former President Bill Clinton’s vigorous campaigning, and Ted Deutch, the Broward County representative (and, given their Palm Beach headquarters, the Fanjuls’ own congressman) who overwhelmingly defeated Republican Ed Lynch in a special election in April of last year.

Though despite Deutch’s party affiliation, based on his policies and his voting record in the Florida Senate prior to becoming a U.S. representative, the Associated Industries of Florida gave Deutch an 80 percent “business friendly” rating, the third highest of any Florida Democrat analyzed, and the highest of any Democrat now serving on the national stage. His general voting record in U.S. office, however, has been overwhelmingly along party lines.

Pepe Fanjul, meanwhile, gave $40,100 to nine Republican candidates prior to the 2010 election. He gave the most to U.S. Rep. David Rivera, he of numerous ethics troubles. Should Rivera remain in office, he has pledged (PDF) to oppose any legislation relating to climate change that would create any amount of government spending. The pledge he signed was originated by Americans for Prosperity, a limited government organization funded by the Koch brothers. The second largest recipient of Pepe Fanjul’s campaign contributions was freshman U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, whose dedication to loosening environmental regulations on corporations like Flo-Sun has previously been reported by The American Independent.

Of course, for mega-corporations like the Fanjuls’, just giving to favored candidates may not represent the best Washington investment for their money. Lobbying is where the Fanjuls put major cash. Flo-Sun spent $695,000 (PDFs: Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4) in 2010 alone lobbying the House, Senate and the U.S. Department of Agriculture on industrial waste regulations, food safety rules relating to sugar and elements of the Clean Water Act that affect the Florida Everglades.

Neither the Fanjuls nor their lobbying firms are required to disclose exactly what’s discussed in lobbyist meetings or which politicians have agreed to meet with them — though it would certainly strain belief to suggest that they’re spending upwards of a million dollars a year to argue in favor of deeper government regulation. Since 2005, Flo-Sun has spent $3.65 million lobbying the federal government.

The bill, SF683/HF914, puts forward a simple question to voters: “Shall the Minnesota Constitution be amended to define ‘person’ to mean natural person?”

“Corporations have been allowed to funnel vast sums of money into elections which distorts our elections and really amounts to buying elections,” Dibble told the Minnesota Independent. “No other entity could begin to match the amount of money that corporations are capable of spending.”

Sen. Scott Dibble

And he warned that next year will have even higher levels of corporate spending than did 2010. “I think we will see that times ten in 2012,” he said.

He pointed to Justice Paul Stevens’ dissent in the Citizens United case that said allowing corporations to intervene in elections will corrupt self-governance.

“The Court’s opinion is… a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self-government since the founding,” wrote Stevens, “and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt.”

But, Dibble said, the bill isn’t only about elections. Further recognition of corporations as persons could give them rights that conflict with actual people in many areas of law, he said. For example, the Supreme Court is currently weighing a lawsuit filed by AT&T which is asserting that corporations have a right to personal privacy under the legal concept of corporate personhood.

“Corporations are an artificial construct,” Dibble said. “They shouldn’t be able to trump actual living human beings’ rights.”

The constitutional amendment being offered would hit the ballot in 2012 if it passes the legislature (amendment bills don’t go through the governor). Dibble said he and House author Rep. Bill Hilty of Finlayson will press for committee hearings. Dibble expressed some skepticism that the bill would pass, but added that some in the Tea Party have been sharply critical of the Citizens United decision. He wonders whether Tea Party-backed Republicans in the legislature find common cause with the DFL on corporate personhood.

Currently the bill is sponsored solely by DFLers.

In the Senate: Dibble along with Tony Lourey of Kerrick, John Marty of Roseville, Sandy Pappas of St. Paul and Tom Bakk of Cook.

In the House: Hilty along with Carlos Mariani of St. Paul, Karen Clark of Minneapolis, Andrew Falk of Murdock, Tim Mahoney of St. Paul, Linda Slocum of Richfield, Michael Nelson of Brooklyn Park, Alice Hausman of St. Paul, Tom Anzelc of Balsam Township, Tina Liebling of Rochester, Jean Wagenius of Minneapolis, Lyle Koenen of Clara City, Jeff Hayden of Minneapolis, Kathy Brynaert of Mankato, Phyllis Kahn of Minneapolis, Sheldon Johnson of St. Paul, Frank Hornstein of Minneapolis, Erin Murphy of St. Paul, John Persell of Bemidji, Rick Hansen of South St. Paul, and Carolyn Laine of Columbia Heights.

The poll, conducted by Zogby International and commissioned by the business-led Committee for Economic Development (CED), surveyed 301 business leaders and presents a somewhat counter-intuitive look at their opinions of the current state of nondisclosure in the political campaign finance system. Highlights pointed out by the Committee for Economic Development include:

Seventy-seven percent believe that corporations should disclose all of their direct and indirect political expenditures, including money provided to third party organizations to be spent on campaign ads. The poll also found that ninety-three percent of business leaders believe that corporate boards should be informed of the beneficiaries and purposes of the company’s direct and indirect political spending. Two-thirds polled agreed with the statement: “the lack of transparency and oversight in corporate political activity encourages behavior that puts corporations at legal risk and endangers corporate reputations.”

“This poll underscores what business people across America already know: the political system is broken and large amounts of money are flooding the system and corrupting the democratic process,” said Ed Kangas, a CED Trustee and the former Chairman and CEO of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, in a statement. “These huge undisclosed contributions that pay for campaign ads are distorting the political process and are a major reason why Congress has become so dysfunctional.”

I hadn’t heard of CED before reading about the results of this survey. The group’s Board of Trustees contains a lot of heavy hitters, however, including representatives from Yahoo!, Delta Airlines, the Boston Consulting Group, McKinsey & Company, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, and it describes itself as a “non-profit, non-partisan business led public policy organization.” Whether it has the ability to exert any political weight in a potentially renewed fight in Congress for disclosure is unclear at this point.

It makes a measure of sense, however, why some companies might be upset with the new system: With more opportunities to give, companies that would rather use their treasuries for other purposes might feel increased pressure to keep up with rival businesses or industries in playing the contributions game. This in turn creates an arms race in which more and more business and labor interests are dragged into the political fight when they could be spending their money more productively. With greater restrictions, at least they could be assured of an even playing field.

Watchdog groups, including U.S. PIRG, are planning an event in Maine Wednesday morning with representatives of the state’s small business community who support the bill.

Collins came out against the Disclose Act just before the previous vote on the bill, citing what she viewed as imbalances in the way corporations and unions are treated in the disclosure requirements and complaining that the measure was designed to provide Democrats an advantage in the November election. She also complained that the bill did not go through the normal committee process and was introduced and voted on without a single hearing.

Snowe, meanwhile, said she was focused solely on measures aimed at creating jobs and bolstering the economy.

These groups aren’t singling out Snowe and Collins for fun, or even because the Senators are generally known as moderate Republicans. Instead, it’s because both of them have a extensive track record advocating on behalf of campaign finance issues and represent a state that has approved some of the strictest reporting standards in the country for state-based races and propositions. I’ll have more on the effort in Maine later today.

Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) reworked the DISCLOSE Act last week to address Republican concerns. (Bryan Smith/ZUMA Press)

On Monday afternoon, President Obama convened a press conference in the Rose Garden to promote legislation that would counteract the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which held that corporate spending on campaign ads can’t be restricted under the First Amendment. The DISCLOSE Act would require corporations, unions and nonprofit groups to disclose more details about their political advocacy and fundraising. According to Obama, it’s a no-brainer.

[Congress1] “You’d think that reducing corporate and even foreign influence over our elections would not be a partisan issue. But of course, this is Washington in 2010,” he joked. “On issue after issue, we are trying to move America forward, and they keep on trying to take us back.”

With the DISCLOSE Act, which Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) scheduled for a cloture vote Tuesday afternoon in the Senate, Obama and fellow Democrats finally feel confident that they’re on solid political ground. The populace might be divided on the merits of the stimulus package, health care reform and the financial regulatory overhaul, but polls show that 85 percent of Americans worry that corporations have captured too much influence in the political system today and 77 percent think Congress should support measures to limit the amount U.S. corporations can spend to influence elections.

As a result, Democrats are pushing forward with a vote on the bill despite every indication that they won’t reach the 60 votes necessary to break a Republican filibuster. But campaign finance reform groups are confident that even if the bill doesn’t pass, there will be political repercussions for Republican senators who choose to vote against it. And that just might encourage Democrats to keep bringing it to the floor until enough of their colleagues across the aisle change their minds.

After the DISCLOSE Act passed the House last month, good government groups immediately turned their attention to moderate Republicans in the Senate whose support would be necessary to beat a filibuster. They zeroed in on Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts, who promised in his Senate campaign to bring greater transparency to Washington, and Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine, who have championed campaign finance legislation in the past.

Snowe and Collins, however, have refused to come out in favor of the bill, while Brown openly repudiated it. Collins and Brown, in particular, have argued the bill wasn’t written in good faith because it provided an unfair advantage to unions by exempting funds attributable to dues from the new disclosure rules.

Not to be deterred, Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), the bill’s original sponsor, released new language last Thursday to address the senators’ concerns. Speaking Monday on a call with reporters, he remained optimistic about getting 60 votes but also keenly aware of the optics of the vote before the August recess.

With the House disclosure exemptions for union dues removed, the bill is now “completely balanced,” Schumer argued. “It will be a true test of many of our Republican colleagues about whether they are in favor of a fair process.”

The senators from Maine, who both voted for the McCain-Feingold campaign finance bill in 2002, are once again the targets of intense lobbying on the part of groups advocating for greater transparency in Washington.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a DISCLOSE Act co-sponsor who participated on the call, made a special effort to single out Collins for her previous support for “Stand By Your Ad,” campaign finance legislation she partnered with Wyden to sponsor as far back as 1996. And several advocacy groups banded together in Maine to call in and write letters to the two senators’ offices urging them to support the bill.

But democracy and campaign finance reform groups aren’t sure Reid’s rushed schedule will give them time to convince enough senators to vote for the bill — at least not before Tuesday’s vote.

“I don’t know if this time around the Republican offices will have time to digest it all,” said Meredith McGehee, policy directer for the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan organization that works primarily on campaign finance and elections. “Even if not, however, it will jump start the conversation because there’s a lot of misinformation out there.”

Indeed, despite claims from some Republicans that the DISCLOSE Act limits organizations’ First-Amendment right to free speech, Lisa Gilbert, democracy advocate for U.S. Public Interest Research Group, a network of state watchdog organizations, argued that disclosure requirements aren’t just constitutional — they’ve been backed by Republicans many times in the past.

“Republicans have always championed disclosure instead of campaign finance [limits],” she said. “It’s hard at this point to hear a real argument about why they’re opposed to disclosure.”

As a result, even if the DISCLOSE Act doesn’t muster 60 votes on Tuesday, both McGehee and Gilbert predict that Democrats will feel the political wind at their backs and raise the issue again before midterms, most likely in September. Despite the past support from some GOP members for disclosure laws, however, campaign rhetoric from both sides of the aisle is making the bill’s passage all the more divisive.

“I’ve spent a lot of time talking with offices trying to explain the provisions, and once you explain it they’re like, ‘Oh, OK,’” said McGehee. “It’s been that kind of process — hard to get people to focus on the details when there’s been so much focus on the politics and the optics of it all.”

A still from a TV ad by the NRA during the 2008 presidential campaign (YouTube)

As House Democratic leaders raced to round up votes before the Memorial Day recess for a pivotal economic aid bill, trimming it by more than $70 billion to avoid a revolt by members of the conservative Blue Dog Coalition, the party made another concession on its agenda to far less fanfare. Last Thursday afternoon, hours before the House Rules Committee was set to take up a measure aimed at mitigating the fallout from Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision — which allowed corporations to spend unlimited amounts of campaign cash — the meeting was scrapped.

[Congress1] Democratic aides depicted the delay as a consequence of a packed legislative calendar, predicting that the money-in-politics bill would come to the House floor after the recess. But some government watchdogs backing the majority’s effort saw a more dire sign in the Rules Committee postponement: that behind-the-scenes lobbying by some of Washington’s biggest campaign spenders, on both the left and the right, had spooked enough Democrats to make the legislation impossible to pass in its current form.

“I’m extremely concerned about what’s going to happen with this bill,” said Craig Holman, the longtime campaign-finance lobbyist at the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen. “It’s taken months to produce a bill that was reasonably good because a number of forces were whittling this one down. … Now, suddenly, it’s been pulled again.”

Upon hearing of the Rules Committee cancellation, Holman said, “I thought, ‘Oh, no. The NRA [National Rifle Association] succeeded.’”

The post-Citizens United bill, dubbed the DISCLOSE Act by its sponsors, sets a series of new disclosure rules to shed light on the sources of campaign commercials, issue mailers and other election-season speech. Corporations, unions and politically active non-profit groups would be required to report donors who finance such political activity above certain thresholds, and the company that primarily pays for TV or radio campaign ads would have to add a disclaimer message recorded by its CEO.

Lloyd Leonard, director of advocacy at the League of Women Voters, acknowledge the grim political reality the bill faced last week. “If you have the votes, vote; and if you don’t have the votes, talk,” he said. “Obviously, proponents of the DISCLOSE Act didn’t have the votes to move ahead, or not all the details had been worked out.”

Generally speaking, the principle of disclosure has broad support on the Hill and from the Supreme Court. While the justices voted 5-4 in favor of letting corporations go beyond political action committees (PACs) to pay for electioneering ads out of their general treasuries, they released a separate but less well-known 8-1 ruling in the Citizens United case that affirmed the constitutionality of campaign-finance disclosure requirements.

But the prospect of donor disclosure has proven unpalatable to the NRA, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Right to Life Committee, all of which fired off blistering critiques late last week in a bid to push the DISCLOSE measure from the House calendar. In a May 27 letter to lawmakers, the NRA charged that the legislation would force it “to turn our membership and donor lists over to the government” and decried the bill’s “byzantine disclosure requirements that have the obvious effect of intimidating speech.”

And conservative groups have not stood alone in chafing at the current scope of the bill’s new restrictions. As Holman put it, “Traditional Democratic allies provided the NRA with a great deal of credibility in this negotiation than they wouldn’t otherwise have.” Liberal-leaning advocacy groups reportedly expressing concerns with elements of the proposal include the Alliance for Justice (AFJ) and the Sierra Club. Though the AFJ’s president warned that Citizens United would likely unshackle far more campaign cash from the corporate world than from non-profits, the group still advised other eligible tax-exempt organizations to “take advantage of” the unlimited election-year playing field set by the high court.

Abby Levine, the AFJ’s deputy director of advocacy, underscored in an interview that her group is “in favor of meaningful disclosure.”

“The question then becomes, what is meaningful?” she added. “We want the relevant information without casting too wide a net.”

Meanwhile, the AFL-CIO, the country’s largest union federation, has so far declined to endorse the DISCLOSE bill and vowed only to “carefully review this complex legislation.” That reticence has not stopped the Chamber and other conservative critics of the bill from accusing its authors of handing a victory to unions by cracking down harder on corporate political activity.

“The Chamber has done a really good job of scaring people, saying this is somehow going to help unions, and when you look at the bill, it’s clear that it’s not,” said a spokesman for one union closely following the bill.

The broad array of potential stumbling blocks raised by individual non-profits — many of which are well positioned to punish or reward lawmakers for their votes by directing ads during the coming midterm elections — underscores the delicacy of talks now going on among Democrats and affected groups. “The thing about this bill is that there is disclosure that wasn’t required before of all entities” in the politically active tax-exempt world, said U.S. Public Interest Research Groups (PIRG) democracy advocate Lisa Gilbert. “These are things people aren’t accustomed to doing.”

Could the NRA or other groups succeed in watering down the bill enough to alienate the watchdog groups that now support it? Leonard, of the League of Women Voters, pointed to a proposed amendment from Rep. Heath Shuler (D-N.C.) as a possible deal-breaker for his group. The Shuler amendment [PDF] would exempt any 501(c)4 non-profit that finances election ads using only individual donations, as opposed to corporate money, from the bill’s disclosure and coordination rules.

Bridgett Frey, spokeswoman for the bill’s chief House sponsor, Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), said via email that her boss would examine specific amendments after the details of the bill are finalized. “Throughout this process, Congressman Van Hollen has met with any group or organization that has had questions or concerns about the DISCLOSE Act, and he continues to do so. He is open to accommodating reasonable concerns, but is committed to a bill that ensures transparency and protects our democratic process.”

The office of House Administration Committee Chairman Robert Brady (D-Pa.), which sent the bill to the Rules Committee last month, also indicated that negotiations over the bill would continue during this week’s recess.

“There’s no hard and fast line at which point disclosure would be weakened to the point at which it would become irrelevant,” Brady spokesman Kyle Anderson said via email. “We’ve gone to great lengths to address concerns expressed by both House Republicans and the groups and organizations that raised them. That process is ongoing.”

The process, however, cannot go on for too long without the new campaign-finance rules having a diminished effect on this November’s midterms. The DISCLOSE bill includes language implementing its new rules within 30 days of passage, sidestepping the need for prolonged regulatory debate at the Federal Election Commission, but Senate Democrats have already vowed to approve their version by July 4 to set up a final vote before the month-long August recess.

“If they don’t make it by July Fourth,” Holman said, “the bill will lose a great deal of momentum.”

The Chamber, for its part, is already betting on Democrats to lose — if not in the House, then in the Senate. The first hint of the DISCLOSE bill’s fate could come as soon as next week, when Democrats are likely to know more about the time frame for a House floor vote.

Today, Yale law professors Bruce Ackerman and Ian Ayres offer a solution. Writing in The Washington Post, the campaign finance reformers propose a new statute to keep the financing restrictions in place for any companies doing business with the federal government (i.e., most of the country’s biggest corporations). Using the drug lobby as an illustration, they explain:

Federal contractors already are not allowed to “directly or indirectly . . . make any contribution of money or other things of value” to “any political party, committee, or candidate.” This provision arguably bars Big Pharma from launching a media campaign in favor of a candidate who supports its special deals, thereby “indirectly providing” the candidate something “of value.” But it doesn’t cover the case in which contractors threaten to spend millions to oppose senators and representatives who refuse their excessive demands.

There is a need, then, for a new statutory initiative: The same anti-corruption rationale may prohibit contractors from spending millions in favor of candidates requires a statutory prohibition on a negative advertising blitz.

It wouldn’t be difficult to imagine, for example, the drug industry going after Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), who’s been pushing a proposal to empower states to negotiate pharmaceutical prices for their lowest-income seniors. (The prohibition on those negotiations has been a cash cow for the drug companies.)

Ackerman and Ayres predict that their proposal would withstand the scrutiny of even the conservative-leaning Supreme Court.

The Roberts court is skeptical — to put it mildly — of campaign finance restrictions. But it is still highly unlikely that the justices would strike down a law targeting federal contractors. All nine recognize that Congress may restrict free speech when there is a significant risk of corruption. That risk is obvious when corporate speakers are simultaneously doing business with the government.

Of course, with just 10 months to go before November’s midterms, Congress would have to act quickly — not something it’s exactly known for.

The first is the more controversial, in that a corporation doesn’t have a pulse, doesn’t vote, doesn’t die and never goes to jail for wrongdoing. But nevermind all that. Most conservatives love this line of thinking. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), for example, just issue a statement hailing the “monumental decision.”

“By previously denying this right, the government was picking winners and losers,” McConnell said. “Our democracy depends upon free speech, not just for some but for all.”

He was referring to Humana, Citigroup and UST Inc.

Others, though, aren’t so sure. Writing the dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens warned that the ruling “threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions around the nation.”

And campaign finance watchdogs immediately cautioned that the ruling will only enhance the already enormous influence that corporations have over the legislative process. “This decision allows Wall Street to tap its vast corporate profits to drown out the voice of the public in our democracy,” Bob Edgar, president of Common Cause, said in a statement.

Consumer advocates are hoping Congress will take up a little-mentioned campaign finance reform proposal — the Fair Elections Now Act — that aims to level the election-year playing field by allowing candidates to tap public public funds if they disavow large contributions from individuals, and all contributions from lobbyists. The hope is that the public funds would attract candidates who otherwise might not have the resources to run for public office. And by limiting contributions to small sums from individuals, it would prevent candidates from relying too heavily on any one donor or interest group.

Popular candidates would still raise more money than others, — the goal is not to give everyone equal funding, just the opportunity for equal funding. The real aim, supporters say, is to prevent a minority of wealthy donors from holding excessive sway, perhaps at the expense of everyone else.

They shouldn’t hold their breath. Campaign finance reform is never popular among lawmakers who have been elected under current financing rules, and even less so in an election year when everyone is scrambling for the very donations that the bill would ban.

Hearing the news, Sen. John McCain accused Sen. Barack Obama of being in the pockets of Big Oil, a charge Obama has repeatedly leveled at McCain in campaign ads. McCain blasted Obama for supporting tax breaks for oil companies in a 2005 energy bill.

The Arizona senator didn’t mention, however, that he and Obama recently voted for a piece of legislation — the energy package tacked onto the $700-billion bailout bill — that gave even more tax breaks to oil companies. Passage of the energy package — whose primary purpose was to bolster clean energy — was continually delayed because Republicans in Congress refused to support a bill that didn’t help fossil-fuel companies.

Neither presidential candidate has talked about how much money his campaign has received from the big, bad oil companies. Here are the numbers: The McCain campaign has received $1.3 million, while the Obama team has gotten $400,000.

Stick that in your barrel and refine it.