Regulation of Interest Groups by the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act - Essay Example

The Bipartisan Campaigns Reform Act came along with two unique features that were not covered in the earlier federal act. One requirement of the BCRA was that the amount of soft-money contributions by interest groups be limited during the campaign period. This was effected by instituting federal limits to bar spending or raising of finances that are beyond the preset values. Secondly, this new law defined “electioneering communications” that required that no corporation would be allowed to fund the advertisements that had to be done 30 days before the primary elections or 60 days before a general election (Campaign Finance Institute, 2006).

In addition, the candidates had to declare their names within the advertisement and confirm to have authorized the airing of such an advertisement. The impact of the new law was to minimize the influence that interest groups had maintained in the campaign by either funding the process or contributing to advertisements. Surprisingly, the provisions of these laws have faced a lot of antagonism from numerous federal candidates that have raised concerns regarding the restriction of utilization of financial resources during the campaign period.

One issue that has seen many political parties and organization move to court is the pre-BCRA constitutional provision on the ‘527 organizations’ that were not covered adequately in the regulation of soft money spending. The law required that the 527 organizations such as Media Fund and Swift Board Veterans for Truth spend at least 50% of hard money in their campaign expenses while participating in federal campaigns. In 2007, the Federal Election Commission was forced to impose fines on these organizations after they had failed to abide to the financing laws governing the election process.

In addition, in 2007, the US Supreme Court overturned the BCRA condition that limited the interest groups from contributing to the financing of media adverts on the ground that this restriction was unconstitutional. As Boatright (2006) points out, BCRA has received abundant criticism and the public demand is that this law be changed to include more realistic regulation of interest group contributions to the campaign process. From above experience, it's worthy to note that the BCRA has numerous weaknesses that warrant its revision to achieve an effective regulation of interest groups.

The United States President, Barack Obama, in 2010 announced the need for US to pass a bill that would restrict financial spending in the campaign period, and particularly the contribution of the specific interest groups. His argument was that the BCRA law is subject to alteration by the Supreme Court as long as this law does not state implicitly the specific amounts that federal candidates would