Debate on Campaign-Finance Bill Stirs Fears That Lawmakers Will Limit Charities’ Lobbying

Last week’s debate in the House of Representatives over campaign-finance legislation has rekindled fears among charity officials that Congress wants to curtail lobbying by non-profit organizations. And some experts worry that states, too, are trying to put a lid on charity lobbying.

Until a few hours before the campaign-finance bill came up for a vote, it contained a provision that would have required all organizations classified under Section 501 of the Internal Revenue Code — including charities classified under Section 501(c)(3) — to get permission from their members annually if they wished to conduct “political activities.” The bill defined political activities as any work intended to influence federal legislation, regulations, or elections.

The language referring to tax-exempt organizations was ultimately dropped from the bill in an attempt by its sponsor, Rep. William M. Thomas, a California Republican, to garner more votes. The legislation was defeated anyway, with just 74 Representatives voting in favor of it.

Under the advocacy proposal, non-profit groups would have been required to inform their members annually about how much they planned to spend on advocacy in the next year. Members would have been able to approve or reject the lobbying expenditures. Groups would then have been required to reduce the amount spent on advocacy work by the percentage of people who did not approve of the political expenditures.

For example, under the legislation, the Y.M.C.A. of the USA, which has more than 14 million members nationwide, could potentially have had to get permission from each of those individuals before lobbying Congress for additional funds for after-school programs or violence-prevention projects. If 60 per cent of the group’s members approved of spending money to lobby for such efforts, then the Y.M.C.A.’s lobbying budget would have to be reduced by 40 per cent.

“Our bottom-line fear is that this measure would make us spend time and money on paper and not on kids,” says Eden Fisher Durbin, director of public policy at the Washington office of the Chicago-based group.

Non-profit groups that represented a wide range of the political spectrum, including the Christian Coalition and Planned Parenthood Federation of America, vigorously opposed the bill. “It puts non-profits in a very awkward position,” says Patrick J. Lemmon, manager of the community education center at OMB Watch, which, along with Independent Sector and the Alliance for Justice, operates the Let America Speak Coalition, which aims to protect the advocacy rights of non-profit groups. “It implies that there is something wrong with advocacy — that somehow it’s distasteful, or dirty, or not quite what non-profits should be doing.”

The proposed lobbying restrictions grew out of attempts by Republicans to rein in political work by labor unions, many of which contributed heavily to the campaigns of Democratic candidates in the 1996 elections. But for many non-profit leaders, last week’s debate brought back unpleasant memories of other recent Congressional attempts to curb lobbying by non-profit groups. One such measure, which was approved in the House in 1995 but not in the Senate, would have limited lobbying by charities that received government grants or contracts.

The defeat of the campaign-finance bill in the House put to rest federal anti-advocacy legislation for now. But many non-profit leaders say that similar measures are being drafted at the state level, either through legislation or ballot initiatives. In most cases, those measures too are aimed at curtailing the involvement of labor unions in political campaigns, but experts say that such bills are often broadly drafted and could affect other non-profit groups as well.

In Colorado, for example, two different ballot initiatives aimed at forcing labor unions to obtain permission from members before spending dollars on advocacy work are now in the works. Patricia Read, executive director of the Colorado Association of Nonprofit Organizations, in Denver, says that the phrasing of the measures suggests that non-profit groups that receive funds through payroll deductions — such as local United Way chapters — would have to get permission from donors before going forward with advocacy campaigns.

Ms. Read worries that it will be difficult to persuade voters to oppose the ballot measures because many people believe that charities are prohibited by law from lobbying. “We still have a big public-education effort ahead of us,” she says.