door to a tremendous increase in party activity in federal elections. The Freshman bill would have created the possibility for party money to be used to offset the funds that millionaire candidates spend on their own campaigns. It would have allowed parties to use their resources to counter issue advocacy advertisements financed by interest groups. The bill also was sensitive to the fact that the current law has allowed inflation to seriously reduce the parties' ability to raise and spend money. It proposed to peg party and other contribution limits to the Consumer Price Index to allow them to keep pace with the rate of inflation. The contribution and spending provisions of H.R. 3526 were not as generous to parties. The bill would have raised the contribution limit for local parties, but it would have made no changes in the limit for national parties. Moreover, it would have done little to encourage individuals to give larger shares of their federal contributions to parties because it did not establish a separate aggregate limit for them. Consistent with its less favorable treatment of parties, H.R. 3526 would have left the current coordinated expenditure limits intact for most candidates and banned coordinated expenditures for candidates who spent more than $50,000 in personal funds. The bill also failed to index party (and other) contribution limits to the Consumer Price Index. Similarly, H.R. 2183 would have allowed parties greater freedom in carrying out communications in connection with its federal candidates' campaigns. This bill would have enabled the parties to continue to make independent expenditures in federal elections, and it would have introduced no changes in the realm of issue advocacy advertising. H.R. 3526, by contrast, would have banned parties from making both coordinated and independent expenditures in connection with the election of a single candidate. H.R. 3526 also proposed to tighten the definitions of what con...
