stitutes coordination and cooperation, and it sought to expand the definition of what constitutes issue advocacy to prohibit parties from spending money on issue advocacy within sixty days of an election. Both bills would have prohibited national parties and federal candidates from raising or spending soft money. However, H.R. 3526 would have been more detrimental to parties because it would have prohibited state and local parties from spending soft money in connection with federal elections. H.R. 2183, in contrast, would have allowed state parties to continue to spend soft money in connection with federal races as long as they used the Federal Election Commission's allocation formulas for determining the appropriate hard-soft money split. More importantly, because H.R. 2183 would have allowed parties to make unlimited coordinated expenditures in federal races, its ban on national party soft-money transfers would have had little impact on the parties' ability to participate in those contests. Indeed, by repealing the caps on coordinated spending the bill would have encouraged parties to maximize hard money expenditures they made in connection with federal elections. This would have had the potential to increase the amount of party money that flows through the FECA's regulatory framework, thereby improving the level of disclosure in the campaign finance system--a goal that is supported by most political reformers and observers (CitizIntra-Party Relations Despite the fact that H.R. 2183 was more favorable to parties, both bills could have some unintended consequences on the distribution of power within the parties' organizational apparatuses. For example, both bills' soft money prohibitions had the potential to reduce the influence of national party organizations on state and local party committees. There are currently no limits on soft money fund raising, spending, and transfers by national parties. Because they were not allowed to contr...
