ociety. Of course, such influence establishes a tyranny of the rich that our forefathers clearly wanted to prevent. Senator Russ Feingold, a proponent of campaign finance reform, said, "The current campaign finance system is fueling the transformation of our representative democracy into a corporate democracy creating a political system that allots power in direct relation to the amount of money an individual or interest group can contribute" (Campaign Finance Reform). The horror of such a governmental system has fueled the cries for campaign finance reform. The current network of campaign finance is a complicated web involving individual contributors, soft money and hard money, and political action committee influence. In the aftermath of the crooked Watergate scandal, anxiety over campaign finance led to the passage of two major reform billsthe Revenue Act of 1971 and the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1974that have set the guidelines and regulations for campaign finance. Although many other laws and acts have been passed in effort to regulate campaign finance, these two acts set the main standards for campaign finance regulation. The main ideas of the acts stipulate that candidates for the two houses of Congress receive no public funding, candidates in the presidential primaries receive matching dollars, and candidates in the presidential general election receive full public funding (Godfrey). The Revenue Act was the first of a series of laws designed to implement federal financing of Presidential elections. Under the act, citizens were given the opportunity to check a box on their tax forms authorizing the federal government to use one of their tax dollars to finance Presidential campaigns in the general election (FEC). Congress implemented the program in 1973 and, by 1976, enough tax money had accumulated to fund the 1976 Presidential election. It was the first publicly funded federal election in U.S. history (FEC...
