Was just watching CNN, who reported that Kerry had to mortgage his house back in December (and got over $12 million) to continue with his campaign. The reporter mentioned that Kerry’s wife is wealthy but can’t help him with his campaign financing, and he is personally responsible for paying off the mortgage; it was implied that his campaign could be in trouble for lack of financing. He has a wealthy wife but she can’t help – why not? What’s the rationale?
I thought it wasn’t so much that she can’t but that they didn’t want to.
She can contribute to his campaign. Subject to the same campaign finance limits as everyone else. The Kerrys’ situation is complicated a bit because they kept their finances separate when they married. Any money/property that belongs to him he can use. He can use half of anything they own jointly.
The rationale behind campign contribution limits is that it prevents wealthy people from directly buying candidates/offices. What if Bill Gates decided he wanted to buy the presidency? He could outspend pretty much everyone else in the country and install whoever he wants. Is that fair? Limiting the amount any one person or corporation can give to a particular candidate theoretically prevents that from happening.
Perhaps a good answer to my question requires a better understanding of the campaign finance laws, or the community property laws of the state in question. My first concern was, why couldn’t his wife help him pay off the mortgage, since it is also her residence. I understand the $ limit on contributions (conflict of interest and all that), but not when it comes to personal income and spouse’s income. I guess it’s the spousal issue that bothers me; i.e., why can’t a wife (or husband) help his/her spouse pay off the mortgage, or pay off anything that supports them personally, in order to help the candidate with his/her finances?
Also, so what if Bill Gates DID decide to run for the presidency? Couldn’t he use as much of his wealth as he wanted to to achieve his goal?
I’d like to see a cite for the notion that Mrs Kerry can’t use her assets to pay off the mortgage. Even if some provision of the law prevents her from using her assets to pay that debt, I don’t think anything stops her from lending her husband the money to pay it off and then having him pay it back to her.
The precedent-setting case on campaign finance laws is Buckley v Valeo, in which SCOTUS ruled that limiting individual contributions directly to political candidates is constitutional. In that same case, the Court ruled that limiting what a candidate could spend on his own election bid is unconstitutional. So Bill Gates could spend a billion dollars to get himself elected President (subject to other campaign finance and expenditure laws, e.g. McCain-Feingold) but he is limited in how much he can directly contribute to any given candidate in a year.
This article discusses in more detail the Heinz and Kerry financial situation in more detail.
I don’t have a cite – that’s what I was asking for; my inquiry results simply from a report by CNN, which said, or I inferred, that his wife couldn’t help him pay off the mortgage or contribute to his campaign. I understand why there’s a limit on campaign contributions from PAC’s and non-related individuals, but it seems to me that a husband/wife situation is different; that’s what I was asking – why is it detrimental to the political process if the spouse has his/her own income and wants to help the candidate?
That’s more of a GD question than GQ, I think, but I suppose the easy answer is that there’s nothing that says the spouse of political candidate isn’t suceptible (sp?) to corruption. So the spouse gets Bill Gate’s billion dollars and passes it along, and the candidate’s bought and paid for with only a slight remove. It’s no less a subversion of the process.
We touched on this issue as a tangential topic in this thread. The sources I have read have all said without much analysis of the issue that, should Ms. Heinz Kerry attempt to use a back-door method to pay off the mortgage, it would be treated as a violation through subterfuge. ElvisL1ves sees no reason to presuppose that Mr. Kerry won’t use such a method if need be, but I continue to assert that there are plenty of better ways to set up a transfer of assets from the wife to the husband than having her deal with an already existing legal mortgage of the family home. It appears to me that the Kerrys have accepted that Ms. Heinz Kerry is precluded from financing her husband’s campaign.
Obviously, the two have not co-mingled her inheritance from her dad.
Minor nitpick: Theresa Heinz did not get her fortune from her dad, but from her late husband. She was married to John Heinz III, who was a Senator from PA and killed in a helicopter crash some years ago.