Below is an editorial from today's Washington Post entitled,"Mitt Romney's failed plan to 'fix' campaign financing."

According to the editorial:

MITT ROMNEY HAS a prescription for the super PAC problem: Allow political candidates to collect unlimited donations, instead of having the funds funneled to supposedly independent groups. “Let campaigns then take responsibility for their own words,” Mr. Romney said at Monday’s debate.

The editorial continues:

Mr. Romney’s cure not only threatens to be worse than the disease, it wouldn’t necessarily cure the disease. The $5 million check to the super PAC supporting the candidate is bad enough - it creates the reality or appearance of a candidate beholden to a particular donor. Unlimited donations to candidates would be worse.

According to Democracy 21 President Fred Wertheimer:

The removal of limits on contributions to candidates would return us to the system of legalized corruption and bribery that existed before the Watergate scandals.

Congress recognized this when it enacted the candidate contribution limits in the wake of the Watergate scandals, the worst campaign finance scandals in modern history.

The Supreme Court recognized this when in the landmark case of Buckley v. Valeo (1976), it upheld the constitutionality of the contribution limits, stating they were necessary “ to deal with the reality or appearance of corruption inherent in a system permitting unlimited financial contributions.”

The Romney proposal to eliminate candidate contribution limits would, in the words of the Supreme Court, establish a system that is “inherently corrupt.”

Democracy 21 President Fred Wertheimer sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder today to follow up on a January 10th letter and Report sent by Democracy 21 to the Attorney General that raised serious questions about the legality of five leading presidential candidate-specific Super PACs.

Today’s letter was sent “to supplement the information contained in the Report and to provide information on a sixth candidate-specific Super PAC, the Red, White and Blue Fund supporting the presidential campaign of former Senator Rick Santorum.”

According to today’s letter:

Importantly, the new information shows that, in two cases, there are individuals who are involved directly and simultaneously in a presidential candidate’s campaign and also with the candidate-specific Super PAC supporting that candidate.  

Democracy 21 Preparing Legislative Proposal to End Candidate-Specific Super PAC Scam

    Statement of Democracy 21 President Fred Wertheimer
 

With federal campaigns already knee-deep in a new era of laissez-faire money, the Republican National Committee has brazenly proposed the ultimate step - that the 105-year-old ban on direct corporation contributions to candidates and parties be scrapped as unconstitutional.

The Supreme Court’s misguided Citizens United decision did damage enough to fair elections by freeing corporations to make unlimited donations to supposedly independent campaign expenditure groups. But the court said nothing about the basic 1907 reform law - enacted after the robber baron scandals — that bans corporate donors from wooing candidates directly with largess.

How much money can you donate to a presidential candidate?

Look it up, and the answer is $5,000 - $2,500 for the primary and $2,500 for the general election. Those are, in fact, the legal limits on individual contributions. But, really, that's so two years ago.

Thanks largely to federal court decisions in 2010 that opened the way for virtually unlimited spending by corporations, labor unions and individuals, those limits are essentially gone - and the effects aren't pretty.

In the past several months, for example, Edward Conard,a former colleague of Mitt Romney's at Bain Capital, gave the Republican front-runner a $1 million contribution. Jeffrey Katzenberg, CEO of DreamWorks Animation, gave President Obama $2 million. And Las Vegas casino magnate Sheldon Adelson gave GOP candidate Newt Gingrich $5 million.