In considering proposals for the expansion of federal authority, I applied the logic of the Constitution’s division of governmental responsibilities between the federal and state governments.  Because the Supreme Court had managed to erase just about every limitation on federal authority, there was little point in looking to the Court’s decisions for coherent guidance.  Nor was I tempted to because members of the legislative and executive branches have an independent obligation to apply the Constitution as they understand it.  To me, at least, it was obvious from the nature of the powers conferred on Congress by the Constitution and from the later adoption of the Tenth Amendment reserving to the states and the people all powers not assigned by the Constitution to Congress, that the Founders intended to limit the new government’s authority to areas that  lay beyond the competence of state and local governments or required uniform rules.  Those limitations, of course, had a more fundamental constitutional purpose.  The Founders considered federalism, along with the separation of powers, to be essential safeguards of our liberties. 

Although the Supreme Court has emasculated the Tenth Amendment, I believed (and continue to believe) that this division of labor is sound public policy. It permits a diversity of approaches to societal problems and, where feasible, it assigns rule-making responsibilities to the levels of government that are the closest to the people and most sensitive to their needs.  As a consequence, when considering the merits of a particular bill, I would consciously apply the ancient “Rule of Subsidiarity” which holds that political authority should be assigned to the lowest level that is capable of exercising it.  It was for this reason that I was comfortable with the role the federal government had assumed in protecting the environment.  Air, water, and wildlife ignore political boundaries.  Emissions from factories in Ohio can affect the health of New Yorkers; and New Jersey wetlands play a critical role in the life cycles of fish and other species that range up and down the Atlantic seaboard.  I admit that it isn’t always easy to decide where the line between federal and state responsibility should be drawn in today’s complex world, but I found the rule a useful analytical tool and a wonderful antidote to the impulse to centralize power.
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pp. 149-151 - Thoughts on campaign financing reform:

Which leads me to the prickly issue of campaign finance reform and my role as lead plaintiff in the controversial Supreme Court case of Buckley v. Valeo, which has achieved “landmark” status and assured me a measure of immortality.  In that case, my co-plaintiffs and I challenged the constitutionality of the Campaign Reform Act of 1974 which, among many other things, placed a $1,000 cap on individual contributions to a political campaign and set limits on the total amounts that could be spent in the course of a campaign for federal office.

To understand the issues as we saw them, it is instructive to take a look at the Buckley plaintiffs.  We were political underdogs and outsiders who spanned the ideological spectrum.   Although I was a United States senator at the time, I had squeaked into office four years earlier as the first third party candidate in 40 years to be elected to the Senate.  My co-plaintiffs included former Senator Eugene McCarthy, who had bucked his party’s establishment by running a sufficiently effective challenge to cause President Lyndon Johnson to withdraw his candidacy for reelection; the very conservative American Conservative Union and the equally liberal New York Civil Liberties Union; New York’s Conservative Party and Stewart Mott, a wealthy sponsor of liberal causes who had contributed $220,000 to the McCarthy campaign.  What we had in common was a concern that the restrictions imposed by the new law would  squeeze independent voices out of the political process by making it even more difficult than it already was to raise effective challenges to the political status quo.

We believed that these restrictions were fundamentally flawed both constitutionally and as a matter of public policy.  The core value protected by the First Amendment is the freedom of political speech.  It is incontrovertible that, in today’s world, it takes money – and a great deal of it – for political speech to be heard.  Therefore, we opposed the 1974 amendment’s limits on contributions and spending as unlawful restrictions on political speech.  We found the legislation equally objectionable on grounds of public policy because a healthy democracy should encourage competition in the political marketplace rather than increase the difficulties already faced by those challenging incumbents or the existing political establishment.  Incumbents enjoy enormous advantages over challengers.  These include name recognition, the use of the frank to communicate with voters, automatic access to the media, and the goodwill derived from handling constituent problems.

Given this fundamental political reality, a challenger who is not wealthy or a celebrity in his own right must be able to persuade both the media and a broad base of potential contributors that his candidacy is credible.  This requires a substantial amount of seed money.  As I testified in Buckley, I could not have won election in 1970 if the $1,000 limit on contributions had been in place.  It was only after the media had taken my third party campaign seriously that I was able to reach out to a broad base of contributors..  Nor could Gene McCarthy have launched a serious challenge to a sitting president without the more than $1 million that was provided by fewer than a dozen early supporters.

We won a number of our arguments before the Supreme Court, but lost the critical one.  The Court agreed with us that the restrictions placed on what could be spent in support of a congressional candidate were unconstitutional.  It held, however, that the limitations placed on contributions by individuals was constitutional because of Congress’s expressed concern for avoiding the appearance of improper influence in federal elections.  But because an individual cannot corrupt himself, the Court overturned the limits that Congress had placed on what candidates can spend on their own campaigns.  This, of course, explains the subsequent epidemic of super-rich candidates for federal office.

In the wake of this and a subsequent Supreme Court decision testing the constitutionality of an even more restrictive MaCain-Feingold campaign finance law enacted in 2002, we are left with a package of federal campaign laws and regulations that have distorted virtually every aspect of the election process.  The 1974 amendments were supposed to de-emphasize the role of money in federal elections.  Instead, by severely limiting the size of individual contributions, today’s law has made the search for money a candidate’s central preoccupation. When I ran in 1970, I never made telephone calls requesting money, and I doubt that I attended as many as a dozen fund-raising functions.  Passing the hat was the exclusive concern of my finance committee.  Today, the need to scrounge for money has proven so burdensome that more than one senator has cited it as a principal reason for his decision to retire to private life.

Furthermore, the federal regulation of campaigns has virtually driven grass roots action from the political scene.  The rules have become too complex, the costs of a misstep too great.  In 1970, when on campaign tours around New York State, I would often run into groups that, on their own initiative, had rented storefronts from which to dispense my campaign literature, man the phones, and deploy volunteers.  Today, anyone intrepid enough to engage in spontaneous grass roots action is well advised to enlist the counsel of an election lawyer and accountant; and even then, he must be prepared to prove his independence in court.

But perhaps the most disturbing consequence of these laws has been the way they have consolidated the political power of favored establishment forces.  By compounding the difficulties face by challengers, they have enlarged the advantages already enjoyed by incumbents.  By restricting the political speech of outsiders, they have enhanced the power of the two major parties.  By limiting individual contributions, they have enhanced the influence of trade associations, labor unions, and political action committees.  And by placing restrictions on when so-called issue advocacy groups are allowed to broadcast their messages, they have increased still further the political power already exercised by the mass media.
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p. 174 - Today’s Senate:

For anyone interested in questions of public policy, I can think of no experience more glorious than to have been a United States senator back in the days when Congress pretty much limited itself to the responsibilities specifically assigned to it by the Constitution.  But those days are gone.  A1970 study of Congress concluded that its workload had doubled every five years since 1935.  Given the fact that, in simpler times, Congress worked at a leisurely pace and was in session for only six or seven months a year, its members could no doubt take the initial increases in stride simply by devoting more hours per day and more months per year to their work.  Over time, however, the available hours and months were exhausted, and the increasing demands could only be accommodated at the sacrifice of quality.  Another consequence of this doubling and redoubling  has been the conversion of what had once been citizen-legislators, who would return to their home communities and their normal lives during half the year, into Washington-based careerists with a diminished taste for taking political risks in the line of duty.
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p. 181 - Term limitations:

My epiphany on that subject occurred in November 1970.  Nixon had invited me to meet with him shortly after my election.  When I was ushered into the Oval Office, Nixon was standing behind his desk.  He was completing a meeting with George Shultz (then director of the Office of Management and Budget) and John Erlichman, who was the president’s domestic affairs advisor.  As I entered, I heard Nixon say, “... but Milton Friedman doesn’t understand that an election will be coming up.”  It seemed clear that the three men had been discussing Friedman’s advice on a particular economic matter, that they agreed with that advice, but that the president was reluctant to act on it because of its possible impact on his 1972 reelection campaign.  That persuaded me that the presidency should be limited to a single six-year term.  I felt (and continue to feel) that six years is long enough to give a president a fair opportunity to deliver on his campaign promises, but not so long as to enable him to inflict irreparable harm on the Republic should he prove to be a disaster.  In time, I came to realize that the temptation to avoid any position that might jeopardize reelection applied with equal force to members of Congress. __________________________

 

p. 185 - Federalism:

There are ways, no doubt, to increase the efficiency of the Senate and carve out a little more time for reflection .  But any such improvements would be marginal at best.  Having since served in the other two branches of the federal government, I believe more than ever that there is only one road to true reform, and that is to rediscover and reapply the principle of federalism and, in that way, reduce the scope of federal responsibilities to manageable size.  I don’t suggest that it is either possible or even desirable to replicate the division between state and federal authority that once obtained in this country.  Too much water is over the dam, too many fundamental changes have occurred in American life.  What I do hope is that we can rediscover the wisdom of the original constitutional design and that we then determine, in the light of today’s conditions, which level of government should be doing what.

There will always be an argument as to where the line is to be drawn .  But I think it less important where it is drawn than that one be drawn that leaves no question as to the outer limits of federal authority.  Of course, having done so, all parties – especially the courts – would have to take a blood oath to abide by the new dispensation.  This means that if the more enlightened folk who gravitate to Washington don’t like the way the citizens of Arizona, or Delaware, or Michigan choose to manage their own affairs, they will have to suppress the impulse to impose enlightenment on them.  But perhaps in the fullness of time, Washington could learn to set aside the arrogance that assumes that the citizens of the several states can’t be trusted to govern themselves.

I recognize that my modest proposal would require an uncommon substitution of philosophy for politics; but ours, after all, is a system uniquely based on a philosophical conception of the nature of Man and of the limits of human institutions.  Those limits are being tested; and perhaps it is not altogether romantic to hope that necessity, if not philosophy, will lead us to rediscover the merits of the Constitution’s original design.  If so, the Senate may once again achieve its former greatness.
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p. 198 – On the clergy and public policy:

From time to time, an issue involving security matters would arise that had to be addressed in the public arena, and I would be deployed to do the addressing, usually at meetings that commanded significant media attention.  One of them was the call by a number of prestigious groups, including the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, for an immediate, unilateral halt to the testing, production, and deployment of nuclear missiles by the United States. ... I have an enormous respect for members of the Catholic hierarchy.  They have a duty to call attention to our moral responsibilities as individuals and as a society. There is nothing in their training, however, that provides them with special insights on how moral imperatives can best be achieved in the untidy world we live in.  Those decisions are best made by moral men and women who have both the responsibility to make them and an understanding of how the world actually works.  Fortunately, such a man was in charge of our country at that time, and history has vindicated Ronald Reagan’s judgment that a resolute restoration of American power was the surest way to defuse the threat of nuclear war that had hung over us since the end of Word War II.
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p. 201 - Differences in American and European perspectives:

Yes, we come from the same stocks and subscribe to the same social and political values.  But for more than 300 years we have lived an ocean apart and  have developed fundamental differences in how we think and how we react to problems.  (I first encountered this cultural divide on spending an evening with a young Frenchman in Paris at the time the Marshall Plan was being launched.  He kept probing me for the Machiavellian reasons  behind the American people’s  puzzling display of generosity.  He couldn’t accept the fact that we expected nothing in return.)  I won’t try to characterize the ingrained differences we encountered on our European rounds beyond saying that I believe Americans, as a whole, tend to be more resourceful than Europeans, more likely to take initiatives to solve a problem rather than simply learning how to live with it. 

This is not a novel observation.  Alexis de Tocqueville noted these cultural differences when he visited the United States over 170 years ago.  He was particularly fascinated by what he described as the uniquely American phenomenon of private initiatives to address public needs.  Everywhere he went, he found myriad voluntary organizations created, manned, and financed by private citizens in pursuit of a host of civic goals.  The fact is that cultural or ingrained traits do exist; and I think it helpful, in our dealings with our European counterparts, that we keep in mind that we are different peoples despite our surface similarities.  This will keep us from being surprised when the other side fails to see the inescapable logic of our positions, and if nothing else, it should make us less inclined to suspect the other’s motives when we fail to agree.  But because the United States bears unique responsibilities today, we should never hesitate to act alone if we have to.
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p. 203 - On the phenomenon of government leaks:

I still don’t understand why presumably responsible adults holding sensitive positions of responsibility find it so hard to keep a confidence.  But the phenomenon seems uncontrollable even when the matter leaked is of no public consequence.  I recall a meeting of senior State Department officers at which Al Haig made a very funny but derogatory remark about one of his European counterparts.  The counterpart was not amused when it appeared in the Washington Post.  This leak didn’t create an international incident, but others have. 

And leaking is not confined to the executive branch.  Congressional committee meetings are notoriously porous.  But the most breathtaking example I saw of the inability of at least some senators to keep their mouths shut involved the only executive session of the Senate to take place during my time there.  The Senate’s Standing Rules state that when acting upon confidential business in an executive session, “[a]ny Senator or officer of the Senate who shall disclose a secret or confidential business or proceedings of the Senate shall be liable, if a Senator, to suffer expulsion from the body; and if an officer, to dismissal from the service of the Senate, and to punishment for contempt.”  Yet despite this warning, which was read to the assembled senators at the outset of the meeting, the substance of our deliberations was reported in the next day’s newspapers. 

Two obvious consequences of this hemorrhaging is a restriction of the number of people who will be consulted in making important executive decisions and a reluctance to commit the reasoning that led to them to paper.  This has to result in significant reductions in the expertise that will be brought to bear in reaching them.  There are occasions where the public interest in the thoughtful conduct of critical public business far outweighs a putative public “right to know.”  In such cases, it is enough that the decisions reached be defensible. 
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p. 226 - Qualifications for the judiciary:

To my mind, there are only four areas that senators may legitimately examine at a judicial confirmation hearing:  Does the candidate have the professional competence required for the job; does he have the judicial temperament that will enable him to apply the law objectively to the facts of a case; does he understand the limits of a federal judge’s constitutional responsibilities; and does he have the character, the personal integrity that is the best guarantee that he will honor those limits once in office?  If those criteria are met,  the strength or nature of a candidate’s political views are irrelevant because, if confirmed, he can be counted on to seek an objective assessment of the relevant law’s meaning and apply it fairly to the facts of the case at hand. 
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p. 266 - Judges and public policy

I am not sure that the American public, or even senatorial inquisitors at confirmation hearings, really believe that judges have a legitimate role in the formulation of public policy.  What may be closer to the truth is that because some judges have engaged in formulating policy and have done so in often highly controversial areas, the public may well come to accept the application of political litmus tests in deciding who should be appointed to the federal bench.  My fear is that this will encourage the belief that the judiciary is in fact, if not in theory, merely a third political branch of government; and that this in turn may encourage future judges to act as if it were.  Liberal activists such as People for the American Way have little problem with policy-making from the bench because, in recent years, they have won so many battles in the courtroom that they could not win in Congress or in state legislatures.  They know, too, that liberal judges are more apt to be on their side of the ideological fence. 

This is a reflection of the deep division that exists today over the standards that are to be applied in interpreting the Constitution.  One school, which is exemplified by Justice Antonin Scalia's focus on original meaning, maintains, essentially, that in construing the Constitution as well as any other federal law, a judge is bound by the meaning of its text as illumi­nated by contemporaneous usage and tradition; that is to say, its mean­ing as understood by those who ratified or enacted it.  The second school, as epitomized by the late Justice William Brennan, views the Constitution as a "living" document that each generation of jurists is at liberty to adapt to the exigencies of the times.  Thus, as Justice Brennan expressed it in an address at Georgetown University in 1985, “The genius of the Constitution rests not in any static meaning it might have had in a world that is dead and gone, but in the adaptability of its great principles to cope with current problems and current needs.”  Needless to say, such a view of the Constitution will allow a jurist to make rather breathtaking departures from the original understanding of what the Constitution permits.  Because conservatives tend to belong to the Scalia school, they are far less likely than their liberal colleagues to read new meanings into the Constitution.  I do not claim that there is no such thing as an activist conservative.  The temptation to write policy into law can be strong.  But If a member of the Scalia school is tempted to abuse his judicial power, he would at least know (or should know) that he is exceeding his authority.  Given the Brennan example, however, those who act on the theory that the Constitution is malleable may have no such qualms.
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p. 273 - The Supreme Court’s impact on culture: