The Report of the Steiwer Committee

The special Senate committee investigating presidential campaign expenditures presented its report on February 28, 1929. The report contains five pages of explanatory material and recommendations, and twenty-five pages of tabulations. The recommendations are not very sweeping, but they strike at four existing defects in our present federal corrupt practices act, namely, the failure to regulate the conduct of conventions and primary elections for the nomination of presidential candidates, to extend the law to political groups operating in individual states, to require careful and accurate itemization of every party expenditure, and to regulate the borrowing of money by political committees. The committee does not argue the constitutional points involved in its first two recommendations, and it does not reach the real problem involved in party deficits with its fourth recommendation. It leaves many vital problems to future committees.The information collected by the committee, by means of hearings and correspondence principally, has been set forth in fourteen tables. There is much useful material in these tables, and several angles of the problem of party finance are clearly brought out by the figures. But there are some serious errors, especially in the tabulation of totals. Tables IV and V dealing with the national committee accounts are inaccurate and misleading. The proof of this statement is as follows. The accounts filed by the two national committees, both with the clerk of the House (according to law) and with the Steiwer committee, show that the Republican national committee received for its own purposes the sum of $3,814,000. On page 8 of the report we find the figure $5,715,000.