While fanciful, these observers are pointing to a serious problem inherent in our money-driven political system. Public officials dependent on private money to finance their campaigns are somehow also expected to act as impartial overseers of the same economic actors who succor them. It's an impossible bind. As Rep. Barney Frank once said, "We are the only people in the world required by law to take large amounts of money from strangers and then act as if it has no effect on our behavior."

Many of these donors, of course, are not strangers to their recipients-often they are, or become, close associates with access and influence far beyond that of ordinary citizens. Kenneth Lay, whose company has been the top bankroller of President Bush's political career, was a sleepover guest of the first Bush White House and a close adviser to the current administration on energy policy. Two provisions of the energy bill passed by the House that would provide almost $6 billion in tax breaks to natural gas and electricity utilities were pushed by Enron and would have certainly benefited the company, according to the Wall Street Journal. And even though Enron is a bankrupt company that will never make another investment or hire another employee, it would have gotten a $250 million check under the "economic stimulus" bill originally passed by the House-not a policy one would be likely to see from impartial legislators working in the best interests of the country.

What is to be done? We should take the impulse behind Attorney General Ashcroft's recusal as a starting point. And that means more than scrutinizing his campaign finance history and urging that he withdraw from other pending matters before the Justice Department, like the handling of the Microsoft anti-trust appeal or antitrust issues facing the telecommunications industry. (According to the Center for Responsive Politics, in the six years before his 2000 race, he raised more than $400,000 from communications and electronics companies. This includes $65,000 from computer and Internet firms and $98,000 from telephone utilities in 2000 alone.). Such steps merely deal with symptoms without getting to root causes.

To insure that our elected representatives are able to do their jobs without fear or favor, we have to establish the separation of economy and state. Candidates for office have to be freed from the private money chase. The way to do that without running afoul of existing constitutional jurisprudence is to offer full public financing-Clean Money-to those candidates who voluntarily give up raising private money and agree to abide by strict spending limits. Such a system will not get all the money out of politics, nor does that need to be the goal. What it will do is break the direct dependence elected officials now have on wealthy private interests.

If Congress had been elected under such a system, might that have prevented the Enron disaster? Quite possibly. Not only would the company's claims about the merits of deregulation been examined with more independence, our elected officials might have also taken a tougher view of the accounting industry's insistence on regulating itself.

Sure, it would cost us to set up a Clean Money system for Congress-about $5 to $10 per taxpayer a year. But that's far less than the $60 billion in shareholder values that just went up in smoke in the Enron case, and probably close to what Enron employees and pensioners lost in their 401k plans. If you asked them, I bet they'd say such a small investment in democracy would be well worth the price.

Nick Nyhart is executive director of Public Campaign (www.publicampaign.org), a non-profit, non-partisan organization devoted to comprehensive campaign finance reform.

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