More difficult questions concerned whether and how to regulate campaign activities on the Internet. In March 2006, the FEC provided some answers by ruling unanimously that most political communication on the Internet was not covered by campaign finance laws. Only paid political Internet ads were covered by such laws. 172 Exempting most political communication on the Internet from regulation was “an important step in protecting grass roots and online politics,” commission chairman Michael E. Toner told the New York Times. 173
Contentious iss ues continued to surround campaign finance disclosure. A report by the Senate Committee on Government Affairs in 1996 described widespread and systematic evasion of disclosure requirements. 174 The FEC’s restricted budget raised continuing questions about the commission’s capacity to monitor and enforce disclosure requirements. Finally, the growth of the Internet raised new issues concerning the appropriate balancing of the public interest in disclosure against the public interest in protecting freedom of expression.
Disclosing Lending Practices to Reduce Discrimination
The Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA), initially enacted in 1975 and substantially expanded in 1989,
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required banks to disclose detailed information about their mortgage lending. The law aimed to curb discrimination in such lending to create more equal opportunity to access credit. The disclosure requirement compelled banks, savings and loan associations, and other lending institutions to report annually the amounts and geographical distribution of their mortgage applications, origins, and purchases disaggregated by race, gender, annual income, and other characteristics. The data, collected and disclosed by the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council, were made available to the public and to financial regulators to determine if lenders were serving the housing needs of the communities where they were located.
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The Examination Council was an interagency body that included the Federal Reserve System, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and other agencies. In 2004, as many as 33.6 million loan records were reported by nearly nine thousand financial institutions.
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Mortgage lending disclosure was part of Congress’s response to activists’ calls, in the later stages of the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s, for greater economic equality. It followed congressional action in 1968 to bar racial discrimination in housing sales or rentals; a settlement negotiated by the Department of Justice to end racial discrimination in the appraisal profession; and approval of the federal Equal Credit Opportunity Act in 1974, which outlawed racial and ethnic discrimination in lending. 178 Community-ba sed orga nizations press ed for disclos ure requirements to aid their local campaigns to end lending discrimination. One of the most prominent figures in this debate was Gale Cincotta, a Chicago-based leader of the fair housing and community reinvestment movement, who founded National People’s Action and the National Training and Information Center, two of the local organizations that documented the retreat of banks from inner-city neighborhoods in the 1960s and 1970s and pressed for more equitable lending. She and other activists found an ally in Senate Banking Committee chair William Proxmire (D-Wis.) . In 1975, Proxmire sponsored a bill requiring disclosure of lending practices. 179 Despite opposition from the banking industry, the requirement was ultimately approved by a narrow margin in both the Senate (47–45) and the House (177–147). 180
