A ban on public funding of presidential conventions was quietly signed into law by Barack Obama on Thursday in a move that could further increase the dependency of US political parties on wealthy donors.



A day after the supreme court removed aggregate limits on how much wealthy individuals can spend supporting candidates, the White House agreed to enact legislation dismantling what was left of an alternative public financing model set up after the Watergate scandal.

US taxpayers could previously elect to earmark $3 (pdf) each year to help support presidential candidates, primaries and conventions in a bid to reduce their reliance on donors, but the amount spent has dwindled in recent years as parties increasingly ignore the subsidies on offer because they require agreeing to some limits on overall spending.

Now the Republican-controlled House of Representatives has proposed scrapping the last actively used part of the subsidy system, which provided an $18m grant to support each party convention in 2012, and use the money to fund national research into childhood diseases instead.

Despite opposition from some Democrats, including House speaker Nancy Pelosi, who regard it a political stunt, the bill called the The Gabriella Miller Kids First Research Act was signed into law in a ceremony at the White House on Thursday afternoon.

President Obama posed with the bill's sponsor, Republican congressman Eric Cantor, and the family of Gabriella Miller, who died after being diagnosed with brain cancer aged 9.

He called the bill "a wonderful way to remember a wonderful girl", without mentioning its related requirement to “terminate the entitlement of national committees of eligible political parties to payments from the Presidential Election Campaign Fund.”

Campaign finance watchdogs also have mixed feelings about the decision to fund the research by removing public election support, which they say comes amid a “wholesale dismantling” of the system of campaign finance regulation introduced after Watergate.

Though it will increase the pressure on parties to raise funds from wealthy donors, party conventions have become increasingly commercialised in recent years already, leading some to question whether they still play a meaningful role in the democratic process at all.

“There is no clear cut answer,” said Kathy Kiely of the Sunlight Foundation. “While the idea of public funding looks good and better than having to find private money, there is no question that in the case of conventions it turned out to be mean public money plus private money.”

“Every time you create a rule, money finds a way to ooze around it,” added Kiely.

The Supreme Court decision to lift donor limits led to weary resignation in Washington on Thursday about what many see as an inexorable slide toward more influence-buying by wealthy donors.

Many commentators inside the beltway focused on fears among lobbyists and donors that politicians would be encouraged to demand even more money from them in future.

Meanwhile the vice chairwoman of the Federal Election Commission warned that it was even failing to enforce what limited rules remain in place.

And White House spokesman Jay Carney angrily refused to answer questions from reporters on whether Democrats would be exploiting the rule change to seek more money from wealthy donors.

“I don’t know how many times I can tell you, I just don’t have anything new for you on it,” he said.

“It’s been a very short time since the decision came down. We’ve expressed our disappointment with the decision, but I don’t have anything beyond that for you.”

• The headline of this article was corrected on 7 April 2014 to note that the funding ban related to party conventions, not presidential campaigns