MONEY SPEAKS

If you ever believed that throwing billions of dollars of private money at the national election campaigns is just the way things get done in America – evidence that we are a truly capitalistic country – and has no effect on the outcome of the legislative process, I recommend that you read two books, Act of Congress by Robert G. Kaiser and America’s Bitter Pill by Steven Brill. These authors argue persuasively that both the Dodd-Frank legislation and the Affordable Care Act left so many vital issues unattended, because special interest groups had made it clear what they would and would not accept.

A stark irony surfaces when the question gets asked: “What did all that campaign money buy us?” We all know the answer: Nothing of substance or value has been accomplished by our elected officials who have so diligently held out their hands to receive the money that has financed their election and re-election campaigns. The irony is that this is exactly what the moneymen intended. All that money (about $4 billion just for the 2014 mid-term elections) for no other result than that the Republicans strengthened their grip on Congress. We get exactly what the campaign donors were looking for when they wrote their large checks: nothing coming out of Congress: no tax reform, no tort reform, no debt reduction, no gun control, no comprehensive immigration legislation, no infrastructure investments, no climate control measures, no Arctic development and protection initiative, nothing to enhance America’s global position, NOTHING!

Nobody in America seriously believes that our elected officials are corrupt in the old-fashioned sense of the God-father (envelopes or briefcases with money under the table). If that happens at all, it is an anomaly and not at all representative of the system. But the system is corrupt in a more fundamental and damaging way. The moneymen and special interest groups have nestled themselves between the People and their elected representatives, making a mockery of our democracy as it was intended and designed by our founding fathers. 

A Congressperson, man or woman, Democrat, Republican or Independent, starts the day with a money raising breakfast, to move on to a fund raising lunch and finish the day with a fund raising dinner. The time in between is filled with meetings with lobbyists and phone calls to campaign contributors. There is no time left to do the People’s work and does anyone really believe that such agenda does not necessarily make these Congresspersons more beholden to their campaign donors than their constituents?

Former Senator Alan Simpson said it best when he testified in a campaign-finance court case: “Who, after all, can seriously contend that a $100,000 donation does not alter the way one thinks about—and quite possibly votes on—an issue?”

That is why, in my book NEITHER HERE NOR THERE, A First Generation Immigrant in Search of American Exceptionalism, I make the case for public financing of election campaigns, for limiting the duration of election campaigns and for reducing the frequency of elections.

How much more effective would our politicians be if they did not have to run around all the time to collect campaign contributions? Without campaign contributions from private citizens, corporations, interest groups, and Political Action Committees, how much less beholden would our representatives in public office be to anyone but their true constituency and the common public interest?

Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, in his dissenting opinion in the McClutcheon case, hit the nail on the head when he wrote that, “The anticorruption interest that drives Congress to regulate campaign contributions is a far broader, more important interest than the plurality [of the Court] acknowledges. It is an interest in maintaining the integrity of our public governmental institutions.” And then he wrote: “Where enough money calls the tune, the general public will not be heard.” In his dissent he accuses the deciding majority of the Supreme Court of failing to recognize the difference between influence resting upon public opinion and influence bought by money alone.

As a public we can complain forever about how dysfunctional our political system has become, but we have to realize that one of the root causes of this breakdown in our democracy is that the moneymen have come between the citizens (voters) and their elected representatives. What counts is not what you and I think that needs to get done, what counts is what the large campaign donors want our representatives in Congress to say and do and what the influential special interest are supporting or not supporting. No-one gets elected to Congress anymore, unless the candidate is willing to cater and pander to the whims of the campaign donors and these special interest groups.

Only Congress itself can lift us out of this morass. It can do so by changing the election laws to only permit public financing of election campaigns and putting term limits in place. Not to speak of constitutional amendments changing the frequency of elections and the term of tenure for our elected officials. But that would require for the Congress to pull itself out of the morass by its own bootstraps, which—as we all know—is one of the hardest things to do. Admittedly, the hurdles for the members of Congress to effect the required change are phenomenal. First, it would have to muster the courage and moral fortitude to ignore what the moneymen and special interests want them to do. And, if they can pull that off, they would have to have the courage of conviction—in defiance of the Supreme Court— that cutting the moneymen out of the election process can be done without infringing upon citizens’ rights under the First Amendment.