MONEY REVISITED

(Parts of this column have appeared before in my 2014 book “Neither here nor there” and in a 2015 column titled “Money Speaks.”)

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, we spent $14 billion trying to influence the outcome of the 2020 election. What did that money get us? We got a desperately needed eviction from the White House and a Congress that is almost equally divided between the two parties that have now dominated the scene in Washington DC for well over a century. Would the outcome have been any different if no money, or only a fraction of $14 billion had been spent in the process? And what could have been done with that money, had it not been spent on campaigning?

The first question is impossible to answer with any degree of certainty, but, given the fact that both parties received billions of dollars in support of their causes and candidates, it is doubtful that money decided the outcome overall. The other question is easier to answer. We need to realize that we are talking about private, not public funds. The source of the money is campaign donors, political action committees, and special interest groups and if the money had not been spent on the political campaigns, it would have been invested elsewhere or put into savings where it would have benefitted the general economy. It could have been donated to good-cause charities, of which there is no shortage in our capitalistic system, where the role of the government in financing societal needs is limited by design.

Between the doubtful effectiveness of money in politics, given the fact that it serves all sides in roughly equal proportion, and the opportunity cost of this expenditure, it should be clear that the nearly unrestrained flow of money into our political process is one of the reasons why our political system has stopped working as intended by our founding fathers. This money is not merely supporting candidates, but also causes, policy, that should be decided by discourse rather than money. Discourse has almost entirely vanished from the halls of Congress, where our representatives have settled for making statements, grandstanding, that can be used for media coverage, which, in turn, support the case for re-election. Where money can decide policy, the need for reasoning, debate and compromise evaporates. It is very unlikely to happen with the current composition of the Supreme Court, but if, for the good of the country, any legal precedent should be reversed by SCOTUS, it should be the case of Citizens United vs FEC, that opened the floodgates for money flowing into political campaigns.

Money, not competency, is now the critical success factor for any national elected office and for most of the high-profile state and municipal elected offices. In 1950, senators could get elected by spending 100,000 dollars on their campaigns; by 1980, that number was typically several million dollars; by 2010, many senate candidates spent 20-30 million dollars to win or retain their seats. And in the 2020 election even a $106 million war chest could not buy Jaime Harrison a Senate seat for South Carolina.

Combined with the freedom of speech, which allows any interest group or political action committee (PAC) to craft any commercial, pro or con a candidate for office, without regard to truth or material content, money has taken control of the political process in the USA, starting with the election process.

Only in America! Nowhere else in the democratic realm of nations has money taken such a commanding control of the political process and its outcomes. Nicholas Stephanopoulos of the University of Chicago wrote in the 2013 Columbia Law Review: “There is near consensus in the empirical literature that politicians’ positions more accurately reflect the views of their donors than those of their constituents.” We are so far along this corrupting road that it is hard to imagine that we can free ourselves from the influence of money on the outcome of our political system. But we should try with all of our might. And the following steps would go a long way towards removing the controlling influence of money:

·        Limit the period during which the media are allowed to run political advertisements in similar ways as currently practiced in Canada and the U.K.

·        Prohibit private funding of election campaigns and replace it with a system of public funding in equal amounts for each candidate.

·        Pay members of congress an honorarium of a million dollars per year and prohibit them from earning or accepting any money (other than from existing investments) from private sources for the time of their tenure.

·        Prohibit members of congress from lobbying the government for a period of five years from leaving congress.

The voting public should be the boss, but its influence has been hijacked by individuals and institutions with pockets deep enough to buy the subservience and vote of the peoples’ representatives. The net result is that the nation’s business no longer gets done. The federal government can no longer proclaim that it sets the rules of the game by which all constituents must play. As long as money rules, Congress is prevented from creating optimum conditions for free enterprise and citizens to shape conditions for a brilliant, sustainably competitive future.

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. 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 overcome its current implacable polarization. Then 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.