“Beyond Corruption”: A Campaign Finance System Warped Beyond What It Would Be Under Any Reasonable Conception Of Democracy
There was a time in our history, thankfully long past now, when bribery was common and money’s slithery movement through the passages of American government was all but invisible, save for the occasional scandal that would burst forth into public consciousness. Today, we know much more about who’s getting what from whom. Members of Congress have to declare their assets, lobbyists have to register and disclose their activities, and contributions are reported and tracked. Whatever you think about the current campaign finance system, it’s much more transparent than it once was.
But if outright bribery is rare, should we say that the system is good enough? It’s a question we have to answer as we move into a new phase of the debate over money in politics. In the wake of last week’s Supreme Court decision in McCutcheon v. F.E.C., many liberals are nervous that the Court’s conservative majority is poised to remove all limits on how much can be donated to candidates and parties. For their part, conservatives seem to be preparing to open a new front in this seemingly endless battle, this time on the disclosure requirements that allow us to track who’s spending money to get their favored candidates elected. But those of us who worry about money’s distorting effects on the process would do well to acknowledge that the combination of more transparency and more money—much, much more money—has created a new reality with dangers that aren’t well described by the traditional conception of “corruption.”
Over the last few decades of campaign finance history, the immediate arguments have changed many times. Sometimes we argued over “soft money” contributions to political parties, sometimes we argued over phony “issue ads,” or 527 organizations and 501(c)(4) organizations, or corporate contributions and aggregate contributions. The specific locus of controversy keeps changing because political money always seems to find its way around whatever obstacles are placed in its path. And the fundamental divide that runs through all these arguments is, just as it has always been, that liberals want to reduce money’s influence over politics while conservatives want to increase it.
Conservatives might protest that that’s not really true; they just care deeply about freedom. But no one buys that for a minute. Their position on the issue is both practical and ideological. They know that if the super-wealthy are allowed to put as much of their money as they want into elections, Republicans will benefit more than Democrats. It’s no wonder that Republican party chair Reince Priebus called the McCutcheon decision a “very big victory for the RNC.” And they genuinely believe that’s as it should be; both the poor person and the rich person have the same right to donate large amounts of money to candidates, and if in practice it’s a right only the rich person can exercise, well that’s the way of the world.
And exercise it they do, with candidates, parties, and independent groups the grateful recipients of that civic-minded largesse growing larger with each passing election. But if your idea of “corruption” is only that which is illegal under bribery laws, that isn’t a problem that demands a solution. In the McCutcheon decision, Justice Roberts was quite clear in his belief that “Any regulation must…target what we have called “quid pro quo” corruption or its appearance…a direct exchange of an official act for money.” Large donations meant to gain the donor access or mere influence over lawmakers, he argued, aren’t enough. In his dissent, Justice Breyer took issue with this rather pinched view, saying “we can and should understand campaign finance laws as resting upon a broader and more significant constitutional rationale than the plurality’s limited definition of ‘corruption’ suggest.”
So maybe what we have here is in part a problem of nomenclature. If you don’t want to call it “corruption,” call it “distortion”—the creation of a system that is warped far beyond what it would be under any reasonable conception of democracy, even if nobody’s breaking any laws.
There is a meaningful difference. Most of the benefits big money looks for these days are spread beyond an individual, sometimes to an entire industry (like banks or oil companies) and sometimes to an even larger group of people and entities who have a common interest, like wealthy people who want to keep taxes on investment income lower than taxes on wage income. If someone like the Koch brothers succeeds in getting their favored candidates elected and their favored policies enacted, many billionaires and corporations will smile in appreciation. They won’t be doing it just for themselves.
There’s an important caveat, which is that money can have a great influence on the arcane details of legislation, where the public neither knows nor particularly cares what’s going on. Lobbyists still give plenty of money to members of Congress, and they do so to ensure the access that allows them to nibble at the nation’s laws for their clients’ benefit. In and of itself, money may not be able to buy a big, visible policy change—a reduction in the top tax rate or the killing of a minimum wage bill, for instance. But it can still buy an obscure provision in the nation’s banking laws, one that could be worth billions to some very interested parties but makes no front-page news.
Even disclosure of all campaign contributions to every type of independent group would probably have just a small impact in reducing the distortion money imposes on the system, in part because citizens can’t be expected to expend the effort to follow its every tendril. When a voter sees an ad casting aspersions on Senator Smiley’s opponent and hears “Americans for an American America is responsible for the content of this advertising,” what can she conclude? Not much, unless she happens to also read an article informing her that AfaAA is a creation of Oswald Greedyhands, whom some consider a heroic job-creator and others consider a nefarious exploiter of working people. Then she’s going to have to think about Oswald’s relationship with Senator Smiley, and learn about the Senator’s legislative record to see what favors he might have done for Greedyhands Industries. It’s a lot to expect of a citizen who has her own life to lead.
So even if the information is out there somewhere, and activists sound the alarms, so long as the money keeps pouring in, the system will bend inexorably toward the interests of those who fund it. A plutocratic system of government of, by, and for the wealthy isn’t necessarily “corrupt,” in the sense of being awash in specific, explicit bribes. But it isn’t particularly democratic, either.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The National Memo, April 7, 2014
“Justice Roberts Defends The Embattled Rich In McCutcheon”: With Laundered Contributions, You Can Now Buy Off Whole Committees
Chief Justice John Roberts’s majority opinion in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, in which the Supreme Court struck down aggregate limits on campaign donations, offers a novel twist in the conservative contemplation of what Nazis have to do with the way the rich are viewed in America. In January, Tom Perkins, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist, worried about a progressive Kristallnacht; Kenneth Langone, the founder of Home Depot, said, of economic populism, “If you go back to 1933, with different words, this is what Hitler was saying in Germany. You don’t survive as a society if you encourage and thrive on envy or jealousy.” Roberts, to his credit, avoided claiming the mantle of Hitler’s victims for wealthy campaign donors. He suggests, though, that the rich are, likewise, outcasts: “Money in politics may at times seem repugnant to some, but so too does much of what the First Amendment vigorously protects,” he writes:
If the First Amendment protects flag burning, funeral protests, and Nazi parades—despite the profound offense such spectacles cause—it surely protects political campaign speech despite popular opposition.
So the problem is that even Nazis are treated better than rich people—less constrained by public anger in their ability to speak out. Or pick your analogy: when thinking about people who want to donate large sums of money to candidates, should we compare their position to that of the despised and defeated, like the Nazis in Skokie, Illinois, in the nineteen-seventies, or of scorned dissidents, like flag-burners, trying to get their voice heard with their lonely donations?
As in Roberts’s opinion in Shelby v. Holder, in which the Court overturned parts of the Voting Rights Act last year, the people we think of as having the power are, in fact, embattled, the victims of schemes, driven by popular opinion, meant to “restrict the political participation of some in order to enhance the relative influence of others,” as Roberts put it. “The whole point of the First Amendment is to afford individuals protection against such infringements,” he wrote, adding:
No matter how desirable it may seem, it is not an acceptable governmental objective to “level the playing field,” or to “level electoral opportunities,” or to “equaliz[e] the financial resources of candidates.”
There is, apparently, a fine line between efforts to keep our political system from being for sale and a social experiment in levelling.
Roberts’s opinion left intact limits on how much a person can donate to a single candidate or party committee, but it took away the limit on how much money in total a person can give directly to candidates. Until this case, the totals were $48,600 to individuals and $74,600 to committees per election cycle. (Shaun McCutcheon, the plaintiff, said he wanted to keep giving directly to Republicans after he’d reached his limits; the Republican National Committee joined him in the case, saying it would be happy to take his money.) Roberts recognized, as the Court long has, that the government has an interest in preventing corruption which allows it to limit the size of a check that one person can hand one candidate. Earlier decisions allowed the aggregate limits in order to prevent donors from using multiple contributions to get around the cap, by giving to numerous committees that might pass the money around and get it to the candidate anyway. Stephen Breyer’s dissent—he was joined by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan—lays out a number of quite practical ways this could happen, but Roberts dismisses those arguments as silly.
“It is hard to believe that a rational actor would engage in such machinations,” Roberts writes, after examining how a person could donate to a hundred PACs to get money to a hypothetical candidate named Smith. He may simply be lacking in imagination here: the immediate effect of McCutcheon is likely to be the development of structures and vehicles for effectively laundering contributions through many small channels, and the emergence of specialists who know how to set these things up. Roberts might think that the complexity—the potential paperwork—is a guarantor against corruption, but he has too little faith. We’ve got the technology to get it done.
Roberts’s other argument is a little sad: “That same donor, meanwhile, could have spent unlimited funds on independent expenditures on behalf of Smith.” In other words, aggregate limits wouldn’t foster corruption, because using money to influence a campaign is much easier with the sort of independent expenditures that Citizens United makes possible.
Citizens United or no, McCutcheon will set up a large-scale experiment in how money is used and passed around, with new kinds of mega-bundling, and how coördinated donations either impose uniformity on a party’s far-flung candidates or help to solidify regional or ideological blocs. It may be a different kind of leveller than Roberts imagines; it could also be a way to financially fuel intra-party civil wars. And that is quite separate from the new potential for influence peddling. Instead of targeting a single Congressman, you can try to buy off a whole committee.
But then Roberts relies on a very narrow measure of corruption: “Ingratiation and access … are not corruption,” he writes, quoting Citizens United. (There are a number of citations of Citizens United in this decision.) The argument of McCutcheon, in effect, is that a political party itself cannot, by definition, be corrupted: “There is a clear, administrable line between money beyond the base limits funneled in an identifiable way to a candidate—for which the candidate feels obligated—and money within the base limits given widely to a candidate’s party—for which the candidate, like all other members of the party, feels grateful.” The gratitude may only be for a place of safety where donors, assailed by the popular opinion of bitter, poorer people, can find a little bit of solace.
By: Amy Davidson, The New Yorker, April 2, 2014
“The Politics Of Losing Sorely”: How McCutcheon, Citizens United And Voting Restrictions Are Hurting Our Democracy
So let’s get right down to it: when you really think about it, what makes America different from other countries? Yes, there are lots of good answers, but if you ask me, it has something to do with this: one person, one vote.
It’s a pretty simple phrase, but in it lies the promise that no matter who you are, or where you come from, when the rubber hits the road your voice is worth just as much as anyone else’s. You have a say. And no one else’s say is more important than yours.
But for that to work, every citizen in good standing has to have a meaningful opportunity to participate in the process. And the question before us today is: Is that getting easier or harder, and which option is more consistent with our concept of American democracy?
Take a look at cases like Citizens United and, this week, McCutcheon, for example. They do one thing: give the very wealthy more influence over elections in the United States. It’s like saying: instead of an electoral process where everyone’s voice is given the same weight, some people, by virtue of their wealth, are going to get megaphones. Yes, that’s been true, in one way or another, for years, but in its recent rulings the Supreme Court’s been busy making those megaphones even louder.
Something similar is happening on the state level, if only from a different direction. You can see it in the tougher voter ID requirements, the diminution of early voting, law after law aimed at making it harder for some people to vote – in this case, people who just happen to be more likely to vote Democratic. The end result is an electorate with an artificially higher concentration of conservative voters. Terrific for Republicans. Less good for democracy.
Take the federal and state efforts together and it’s a kind of a pincer movement aimed at producing a “representative” government that’s actually a lot more conservative than its constituents, a representative government that’s not really all that, you know, representative.
This is what happens when one segment of the population says: We’ve been losing too much and we’re sick of it. But instead of retooling our arguments to better match where the American electorate is, or trusting in the traditional American way of persuading a skeptical audience, we’re instead going to lift the hood on the democratic process itself and see if we can change the system so that outcomes we prefer become more likely – not because they are more representative of the American people but because we’ve figured out how to get a few more of our fingers on the electoral scale.
But here’s the thing: being a good loser is, actually, an essential part of the American system. Every few years, we expect our politics to spit out a government that roughly reflects the priorities and interests of a majority of its citizens, because we all get to participate in the process equally. We may not like what that government looks like, but we don’t go storming across the Rubicon, angry pitchforks in hand because the inclusiveness of the process gives it a kind of legitimacy that you don’t find in a lot of other places. We live with it because we know it basically reflects the views of our peers (as opposed to: some remote cabal) and because we’ll have a meaningful opportunity to change it next time around.
And the fact of the matter is: its good for the process when someone loses on the merits. Because losing fair and square encourages the loser to stop regurgitating the same losing arguments over and over again, and instead to come up with something better. Isn’t that what we want the competition of ideas that plays out in every election to produce? Or are we instead going to stand by and let the sorest of the losers say: If I can’t win the game as its supposed to be played I’m going to change the game, and I don’t much care if doing so undermines one of the very things that makes America a beacon of liberty in an increasingly Putinized world.
Of course, it isn’t entirely up to us, but that’s what happens when the Supreme Court steps in. For me, that only increases the urgency of the following question: is there a point at which changing the nature of electoral inputs, either by giving some outsized influence over the process or making it harder for others to participate at all, gets so out of whack that it begins to undermine the legitimacy of electoral outcomes? If you really love America qua America, you know that’s a place we should never be.
No we’re not there yet.
But it’s sure not getting any easier.
By: Anson Kaye, U. S. News and World Report, April 4, 2014
“An Endless Battle”: The Next GOP Scheme To Manufacture Obamacare “Horror Stories”
After the administration met a target of seven million new private insurance signups under the Affordable Care Act, and after pretty much every Obamacare “horror story” featured in a Koch-funded attack ad has turned out to be either completely false or extremely misleading at best, and after even some conservatives are telling their brethren to stop fooling themselves into thinking the ACA will inevitably implode, you might think that we could now start having a reasonable, factually grounded discussion about how we might improve the ACA going forward.
No such luck. In fact, there’s a new misleading “horror story” on its way: the worker whose hours are being cut back so their boss won’t have to comply with the ACA’s employer mandate. Watch out for it, because it’s coming.
Just as before, the decisions of private companies to attempt to screw over ordinary people are going to be blamed not on those companies, but on Obamacare. Before it was insurance companies, who tried to shunt their customers into overpriced policies when cheaper options were available on the exchanges. How many news stories did we see that featured someone’s anger at an insurer’s letter telling them they should sign up for a new, more costly plan, without even asking what other options the person had?
This time, the “horror story” will feature workers whose employers are trimming their hours back to avoid having to give them health insurance. Yesterday the House passed a bill, with every Republican voting in favor (along with 18 conservative Democrats) changing the law’s definition of full-time work from 30 hours a week to 40 hours a week. The purpose is to allow an employer to cut a full-time worker down to 39 hours and claim they’re “part time,” to avoid giving them health coverage (as it stands now, they’d have to cut them down to 29 hours).
President Obama would veto any such bill if it actually passed both houses. But still: this is the opening of a new front in the endless battle over the ACA.
So some context is in order. The ACA mandated that all companies with 50 or more workers offer health coverage. It’s vital to understand that this mandate actually affects only a small portion of workers, because most companies of that size already offer coverage. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 91 percent of firms with between 50 and 199 employees offer coverage today, before any mandate has taken effect. For companies with 200 or more employees, it’s virtually all of them (over 99 percent). Even most companies with fewer workers — 85 percent of those with between 25 and 49 employees — offer coverage.
So if, in the coming days, you see a story about an employer that’s trying to find ways not to cover their employees, the first thing to remember is that this an employer who is not giving their workers the benefits most people get. The second thing to remember is that the mandate has already been delayed. Companies with between 50 and 99 workers now have until 2016 to get their workers insured.
To be clear, there’s an argument for restructuring the employer mandate completely; there are other ways you could make sure that employees are covered. And as we learned in the Hobby Lobby case, the mandate isn’t truly a mandate; if a firm wants, it can decline to cover its workers, and pay a tax (which will cost a lot less than health coverage) to help defray the cost of them getting insurance through the exchanges.
I don’t even believe that people should be getting insurance through their employers at all; the fact that we do is an artifact of history that doesn’t have much practical rationale, particularly now (it started during World War II, when wage controls meant employers couldn’t give raises, so they began offering health benefits instead). But once coverage is required from all mid-size and large firms, it will be part of the cost of doing business for all of them — just as it is today for nearly all of them.
And by the way, this is true of lots of regulations: minimum wage laws, worker safety laws, laws against dumping toxic waste in the creek behind your factory, and a whole host of other laws that may increase a company’s expenses but get worked into the prices they charge for their goods and services.
As long as this is the system we have and there’s a mandate scheduled to take effect in 2016, we should be honest about what it means. If the claims about people getting dropped from individual coverage have taught us anything, it’s that whenever we see a new “Obamacare horror story,” it’s probably bogus. And this one will be no exception.
By: Paul Waldman, The Plum Line, The Washington Post, April 4, 2014
“5 Things Conservatives Lie Shamelessly About”: A Neat Little Rhetorical Trick, Tell Lies So Fast Your Opponents Can’t Keep Up
Mark Twain once famously said, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” Twain wasn’t praising lies with this comment, of course, but modern-day conservatives seem to think he was dishing out advice instead of damning the practice of dishonesty. Conservatives have figured out a neat little rhetorical trick: One lie is easy for your opponents to debunk. Tell one lie after another, however, and your opponent’s debunkings will never catch up. By the time the liberal opposition has debunked one lie, there’s a dozen more to take its place.
Science educator Eugenie Scott deemed the technique the “Gish Gallop,” named for a notoriously sleazy creationist named Duane Gish. The Urban Dictionary defines the Gish Gallop as a technique that “involves spewing so much bullshit in such a short span on that your opponent can’t address let alone counter all of it.” Often users of the Gish Gallop know their arguments are nonsense or made in bad faith, but don’t particularly care because they are so dead set on advancing their agenda. Unfortunately, the strategy is so effective that it’s been expanding rapidly in right-wing circles. Here are just a few of the most disturbing examples of the Gish Gallop in action.
1. Creationism. It’s no surprise creationists inspired the coining of the term Gish Gallop, as they have perfected the art of making up nonsense faster than scientists can refute it. The list of false or irrelevant claims made by creationists, as chronicled by Talk Origins, numbers in the dozens, perhaps even hundreds, and more are always being spun out. Trying to argue with a creationist, therefore, turns into a hellish game of Whack-A-Mole. Debunk the lie that the speed of light is not constant, and you’ll find he’s already arguing that humans co-existed with dinosaurs. Argue that it’s unconstitutional to put the story of Adam and Eve in the science classroom, and find he’s pretending he was never asking for that and instead wants to “teach the controversy.”
“Teaching the controversy” is a classic Gish Gallop apology. The conservative wants to make it seem like he’s supporting open-minded debate, but instead he just wants an opportunity to dump a bunch of lies on students with the knowledge that they’ll never have the time and attention to carefully parse every debunking.
2. Climate change denialism. This strategy worked so well for creationism it makes perfect sense that it would be imported to the world of climate change denialism. Climate change denialists have many changing excuses for why they reject the science showing that human-caused greenhouse gases are changing the climate, but what all these reasons have in common is they are utter nonsense in service of a predetermined opposition to taking any action to prevent further damage.
Skeptical Science, a website devoted to debunking right-wing lies on this topic, has compiled a dizzying list of 176 common claims by climate denialists and links to why they are false. Some of these lies directly contradict each other. For instance, it can’t both be true that climate change is “natural” and that it’s not happening at all. No matter, since the point of these lies is not to create a real discussion about the issue, but to confuse the issue so much it’s impossible to get any real momentum behind efforts to stop global warming.
3. The Affordable Care Act. It’s not just science where conservatives have discovered the value in telling lies so fast you simply wear your opposition out. When it comes to healthcare reform, the lying has been relentless. There are the big lies, such as calling Obamacare “socialism,” which implies a single-payer system, when in fact, it’s about connecting the uninsured with private companies and giving consumers of healthcare a basic set of rights. In a sense, even the name “Obamacare” is a lie, as the bill was, per the President’s explicit wishes, written by Congress.
But there are also the small lies: The ACA funds abortion. Under the ACA, old people will be forcibly euthanized. Obamacare somehow covers undocumented immigrants. Congress exempted itself from Obamacare (one of the lies that doesn’t even make sense, as it’s not a program you could really get exempted from). Healthcare will add a trillion dollars to the deficit.
The strategy of just lying and lying and lying some more about the ACA has gotten to the point where Fox News is just broadcasting lies accusing the Obama administration of lying. When it was reported that the administration was going to hit its projections for the number of enrollments through healthcare.gov, a subculture of “enrollment truthers” immediately sprang up to spread a variety of often conflicting lies to deny that these numbers are even real. It started soft, with some conservatives suggesting that some enrollments shouldn’t count or arguing, without a shred of evidence, that huge numbers of new enrollees won’t pay their premiums. Now the lying is blowing up to the shameless level, with “cooking the books” being a common false accusation or, as with Jesse Watters on Fox, straight up accusing the White House of making the number up. Perhaps soon there will be demands to see all these new enrollees’ birth certificates.
4. Contraception mandate.The ACA-based requirement that insurance plans cover contraception without a copay has generated a Gish Gallop so large it deserves its own category. Jodi Jacobson of RH Reality Check chronicled 12 of the biggest lies generated by the right-wing noise machine in just the past couple of years since the mandate was even announced. It is not “free” birth control, nor is it “paid for” by employers. The birth control coverage is paid for by the employees, with benefits they earn by working. The mandate doesn’t cover “abortifacients,” only contraception. No, birth control doesn’t work by killing fertilized eggs, but by preventing fertilization. It’s simply false that the prescriptions in question can all be replaced with a $9-a-month prescription from Walmart, as many women’s prescriptions run into the hundreds and even thousands a year. No, it’s not true that the contraception mandate is about funding women’s “lifestyle”, because statistics show that having sex for fun instead of procreation is a universal human behavior and not a marginal or unusual behavior as the term “lifestyle” implies.
5. Gun safety. The gun lobby is dishonest to its core. Groups like the NRA like to paint themselves like they are human rights organizations, but in fact, they are an industry lobby whose only real goal is to protect the profit margins of gun manufacturers, regardless of the costs to human health and safety. Because their very existence is based on a lie, is it any surprise that gun industry advocates are experts at the Gish Gallop, ready to spring into action at the sign of any school shooting or report on gun violence and dump so many lies on the public that gun safety advocates can never even begin to address them all?
A small sampling of the many, many lies spouted by gun industry advocates: That guns prevent murder, when in fact more guns correlates strongly with more murders. That gun control doesn’t work. That gun control is unpopular. That any move to make gun ownership safer is a move to take away your guns. That a gun in the home makes you safer when it actually puts your family at more risk. That guns protect against domestic violence, when the truth is that owning a gun makes abuse worse, not better. Even the standard line “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” is a distracting bit of dishonesty, since most gun deaths aren’t murders but suicides.
How do you fight the Gish Gallop, when trying to debunk each and every lie is so overwhelming? There are a few tactics that help, including creating websites and pamphlets where all the lies can be aggregated in one place, for swift debunking. (Bingo cards and drinking games are a humorous version of this strategy.) A critical strategy is to avoid lengthy Lincoln-Douglas-style debates that allow conservatives to lie-dump rapidly during their speaking period, leaving you so busy trying to clean up their mess you have no time for positive points of your own. Better is a looser style of debate where you can interrupt and correct the lies as they come. I’ve also found some luck with setting an explicit “no lies” rule that will be strictly enforced. The first lie receives a warning, and the second lie means that the debate is immediately terminated. This helps prevent you from having to debunk and instead makes the price of participation a strict adherence to facts.
By: Amanda Marcotte, AlterNet, April 2, 2014
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