“Time To Make A Choice”: Huge Wealth Gap Caused Backlash Before And May Again
A majority of the Supreme Court decided last week that the First Amendment protects the right of individuals to pour as much as $3.6 million into a political party or $800,000 into a political campaign.
The court said such spending doesn’t corrupt democracy. That’s utter baloney, as anyone who has the faintest familiarity with contemporary American politics well knows.
The McCutcheon vs. FEC decision would be less troubling were the distribution of income and wealth in America more equal. But over the last few decades it has become extraordinarily concentrated. The richest 400 Americans now possess more wealth than the bottom half of the U.S. population put together.
A few billionaires are now deciding on whom to place their bets for the next presidential election. Before McCutcheon vs. FEC, they had to resort to bulky super PACs and so-called “social welfare” organizations. Now they can dole out their money directly.
McCutcheon vs. FEC coincides with the publication in English of an important book by French economist Thomas Piketty, “Capital in the 21st Century.” Piketty sees the United States and most of the rest of the world returning to the vast inequalities of wealth that were taken for granted as late as the end of the 1800s.
“It is almost inevitable that inherited wealth will dominate wealth amassed from a lifetime’s labor by a wide margin, and the concentration of capital will attain extremely high levels,” Piketty writes. Those levels are potentially incompatible with the meritocratic values and principles fundamental to modern democratic societies.
Piketty shows that for several centuries before World War I, the financial returns to the owners of capital exceeded the rate of growth of modern economies, creating a widening divergence between wealth and incomes. That divergence meant widening inequality between the owners of those assets and the people who worked for a living.
The gap was reversed in the 20th century by two brutal wars and a Great Depression that wiped out the dynastic fortunes of Europe and the accumulated wealth of America’s Gilded Age. But in recent decades, slower growth and higher returns to the owners of capital have allowed the older pattern to reassert itself.
In this sense, McCutcheon vs. FEC marks another step back toward dynastic rule, enabling the owners of vast wealth to compound their holdings through politics.
Nonetheless, I think Piketty’s analysis is way too pessimistic. He disregards the political upheavals and reforms that such wealth concentrations have periodically fueled – such as America’s populist revolts of the 1890s followed by the progressive era before World War I, and the German socialist movement in the 1870s followed by Otto von Bismarck‘s creation of the world’s first welfare state.
Even at this particularly dark hour for democratic capitalism, we see evidence of a resurgent populism and progressivism in the United States. The so-called Tea Party movement is, in a sense, a populist revolt against large corporations, Wall Street and the Republican Party establishment. And the Occupy movement, although apparently short-lived, has found new voice in the recent electoral victories of New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
Democratic capitalism might have within it a balance wheel that Piketty too readily discounts: a public that, once it catches on to what’s happening, refuses to cede control to concentrated economic power.
In turn-of-the-century America, when the lackeys of robber barons literally placed sacks of cash on the desks of pliant legislators, the great jurist Louis Brandeis warned that the nation faced a choice. “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few,” he said, “but we can’t have both.”
Soon thereafter, America made the choice. After the turn of the century, public outrage gave birth to the nation’s first campaign finance laws, along with the first progressive income tax. The trusts were broken up and regulations imposed to bar impure food and drugs. Several states enacted America’s first labor protections, including the 40-hour workweek.
In the short term, McCutcheon vs. FEC might make it easier for today’s robber barons to take over American politics. But by inviting them to corrupt our democracy so brazenly, it also might fuel a popular backlash leading to a new era of reform. It has happened before.
By: Robert Reich, Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley; San Francisco Chronicle, April 11, 2014
“It’s Time To Get Creative”: Want To Cut The Rich’s Influence? Take Away Their Money!
Chief Justice John Roberts this week continued his gradual judicial elimination of America’s campaign finance laws, with a decision in McCutcheon v. FEC that eliminates “aggregate” contribution limits from individuals to political parties, PACs and candidates. The decision may not have a catastrophic effect, in a world where individuals were already permitted to donate unlimited sums to independent political organizations, but it is just another move toward the end of regulation of political spending altogether. If Americans want to limit the influence of money on politics, they will have to start getting more creative.
Roberts’ specialty is “faux judicial restraint,” in which he achieves his radical desired goals over the course of many incremental decisions instead of one sweeping one. In this case, as many observers have noted, Roberts pointed to our current easily circumvented caps on political spending as justification for lifting yet another cap, without noting that the Roberts court helped create the current system to begin with. Our campaign finance laws have not quite yet been “eviscerated,” but the trend is clear. Roberts and Justice Clarence Thomas, who penned a partial dissent calling for all regulation of political spending to be eliminated, have something close to the same end goal, but Roberts is willing to be patient in getting there.
As long as Roberts and his fellow conservatives dominate the Supreme Court — and it seems likely that they will continue to dominate it for years to come — campaign finance reformers are going to find themselves sabotaged at every turn. As Rick Hasen says: “It is hard to see what will be left of campaign finance law beyond disclosure in a few years.”
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, April 3, 2014
“Reared In The Game”: On Our Highest Court, A Former Lobbyist Guts Campaign Finance Reform
For a large and bipartisan majority of Americans, the increasing power of money in politics is alarming, but not for the conservative majority of the United States Supreme Court, whose members appear to regard the dollar’s domination of democracy as an inevitable consequence of constitutional freedom — and anyway, not a matter of grave concern. Expressed in their decisions on campaign finance, which continued last week to dismantle decades of reform in the McCutcheon case, the Court’s right wing sees little risk of corruption and little need to regulate the flamboyant spending of billionaires.
Given the behavior of certain conservative justices, such as Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito – who flout the rules that govern partisan behavior among lower-court judges – it is easy to regard their rulings as partisan cynicism. But there is also an element of willful naiveté when the conservatives claim, for instance, that corrupt donations will be exposed by the instant transparency of publication on the Internet. Any reporter who has covered elections can attest that there are dozens of ways for wealthy donors to avoid public scrutiny until it is much too late to matter.
But if right-wingers like Scalia and Thomas are simply pursuing ideological objectives, what about Anthony Kennedy, the Reagan appointee from California who was long seen as a moderating influence and a “swing vote”? On the issue of campaign finance, Kennedy has marched along with the majority, seeming just as fervent in his urge to destroy every regulation and protection against the “malefactors of great wealth” erected since the days of Theodore Roosevelt.
It was Kennedy who wrote the majority opinion in Citizens United, which dismissed the notion that corruption will arise from unlimited political campaign contributions because they will all be disclosed. “Citizens can see whether elected officials are ‘in the pocket’ of so-called moneyed interests …and disclosure permits citizens and shareholders to react to the speech of corporate entities in a proper way,” he wrote. “This transparency enables the electorate to make informed decisions and give proper weight to different speakers and messages.”
But if any Supreme Court justice knows how ridiculous that sounds, it must be Kennedy – whose own background as a corporate lobbyist and son of a lobbyist has been forgotten in nearly three decades since his Senate confirmation in 1987.
Yes, Kennedy was a respected appellate court judge before Reagan appointed him to the high court. But before that, he grew up and then worked as an attorney in Sacramento, where his father became a “legendary” lobbyist in a state capital renowned as “freewheeling” (a polite term that means “routinely corrupt”).
His father, Anthony “Bud” Kennedy, was a backslapping, hard-drinking partner in a powerful lobbying law firm run by one Arthur “Artie” Samish, “the “secret boss of California” who finally went to prison on tax charges in the mid-1950s, while young Tony was studying to enter law school. Samish liked to brag that he had amassed more power than anyone else in the state, including the governor, that he could buy any legislator with “a baked potato, a bottle, or a broad,” and that he was able to “unelect” any lawmaker who didn’t vote his way.
The major clients of Samish and Kennedy were racing, entertainment, and liquor interests, notably including Schenley Industries, then run by J. Edgar Hoover’s mobbed-up pal Lewis Rosenstiel. When Bud Kennedy died suddenly in 1963, young Tony was only two years out of law school. But he went into the family business and inherited his late father’s clientele.
While Kennedy always insisted that lobbying was only a “sideline” in his law practice, his billings were substantial – the equivalent of hundreds of thousands or more in today’s dollars. In 1974, he pushed through a bill for Capitol Records that saved the company (and cost the state) millions in sales taxes.
How did he do it? The same way that special interests work their will today – by doling out huge wads of cash to lawmakers on behalf of his clients. The single largest recipient of Kennedy lobbying largesse, according to the Los Angeles Times, was a legislator who introduced a bill to benefit the opticians’ lobby that Kennedy himself had drafted (it passed). He gave that guy alone about $6,500 in campaign contributions over six years, or roughly $40,000 in today’s dollars.
So if anybody on the Court knows how the political and legislative process is greased in this country, that would be Anthony Kennedy. After all, he was reared in the game. And it shouldn’t deceive anyone when he sounds as if he doesn’t understand how things work or who wins in that perverse process – and how everyone else loses.
By: Joe Conason, Editor in Chief, The National Memo; Author, Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth; Published in The National Memo, April 4, 2014
“Three Feet Away”: Scott Walker’s Intimidation And Voter Harassment Program
There’s been a fair amount of attention lately on Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) newly imposed voting restrictions in Wisconsin, and for good reason. The governor’s latest measures appear to have only one purpose: making it more difficult for his constituents to participate in their democracy.
But last week’s new restrictions weren’t the end of Walker’s efforts. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports:
Election observers could stand a few feet from voters and poll workers, under one of a series of election bills Gov. Scott Walker signed in private Wednesday.
The law would allow observers to stand 3 to 8 feet from the table where voters announce their names and addresses and are issued voter numbers, or from the table where people register to vote.
Consider a hypothetical scenario. A college student in Madison stops by a table to register to vote, and as she goes through the process, an elections “observer” stands 36 inches away, just to ensure the rules are being followed to his satisfaction. Months later, when she goes to her local voting precinct, another “observer” – again standing just 36 inches away – will oversee the process as she picks up her ballot.
This scenario will now be legal in Wisconsin.
Why in the world would GOP policymakers in Wisconsin consider this a good idea? According to the article, “Walker’s office said that the law will safeguard the fairness of elections by ensuring observers can see how they are being conducted.”
Just think, Wisconsin not only held generations of fair elections without “observers” hovering around voters, but has enjoyed one of the highest voter-participation rates in the country. Little did state residents know how flawed their system was.
Democratic opponents of the proposal warned of intimidation, voter harassment, and according to one state senator, observers “breathing down the necks of poll workers.”
They did not, however, have the votes to stop the measure.
All of this is the latest in a series of election-related policies approved by Wisconsin Republicans. In 2011, for example, they curtailed early voting statewide.
Last week, Walker went further, curtailing early voting even further, eliminating weekend voting and ending evening voting after 7 p.m.
There was no reason to impose these new voter-suppression policies and the rationales proponents came up with were easily discredited.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 3, 2014
“Early Voting Under Attack In Wisconsin”: Republicans Putting Up Even More Obstacles To Civic Participation
It may soon get a lot harder to vote in Wisconsin.
State and federal courts are currently deliberating the outcome of Wisconsin’s enjoined strict photo ID law. Governor Scott Walker this week said he would call a special legislative session to modify the law if it’s struck down, so voter ID could be in effect for the November 2014 election. And, this Wednesday, Senate leadership muscled through a bill, SB 324, which would cut back on early in-person absentee voting in that state. The measure passed 17-16, with one lone Republican joining the state’s Democratic Senators in casting nay votes. If the vote in the Assembly falls along party lines like it did in the Senate, the rollbacks could very well become law. Governor Walker has stated that he is open to instituting cutbacks on early voting if the measure reaches his desk.
In Wisconsin, all voters who apply may vote absentee in advance of Election Day, either by mail or in-person at the local municipal clerk’s office. Early in-person absentee voting starts the third Monday before the election, and is available through the Friday preceding Election Day. The bill passed by the Senate would eliminate early voting on weekends, and require that all early voting during the week conclude no later than 7 p.m. The bill also proposes a 45-hour weekly cap on early voting. Under the current law, which has no such restrictions, two communities that are home to nearly 15 percent of the state’s total population and nearly half of the state’s non-white population, Milwaukee and Madison, offer extended hours to serve more voters.
Cutting back on early voting puts up obstacles to civic participation. Voters like it, and they use it. When people can choose to vote on a day and time that does not conflict with work, family care, or other obligations, they are more able to wait in lines and undertake the other administrative costs involved in voting. Over the last three presidential elections, an average of 14 percent of voters in Wisconsin cast early ballots. Despite what some lawmakers are doing to make it harder to vote, citizens around the country support increasing access to the ballot. For example, a recent Iowa poll found that people there overwhelming believe that ensuring every eligible voter gets to cast a ballot outweighs concerns over ineligible voters. And, as the Brennan Center found in its comprehensive 2013 study of early voting, it’s also popular with the people who administer elections, because it reduces stress on the voting system on Election Day, leads to shorter lines, and allows for more opportunity to discover and correct problems before the polls close.
In producing our report, we looked into which jurisdictions have most successfully implemented early in-person voting, and were able to distill a set of seven best practices. Wisconsin does begin its early voting period a full two weeks before Election Day, which is one of the identified best practices for administering early voting. Another is to offer early voting on weekends, including the last weekend before the election. In fact, in eight of the nine states with the highest early voting turnout in recent elections, jurisdictions are required by law to offer early voting on at least one weekend. Not only does current Wisconsin law not mandate any weekend hours—instead leaving that decision up to the individual jurisdictions—but under the proposed changes weekend voting would be actively prohibited. A third best practice is to offer extended early voting hours during the week outside of business hours. The bill approved by the Wisconsin Senate, conversely, limits how many early voting hours may be offered each week, and likewise prohibits evening early voting after a certain hour.
Given the popularity of early voting among those who vote and those who administer elections, it’s hard to understand why Wisconsin lawmakers are intent on limiting early voting systems and throwing up more and more obstacles to the franchise. Their efforts would be better spent making elections more free, fair, and accessible for their constituents.
By: Jennifer L. Clark, Brennan Center for Justice, New York University School of Law, March 14, 2014
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