“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 Cruelty Of Unleashed Capitalism”: Rich Catholic Republicans Threaten Pope Francis, Because He Frightens Them
If anyone wonders whether Pope Francis has irritated wealthy conservatives with his courage and idealism, the latest outburst from Kenneth Langone left little doubt. Sounding both aggressive and whiny, the billionaire investor warned that he and his overprivileged friends might withhold their millions from church and charity unless the pontiff stops preaching against the excesses and cruelty of unleashed capitalism.
According to Langone, such criticism from the Holy See could ultimately hurt the sensitive feelings of the rich so badly that they become “incapable of feeling compassion for the poor.” He also said rich donors are already losing their enthusiasm for the restoration of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan – a very specific threat that he mentioned directly to Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York.
Langone is not only a leading fundraiser for church projects but a generous donor to hospitals, universities, and cancer charities (often for programs and buildings named after him, in the style of today’s self-promoting philanthropists). Among the super-rich, he has many friends and associates who may share his excitable temperament.
While his ultimatum seems senseless – would a person of true faith stiff the church and the poor? – it may well be sincere. And Langone spends freely to promote his political and economic views, in the company of the Koch brothers and other Republican plutocrats.
Still, a Pope brave enough to face down the Mafia over his financial reform of the murky Vatican Bank shouldn’t be much fazed by the likes of Langone.
Yet Langone has reason to worry that the Holy Father is in fact asking hard questions about people like him. Indeed, he could serve as a living symbol of the gross and growing economic inequality that disfigures the American system and threatens democracy.
As a leader of the New York Stock Exchange, he was largely responsible for the scandalous overpayment of his friend Richard Grasso, the exchange president who received nearly $190 million in deferred compensation when he stepped down. Although New York’s highest court eventually upheld Grasso’s pay package, it was a perfect example of the unaccountable, self-serving greed of Wall Street’s elite.
Anything but repentant following the revelation and repudiation of the Grasso deal by NYSE executives, Langone told Forbes magazine in 2004: “They got the wrong f—ing guy. I’m nuts, I’m rich, and boy, do I love a fight. I’m going to make them sh-t in their pants. When I get through with these f—ing captains of industry, they’re going to wish they were in a Cuisinart—at high speed.”
He embarked on a furious vendetta against Eliot Spitzer, who had fought to recapture Grasso’s millions as New York attorney general. And when Spitzer was forced to resign as governor in the wake of a prostitution scandal, Langone’s public gloating seemed to indicate that he had played a personal role in exposing his enemy’s indiscretions. He particularly hated Spitzer for attempting to punish and curtail the worst misconduct in the financial industry.
While Langone passionately defended the outlandish grasping of the super-rich like his friend Grasso, however, he has displayed far less indulgence toward workers, especially those struggling to support their families on poverty wages. Until just last year, he was a director of Yum! Brands, the global fast-food conglomerate that includes Taco Bell and Kentucky Fried Chicken among its holdings – and that spends millions annually to hold down the minimum wage and prevent unionization of its ill-paid employees and farmworkers.
What all this adds up to is hundreds of millions of dollars in questionable compensation for financial cronies, but not a dime more for low-income workers. It is exactly the kind of skewed outcome that the Pope means when he speaks about today’s capitalists, “the powerful feeding upon the powerless,” and the need for renewed state regulation to bring their burgeoning tyranny under control. He is talking about Langone, the Kochs, and an entire gang of right-wing financiers.
“How I would love a church that is poor and for the poor,” Francis said not long after his election to the papacy. That could be what he gets – and that might not be so bad, for the poor and for all of us, Catholic or not, who love justice.
By: Joe Conason, Featured Post, The National Memo, January 3, 2014
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