“A Most Revealing Week For Republicans”: What Matters Most To The GOP, Protect The Rich, Injure The Poor
If you haven’t done so yet, I urge you to take three minutes here with me to reflect on this unusually revealing week. Three big developments—the Obamacare enrollment deadline, the Paul Ryan budget, and the Supreme Court’s McCutcheon decision—return us to first principles, so to speak; remind us of what our two parties (and the philosophical positions behind them) are really and truly about. And they remind me, at least, of why the Republican Party, on a very basic level, can’t ever be truthful with the American people about what matters to it most at the end of the day.
So what is it that matters most to the Republican Party? A lot of things do, and for different Republicans, the answer will be different: abhorrence of abortion, disgust at social relativism, hatred of big government. These things matter. But they don’t, in my view, matter most. What matters most, especially to elected Republicans in Washington (that is, more so than the rank-and-file), is this: Protect the well-off from redistribution of their wealth to those who don’t deserve it.
On what basis do I make this claim? Well, I’ve been watching Republicans on Capitol Hill pretty closely for many years now. There are, Lord knows, a number of topics on which they are not exactly what you’d call amenable to compromise. The climate-change denialism, the constant attempts to chop away at reproductive rights (which are constitutional rights), et cetera.
But I think it’s fair and accurate to say that, especially in the Obama era, two issues have obsessed the party more than all the others: opposition to tax increases, especially on the wealthy; and a zeal for cutting the budget, which really means cutting domestic spending programs.
In other words—protect the rich, and injure the poor. These are the points on which they’ve fought tooth and nail. After all, think about this: They could have had a major concession from Obama on entitlements (chained CPI) if they’d been willing to allow an income-tax increase on dollars earned above $250,000. But even that couldn’t reel them in. It’s true they did allow an increase on dollars earned above $450,000 (for families) in the fiscal-cliff deal, but their backs were really against the wall on that one: They relented to that small increase only because the country was hours away from a major tax increase (the expiration of the Bush tax cuts), and it was clear to everyone that the Republicans were going to shoulder most of the blame.
As for cutting the federal budget, downsizing government—and we all know doing that hurts poor and working-class families most directly—well, wasn’t that the chief impetus behind the creation of the Tea Party? Remember Rick Santelli’s creation-myth rant, about the anger at the people who took mortgages they couldn’t afford. (Classic liberal-conservative divide, rooted almost entirely in psychological outlook: Liberals tended to blame the banks that hornswoggled people, while conservatives tended to blame the people who let themselves be hornswoggled.)
That’s the game. Redistribution, as in loathing of. That’s the glue of the Washington Republican Party. And it’s wrong to think of it as just an “economic” issue. It is, to them, a moral one. Don’t believe me? Take it from Arthur Brooks, head of the American Enterprise Institute, who wrote a famous Wall Street Journal column back in April 2009 headlined “The Real Culture War Is Over Capitalism.” Reread that. Money, a cultural issue. Defenders of free enterprise, he wrote, “have to declare that it is a moral issue to confiscate more income from the minority simply because the government can.” He also charged these same defenders with the task of defining true “fairness” as “protecting merit and freedom.” I shouldn’t have to decode those two words for you, I shouldn’t think.
But here’s the thing: Brooks’s candor was and is rare. It wasn’t a risk of any kind for him to express those views to the readers of the Journal’s Op-Ed page, who would strongly agree. But most Americans don’t agree. Most Americans support redistribution to one degree or another. They support progressive taxation, they support many or even most categories of government spending, and so on. We—liberal Democrats, centrist Democrats, and moderate Republicans, to the extent that they exist—argue about how much spending, but not about the very notion of spending. Real conservatives stand outside this conversation: They believe that virtually no redistributive spending is justified. But they know that’s a highly unpopular position, so most of the time, they can’t say that. They have to say other things.
Now let’s circle back to this week. What Republicans really think about Obamacare, as E.J. Dionne put it in The Washington Post yesterday, is that “they don’t want the federal government to spend the significant sums of money needed to get everyone covered.” But they know that sounds cruel, so they can’t say that. So instead of inveighing against redistribution directly, they’ve spent months talking about its unworkability. Well, that’s been proven wrong (so far), and so now they’ll just say, as they have been this week, that they don’t believe the numbers. Then they’ll fish out more alleged horror stories that don’t check out. But they won’t say what they actually think.
In the same way, Paul Ryan puts out a budget document that makes dramatic cuts on programs for poor and working people, which makes four domestic promises in the summary—“Expand Opportunity,” “Strengthen the Safety Net,” “Secure Seniors’ Retirement,” and “Restore Fairness”—but in its numbers does the opposite. Ryan’s budgets have always been first and foremost about attacking redistribution aggressively. But he can’t say that. So he just says the opposite.
And what does the McCutcheon decision have to do with all this? Very simple. Redistribution happens because redistributionist politicians have the nasty habit of getting elected. They get elected, in part, because of campaign-finance laws that limit wealthy conservatives’ ability to influence outcomes. In this sense the campaign-finance reform laws of the 1970s are themselves redistributionist—they were explicitly designed to level the playing field, which is a hoary cliché but expresses a proper goal, i.e., not letting the wealthy own Congress lock, stock, and barrel.
McCutcheon tells us, to an extent that even Citizens United hadn’t quite, that Chief Justice John Roberts detests this electoral redistributionism, and as Jeffrey Toobin wrote this week, has as his goal “the deregulation of American political campaigns.” Roberts’s opinion says: “It is not an acceptable governmental objective to ‘level the playing field.’” You can’t ask for it to be put more plainly than that. (Roberts doesn’t face voters and has a job for life and can speak with more candor than senators.)
Savagely fighting the delivery of health care to financially struggling people; slashing the federal programs that help these people get by; rigging elections so that rich conservatives (who outnumber rich liberals substantially) have more control over who wins them. These may seem disparate battles, especially the third one, but the motivation in each case is the same: Protect the well-off from redistribution of their wealth to those who don’t deserve it.
You’ll rarely hear an elected Republican admit this. But it’s usually the motivation. And we saw it this week in starker relief than we usually do. But don’t despair too much: They may yet prevail on campaign spending, but Ryan is going to lose, and Obamacare is going to win. So maybe, even though they won’t talk about it openly, people are onto them anyway.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, April 4, 2014
“Reclaiming Democracy”: A Resounding Vote Against Koch Brothers Dollarocracy
Even as the US Supreme Court attempts to expand the scope and reach of the already dangerous dominance of our politics by billionaires and their willing servants, Americans are voting in overwhelming numbers against the new politics of dollarocracy.
The headline of the week with regard to the campaign-finance debate comes from Washington, where a 5-4 court majority has—with its McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission decision—freed elite donors such as the politically-ambitious Koch Brothers to steer dramatically more money into the accounts of favored candidates, parties and political action committees. The decision makes it clear that the high court’s activist majority will stop at nothing in their drive to renew the old Tory principle that those with wealth ought to decide the direction of federal, state and local government.
But the five errand boys for the oligarchs who make up that majority are more thoroughly at odds with the sentiments of the American people than at any time in the modern history of this country’s judiciary.
We know this because the people are having their say with regard to the question of whether money is speech, whether corporations have the same rights as human beings and whether billionaires should be able to buy elections.
In every part of the country, in every sort of political jurisdiction, citizens are casting ballots for referendum proposals supporting a Constitutional amendment to overturn US Supreme Court rulings that have tipped the balance toward big money.
In so doing, these citizens are taking the essential first step in restoring democracy.
On Tuesday, thirteen Wisconsin communities, urban and rural, liberal and conservative, Democratic-leaning and Republican-leaning answered the call of constitutional reform. Even as groups associated with billionaire donors Charles and David Koch were meddling in local elections in the state, voters were demanding, by overwhelming margins, that the right to organize fair and open elections be restored.
It even happened in Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s hometown of Delavan, where voters faced the question:
Shall the City of Delavan adopt the following resolution:
RESOLVED, the City of Delavan, Wisconsin, calls for reclaiming democracy from the corrupting effects of undue corporate influence by amending the United States Constitution to establish that:
1. Only human beings, not corporations, unions, nonprofit organizations nor similar associations are entitled to constitutional rights, and
2. Money is not speech, and therefore regulating political contributions and spending is not equivalent to limiting political speech.
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that we hereby instruct our state and federal representatives to enact resolutions and legislation to advance this effort.
76 percent of the Delavan residents who went to the polls voted “Yes!”
They were not alone. A dozen other Wisconsin communities faced referendums on the same day. Every town, village and city that was offered a choice voted to call on state and federal officials to move to amend the US Constitution so that citizens will again be able to organize elections in which votes matter more than dollars.
The Wisconsin votes provided the latest indication of a remarkable upsurge in support for bold action to renew the promise of American democracy. Since the Supreme Court began dismantling the last barriers to elite dominance of American politics, with its 2010 Citizens United decision, sixteen states and more than 500 communities have formally requested that federal officials begin the process of amending the constitution so that the court’s wrongheaded rulings can be reversed.
Last fall, John Bonifaz, the co-founder and executive director of the reform group Free Speech For People, calculated that “In just three years since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, we have come one third of the way to amending the US Constitution to reclaim our democracy and to ensure that people, not corporations, shall govern in America.”
Since the start of 2014, however, the movement has seen a dramatic acceleration in the grassroots pressure for action. During the first weeks of March, forty-seven town meetings called for a constitutional amendment—in a move that put renewed pressure on the New Hampshire legislature to act on the issue.
It is the experience of big-money politics that has inspired renewed activism for reform.
Wisconsin has had more experience than most states with the warping of democracy by out-of-state billionaires, “independent” expenditures and SuperPAC interventions. Governor Walker’s campaigns have reaped funds from top conservative donors, including the Koch Brothers. And a Koch Brothers-funded group, Americans for Prosperity waded into contests this spring for the local board of supervisors in northern Iron County, where mining and environmental issues are at stake; and in the city of Kenosha, where school board elections revolved around questions of whether to bargain fairly with unions representing teachers. In other parts of the state, business interests poured money into school board contests and local races Tuesday, providing a glimpse of the role corporate cash is likely to play in local, state and national elections in the months and years to come.
The Koch Brothers had mixed success Tuesday. Three Iron County Board candidates who were attacked by Americans for Prosperity mailings and on-the-ground “field” efforts in the county won their elections—beating incumbents who were promoted by the outside group. But in Kenosha, two school board contenders who were seen as anti-union zealots won.
There were, however, no mixed results when voters were given a clear choice between dollarocracy and democracy.
The signal from Wisconsin is that grassroots politics can and does still win.
In fact, it wins big.
Encouraged by groups such as United Wisconsin and Move to Amend, activists went door to door in the depths of winter to place amendment questions on local ballots in towns, villages and cities across the state. Many of the communities were in heavily Republican regions of Wisconsin. Yet, the pattern of support was strikingly consistent; in no community did an amendment proposal win less than 60 percent of the vote, and in several the support was over 85 percent.
“Citizens United opened the floodgates to unlimited corporate spending in our elections. Now, Wisconsin voters are standing up to the corrupting influence the flood of special interest money has had on our elections and in our state and national capitols where laws are made,” says Lisa Subeck, the director of United Wisconsin. “Tuesday’s victories send a clear message to our elected officials in Madison and in Washington that we demand action to overturn Citizens United and restore our democracy.”
Whether all those elected representatives will get the message remains to be seen. Several of the communities that voted Tuesday are in the district of Congressman Mark Pocan, D-Madison, who has already introduced an amendment proposal and has been an ardent backer of reform. But many other communities are represented by recipients of the big-money largesse of Wall Street traders, hedge-fund managers, casino moguls and billionaires looking to cover their bets.
Communities in the home district of House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wisconsin, voted by margins as high as three to one to support an amendment strategy. The results were similar in conservative Waukesha County, which has historically been a Republican stronghold; in the city of Waukesha, for instance, 69 percent of the electorate called for action to amend the constitution. In Wauwatosa, the Milwaukee suburb where Governor Walker now maintains his voting residence, the vote for an amendment was 64 percent.
Wisconsin has several legislative proposals to put the state on record in support of a constitutional amendment. But they face uphill climbs in the current Republican-controlled legislature. And Walker shows no enthusiasm for reforming the system that has so richly rewarded his campaigns. Yet, grassroots activists like Ellen Holly, who helped organize the amendment vote in Walworth County—the heart of Paul Ryan’s district and Walker’s old home turf—is not blinking. She says it’s essential for the Move to Amend campaign to take the fight into even the most conservative areas and to deliver messages to politicians like Ryan.
The widespread support for overturning Citizens United, especially from rural and Republican-leaning areas offers a reminder that the reform impulse is bipartisan and widespread. The same goes from the broad coalitions that have developed. Among the loudest voices on behalf of the referendum campaign in rural Wisconsin was the Wisconsin Farmers Union, which hailed Tuesday’s voting as “a clear message that we the people are ready to take back our democracy.”
“Citizens United has allowed big money to drown out the voices of ordinary people and created an environment where, too often, our elected officials are sold to the highest bidder,” says Subeck, a Madison city council member who this year is running for the legislature on a promise to focus on campaign-finance issues. “To fully restore public trust in our democracy, we must return control of our elections to the people through common sense campaign finance reform, starting with the reversal of Citizens United.”
By: John Nichols, The Nation, April 3, 2014
“An Invitation To Oligarchy”: McCutcheon, And The Vicious Cycle Of Concentrated Wealth And Political Power
If wealth and income weren’t already so concentrated in the hands of a few, the shameful “McCutcheon” decision by the five Republican appointees to the Supreme Court wouldn’t be as dangerous. But by taking “Citizen’s United” one step further and effectively eviscerating campaign finance laws, the Court has issued an invitation to oligarchy.
Almost limitless political donations coupled with America’s dramatically widening inequality create a vicious cycle in which the wealthy buy votes that lower their taxes, give them bailouts and subsidies, and deregulate their businesses – thereby making them even wealthier and capable of buying even more votes. Corruption breeds more corruption.
That the richest four hundred Americans now have more wealth than the poorest 150 million Americans put together, the wealthiest 1 percent own over 35 percent of the nation’s private assets, and 95 percent of all the economic gains since the start of the recovery in 2009 have gone to the top 1 percent — all of this is cause for worry, and not just because it means the middle class lacks the purchasing power necessary to get the economy out of first gear.
It is also worrisome because such great concentrations of wealth so readily compound themselves through politics, rigging the game in their favor and against everyone else. “McCutcheon” merely accelerates this vicious cycle.
As Thomas Piketty shows in his monumental “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” this was the pattern in advanced economies through much of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. And it is coming to be the pattern once again.
Picketty is pessimistic that much can be done to reverse it (his sweeping economic data suggest that slow growth will almost automatically concentrate great wealth in a relatively few hands). But he disregards the political upheavals and reforms that such wealth concentrations often inspire — such as America’s populist revolts of the 1890s followed by the progressive era, or the German socialist movement in the 1870s followed by Otto von Bismarck’s creation of the first welfare state.
In America of the late nineteenth century, the lackeys of robber barons literally deposited sacks of money on the desks of pliant legislators, prompting the great jurist Louis Brandeis to note that the nation had a choice: “We can have a democracy or we can have great wealth in the hands of a few,” he said. “But we cannot have both.”
Soon thereafter America made the choice. 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.
The question is when do we reach another tipping point, and what happens then?
By: Robert Reich, The Robert Reich Blog, April 3, 2014
“The General Public Will Not Be Heard”: John Roberts Shows He Has No Idea How Money Works In Politics
Shaun McCutcheon is the kind of donor that the Republican Party can’t get enough of. The CEO of Coalmont Electrical Development in McCalla, Alabama, McCutcheon made a small fortune from his work in the mining industry and dedicated much of his life to electing Republicans. The Chairman of the Alabama State Republican Party said that McCutcheon was great at “supporting conservative candidates, getting conservatives elected to office.” Upset that he couldn’t donate more than the federal limit of $46,200 to individual candidates, he teamed up with Senator Mitch McConnell at a CPAC conference in 2012 to launch the latest assault on campaign finance law.
In today’s Supreme Court decision, the Roberts Court, in another 5-4 decision, tore down the aggregate donation restriction. Going forward, donors like McCutcheon can donate up to $3.6 million per cycle, as long as the donations are done in $2,600 blocks to individual candidates.
In reality, the case may not have a huge impact on elections. By tearing down any restriction on the amount that an individual can donate to a Super PAC, Citizens United already opened the spigot on unlimited money in our electoral system. Today’s decision builds on Citizens United but the harm to democracy has already been done.
What is striking about the opinion is how completely off-base Chief Justice Roberts is in his understanding of the role of money in politics. Roberts struck down the law, framing the attempt to limit the flow of money into politics as an attempt to stifle unpopular speech. Just as 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.” For the Roberts Court, wealthy donors are under attack as a minority and need the protection of the Supreme Court. Under the Citizens United framework that money is speech, the court in McCutcheon struck the aggregate limit as a violation of the First Amendment.
The Court comes off as remarkably uninformed when it comes to the relationship between wealthy donors and elected officials. Roberts says that legislation cannot seek to limit what he calls the “general gratitude a candidate may feel toward those who support him or his allies, or the political access such support may afford.” Roberts said “spending large sums of money” would not “give rise to such quid pro quo corruption.” The reality is, of course, that looking for evidence of direct trades of a Congressional vote for a donation will reveal very few instances of corruption. However, as Lawrence Lessig has established, there is a broader system of “dependence corruption” in which candidates must rely on wealthy donors in order to have access to the political system. The Roberts Court reflects a lack of understanding in how money actually operates in our political system and has adopted such a hollow understanding of corruption that they are able to view our system as free of any corrupting influence.
The reality, as Justice Breyer stated from the bench, is that the decisions in Citizens United and McCutcheon “eviscerates our nation’s campaign finance law.” We are left with an inability to regulate the flow of millions into the campaign finance system and a Court that is unwilling to stand up to anything but the most blatant forms of corruption.
Conservatives will celebrate today’s decision as a victory for the First Amendment but the reality is that the right to political speech is under assault from the torrent of money pouring into our elections. This is a point that Justice Breyer captured in his dissent; “Where enough money calls the tune, the general public will not be heard.”
The Supreme Court is now controlling how the Congress can limit the electoral process but, remarkably, not a single Justice has ever held elected office. Since Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, a former State Senator in Arizona, resigned from the Supreme Court in 2005, we have not had a Justice with any experience in elected office. Since she left the Court, Justice O’Connor has openly critiqued the decision in Citizens United, and has argued “we’re in a bit of trouble in this whole area.” While putting elected officials on the Supreme Court has fallen out of fashion, due in part to the extensive voting records they are forced to defend, the Court’s decision in McCutcheon is a reminder that it may be quite valuable to have a Justice who can tell his or her colleagues how a campaign actually works and the impact of money in our electoral system.
If there is any silver lining in this decision, it is that it can help to draw public attention to the outsized role that large-scale donors are playing in our electoral process. The backlash to Citizens United demonstrated that the public does care about this issue and after today’s decision there will be a demand for further action. The decision may not change the landscape of the 2014 elections because donors can already dump huge sums of money into elections but it does show how little the Roberts Court understands about how our campaign finance system actually works. Thanks to the Roberts Court, we no longer have a working campaign finance system; all we have left, as Justice Breyer noted today, is “a remnant incapable of dealing with the grave problems of democratic legitimacy that those laws were intended to resolve.” We are living in a brave new world of elections, a world where millionaires and billionaires speak loudly and the rest of us do the listening.
By: Sam Kleiner, Fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project; Published in The New Republic, April 2, 2014
“SCOTUS Sanctioned Corruption”: In McCutcheon, Justices Advance Troubling Vision Of Democracy
The Supreme Court’s McCutcheon decision today dealt another serious blow to the regulation of money in politics. In its 5-4 decision, the Court struck down the federal aggregate contribution limits, which restrict the amount one person can contribute to all candidates, parties, and political committees combined. As a result, one person can now give more than $3.6 million to one party’s candidates and committees in a single election cycle (under the limits, one could give “only” $123,200 per election cycle). With a sufficiently sophisticated joint fundraising apparatus, this money could be given in response to a solicitation from a single party leader.
While this is troubling by itself, the more sinister part of the decision lies in the groundwork the decision laid for future money in politics cases.
The Court doubled down on its holding that corruption only includes contributions given with the expectation of receiving official action in return — essentially a direct bribe in the guise of a political contribution. The Court also acknowledged that contributions can be used to gain ingratiation with and access to government officials while not reaching the level of outright bribery. But the Court praised this relationship rather than condemning it:
“We have said that government regulation may not target the general gratitude a candidate may feel toward those who support him or his allies, or the political access such support may afford. . . . They embody a central feature of democracy—that constituents support candidates who share their beliefs and interests, and candidates who are elected can be expected to be responsive to those concerns.”
This vision of the Constitution is wrong. It elevates wealthy donors who can afford to buy influence over 99.99 percent of Americans, who have an equal right to representation. Although the Court may talk in the language of protecting constituents, the outcome is clear — big donors can give to however many candidates they want, regardless of whether they can vote for those candidates or would be constituents of those candidates. This case is about big money, not constituents.
Beyond this, the overtones of the decision suggested that contribution limits may be subject to harsher constitutional scrutiny in the future. If the Court changes this standard for review, it will be more difficult to successfully defend contribution limits from First Amendment challenges in future cases. The Campaign Legal Center’s Trevor Potter describes this danger in a blog post that predates the McCutcheon decision.
There are still meaningful ways to limit the power of big money in our political system. We need to enact disclosure laws to eliminate dark money, elevate the voices of ordinary voters through small donor public financing, strengthen rules against coordinated spending and the circumvention contribution limits, and ensure existing rules are enforced.
But until then, even more money will flow directly to candidates, further marginalizing average voters at the expense of the wealthy. While this is just the latest step in a long line of recent cases weakening our campaign finance system, the decision strongly signals that more is still yet to come.
By: David Earley, Brennan Center For Justice, April 2, 2014
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