But a free press can do that work, and report on who is behind the money.
Emphasis added. No, you don’t.
I’d need to know exactly what “etc” entailed before agreeing to that. But the question goes beyond the silly catchphrase “corporations are not people” and to the core of what the 1st amendment is about.
Let me ask you: If freedom of speech and freedom of the press are only available to individual persons, what is there to stop the government from censoring newspapers that are not owned by individuals? What is to prevent the government from censoring films, books and ISPs?
If you and I create a corporation to distribute one of Michael Moore’s films, and a future President Palin doesn’t like it, can she shut us down? We don’t have the right to free speech since we are not acting as individuals?
The Free Press will reach those who bother to watch the news. The advertisements reach everyone, and pandering high-profile interviews reach the common man. The Free Press would go broke even attempting to match that…what little actual “Free Press” there is left that isn’t already owned by the same corporations that are actively promoting their pet candidates. The scale is incredibly imbalanced as it is, and nothing proposed so far would even put a dent in the power structure as it now stands.
The free press is already doing that, btw. How effective has it been so far?
The free press cannot report who is making donations to most PACs, because they are not required to report them.
And again, it doesn’t matter if an independent free press gets access to all the information it wants/needs if the advertisers and their ilk can reach twenty times the audience. Most Americans don’t read in-depth news stories anymore.
So, reporting Romney’s 47% comments had no effect on the election?
How is repeating a one-liner the same as an in-depth news article?
I read once every dollar in public financing saves something like $20 in lower cost because politicians are not writing laws that are overly favorable to people who write them checks (industry X donates Y dollars, politician responds by passing law giving 10-50Y dollars in subsidies to industry X). So public financing should pay for itself from day one.
I think it’d cost a billion a year or less. Really, it shouldn’t be that expensive on a national level. A presidential election every 4 years, 435 house races and 33 senate races every 2 years. Two billion every 2 years should be more than enough I would assume.
I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it’s possible to measure that effect.
Yeah, that claim has the look of a nonsense statistics because I find it very difficult to imagine how you could “prove” that a Congressman is voting a certain way or approving a certain amount of earmarks directly in relation to how much money they receive from some company.
I don’t really believe there is widespread quid pro quo like that going on to the degree most people think. If I’m a congressman from a district that is historically poor but experiencing a shale gas boom that is bringing jobs, pipeline infrastructure, storage infrastructure, related chemical industries and etc to my district then I’m probably going to favor legislation favorable to the natural gas extraction industry. Since those companies will be heavily active in my district, I expect I’ll receive money to some degree from natural gas interests.
Are my votes because of that money, or because 90% of my constituents, who historically have been low income, really love the new good paying jobs and want their representative to do anything he can to insure they are here for good? I don’t see what sort of analysis could prove that one way or another.
I would slightly nitpick what John Mace said: One could certainly come up with a methodology for attributing various votes to various motives, and motives to money, and thus come up with a figure of that sort. Rather, I would say that it’s not possible to reliably measure such an effect. There’s a difference between a bad measurement and no measurement at all.
I think money and politics are unfortunately married, but as far as I can tell this dates back to basically the beginning of elected positions in human history (we know it dates back to the Romans for sure.) I’m very unconvinced of a few things:
- That we can divorce the two without infringing on important civil liberties enjoyed by ordinary people or associations of people who ought still enjoy civil liberties. I’ll note that here and in the rest of the lefty parts of the internet everyone bitches about corporate personhood but no one complains that now unions get to directly advocate for candidates as well. I hope that when you guys are arguing that corporations should lose the ability to engage in speech, you are including unions in your definition of “corporation.” Otherwise I don’t see anyway to view you as anything but massive hypocrites, because you’re basically saying “well we agree with Citizens United in the ways it helps our party, but not the ways it might help the other party.”
The simple truth is the First Amendment states, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” I see that as a clear cut restriction, Congress can’t pass laws abridging free speech, period. Newspaper and organizations running expensive printing presses were not unheard of in the age of the Bill of Rights, I very seriously doubt there was an intention that Congress was only barred from prohibiting me from yelling stuff from a street corner, it seems patently obvious Congress was barred from restricting free speech, period.
“Money isn’t speech” is an irrelevancy. The money issue is not what laws like BCRA were odiously prohibiting, they prohibit political media distribution, that is speech. Citizens United was primarily individually funded with small corporate contributions. They produced an anti-Hillary documentary that had been distributed, and wanted to put it on a Video On Demand channel. Under BCRA they could not. I don’t really see how you can argue that’s a good thing, that the government can prohibit a mostly citizen funded group from paying a cable provided a little under $2m to carry a free Video On Demand offering pertaining to an upcoming election. Video On Demand requires an active choice to consume its content, and it is explicitly not going over the public airwaves.
Further, this insistence on going through the official campaigns is undemocratic. We have a rigid two party system, and while they are in theory supposed to be big tent parties we all know that some viewpoints on the left and right are simply not considered mainstream and not given the light of day by the existing parties. By saying those groups with interests that fall outside the political mainstream, should be barred from advocating for or against candidates is basically saying that unless your politics fall inside what the two parties deem acceptable you must accept a far lesser set of political expression rights. I don’t see how that is right.
Now, none of that is to say I’m particularly pleased about unions or Super PACs. But I’m displeased about Westboro Baptist Church, municipalities seizing land under eminent domain for “economic development” and a host of other issues. But we live under a constitutional system of government, and when a plain reading of the constitution supports stuff I don’t like, I don’t think the way to fix it is to pass unconstitutional laws. Now, we could amend the constitution, yes. But it goes back to how do you amend the first amendment without destroying protections that are important? I don’t think it’s nearly so easy as anyone would think, and I think BCRA showed that. There is an argument to be made the SCOTUS went too far in its Citizens ruling, but I’ll note the original case was a good example of bad effects of the law. A private, mostly individually funded group wanted to pay a private cable company just under $2m to put a documentary on a Video On Demand channel. I don’t even see how a reasonable person could consider that “electioneering” in the first place, but the FEC did. This because when you give agencies this sort of regulatory power they can take it too far.
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I’m also unconvinced we should be trying to fix the money in politics problem at all. To some degree I think there is something to be said that it’s an argument that assumes voters are too stupid to decide for themselves. If voters really disliked politicians that were too involved with moneyed interests logic dictates they would not vote for them. However, this has never appeared to be a major issue for the voters. Now, I’m actually someone who has argued for a more restricted electorate in the first place, but the lefties here abhor such talk because they think everyone should be allowed to vote. My position on a restricted electorate is that most people are simply unfit to take part in the political process, but if you reject that assertion I don’t know that I understand the assertion that we need all kinds of regulations (which history suggests would be interpreted over-broadly by regulatory agencies) to protect voters from making bad choices. You either believe in the fitness of voters or you don’t, the way I see it.
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I’m also unconvinced the problem is quite so bad as you make it out to be. For one, Karl Rove put together a $1bn+ mega PAC that appears to have done jack shit. Even unions appear to have had limited impact in the elections compared to conventional wisdom. I don’t think elections are being won by that kind of activity any longer. It looks like grassroots activity appears to be more important, and that’s an area the Obama campaigns were immensely powerful in and it resulted in two significant electoral and popular vote victories. If there is any point where Super PACs actually influenced the election, I think it was prior to the Republican Convention. Obama was able to marshal a lot of Super PAC resources to use against Romney while he was only the “Nominee Presumptive” and it helped paint a very negative picture of him in the minds of the public. By the time the Romney campaign was able to get fully underway for the general election he was working from a deficit. Romney then proceeded to a do a lot of stuff to help reinforce the negative image already painted of him. (FWIW I think the Romney campaign was poorly run but I think a big reason for that was the insanity of the GOP primary process forced Romney to do things that made him inherently less electable and that had effects persisting throughout the election. They had ordinary style mismanagement above and beyond ideological, though, their data and technology team for example has been portrayed as inept in all the tech journals I read.)
I find these numbers as credible as the factoids that final four pools cost businesses eleventy billion in lost productivity.
The system is flexible. Just as people work a bit longer or harder at other times to make up for quick breaks, the political system would move to accommodate the influence of those who are influential. I agree that eliminating the hours that are put into fundraising would be a good thing, but the notion that these would simply be translated into hours of studying bills and putting through nothing but the “public good” is sheer fantasy.
Nor would it even be a good thing. You don’t want 535 “experts” all trying to stuff their notions into every bill. That’s chaos. You want Congress to be something like the Dope, where there are a few real experts on each of a huge variety of subjects and a larger group knowledgeable enough to follow the arguments and shoot down the idiocies of the ignorant when the real experts aren’t around. And that in fact is what it is today and has been for most if not all of its history.
Even that is ignoring the hidden assumption in the OP, that the job of a representative is simply to be knowledgeable about bills. What about understanding the district, handling complaints and problems of constituents, holding hearings, and the rest? Yes, many of those tasks would be improved by fewer hours spent in fund-raising which is why I approve of it. But the job of a representative is large and varied and involves much more than the simplistic reductionism of passing bills.
The relevant text of the BCRA prohibited expenditures on electioneering communications. The majority of the funds for an individual campaign (at least a well managed one) are spent on electioneering communications. The distinction is illusory.
If electioneering communications were utterly ineffective at changing voters minds, restrictions on expenditures for them would be in the interests of all parties.
Even if you could ban privately-funded political speech (and obviously you can’t do this, nor should you), how would you decide who gets public funding? Everyone who signs up? Impossible. And whatever criterion you do introduce, then the ballgame would just involve raising money to win that threshold race.
You can’t get money out of politics. You can only move it around. If it doesn’t go to candidates, it will go to national committees. If it doesn’t go there, it will go directly into ads, or third party organizing groups. None of these is really much better than the others.
Our best hope is technological change (cheaper access to information), voter behavioral change (taking actions that make voters less susceptible to paid-for political information or organizing), and limiting the power of government to act in favor of moneyed interest (changes to how regulations are promulgated, for example). None of these is likely to succeed, but all are infinitely likelier than trying to get money out of politics.
Ah. So we’re back to the old, “change the funding,” argument. I think this is the wrong tack. This is what I get for letting others lead the discussion.
What I’m concerned with is how elected representatives are spending their time, not how much money they are spending.
Maybe we can stop Strip and Land Mines, Inc. when they want to donate $50 000 000 in a single Congressional race. Maybe we can’t. That’s another issue as far as I am concerned.
What I want to do is stop Representative Dimbulb from spending 5 or 6 hours a day begging when he could be educating himself on bills and doing his constitutional duty. Apparently McCain-Feingold was supposed to make raising money so time-consuming that it would pull money out of politics. Instead it pulled politicians’ time into fundraising and away from doing their actual jobs. And no, their actual job is neither beggar nor prostitute. Their actual job is to legislate. That means knowing what’s going on.
It’s not about the money. It’s about the time wasted on begging for money, which breeds ignorance and incompetence. Get Representative Dimbulb and his colleagues out of the begging queue, and get their brains focused on the text of the bills, and it will eventually matter less how much money the elites throw at them.
So no, it’s not about campaign finance reform, it’s not about the money, it’s about the behavior of the legislators who spend more time begging than legislating. It’s about the time.
I can see a few reasonable lines of attack:
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Repeal McCain-Feingold and its ilk. Let it all go. If someone can raise a few million from a single donor, that’s more efficient than begging from umpteen donors. Will that put Congressmen in rich men’s pockets? Sure. But they are in rich bundlers’ pockets now. Repealing campaign finance laws would mean more flexibility for those who want to compete in different ways and defy the system.
But this does not address the real problem. -
Change the social attitudes. Make it shameful to waste the public’s investment in you by spending your time begging for bribes. Make it shameful to bribe.
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Pass laws prohibiting sitting Congressmen from spending too much time soliciting donations. This is where I was trying to go with this thread. And when I posted the OP, I had an idea how to do it, too, but put off saying it in the OP (clearly a mistake).
States with a referendum process could pass laws prohibiting any sitting Congressman from personally soliciting donations until after, say, the June primaries. You presumably have a record, you can run on that. If your friend, your wife, your brother, or your confessor want to raise money for you, fine. If you’re out of office and trying to get in, you can go out and raise money. *If you’re in office, *you have a duty to do the work, and should be prohibited from “campaigning” in the form of soliciting or receiving donations personally until a defined election season. We restrict gifts to public officials, we prevent uniformed personnel from campaigning, this is in that vein.
But this doesn’t make them do their work. It’s still indirect. -
Mandate that they spend time on their constitutional duties. This is the nitty-gritty. Maybe even make them spend a certain number of hours a week in “study hall” and set up an authority who will watch them like students in detention. If they can’t be trusted to do their work unwatched, watch them all the time, like high school students or assembly-line workers. This would presumably also be accomplished by referendum.
Maybe this is the best answer. -
Failing all of the above, maybe some kind of executive coup d’etat, dissolving Congress and declaring emergency martial law. If they won’t do the work, they don’t get to keep the position.
But this would be a revolutionary act, and thus could well backfire.
Again, it’s not the dollar amounts that breed dysfunction, but the hour amounts. A Congressman who spends 8 hours a day begging at $1/minute and clears $480 is far more derelict in his duty than one who spends an hour on the phone with his sugar daddy and clears $50 000.
Maybe he’s not that much worse for the country, but he’s presumably an incompetent of no use to his constituents.
This isn’t policy; it’s a tantrum.