Show me the money
One of the oldest adages for anyone studying politics and government is Follow the Money.
If you know who’s paying for a candidate’s campaign ads, or a political movement’s rallies, you have a much clearer sense for what they’re about and whose interests they’re likely to watch out for.
And for years, there was a kind of national consensus around this idea:
We might disagree about the impact of all the cash washing around in American politics; but surely we can agree that disclosure of the sources of that money should be a basic requirement. Right?
Unfortunately, like so many other reasonable ideas in our political culture, this too is being abandoned.
This year, secretive groups not officially tied to either party or their candidates have spent more than $200 million on campaign ads and other forms of activism. That’s up from $68 million four years ago.
This from Capital News Connection, a public radio project.
The spending explosion, most observers agree, stems from recent federal court rulings, especially Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission, decided earlier this year.
The Supreme Court declared corporations, unions and other special interests could spend unlimited amounts from their treasuries to try to influence campaigns, so long as the money doesn’t go directly to candidates.
Journalists have been working aggressively to try to figure out where all that money is coming from and where it’s going, but it’s not easy.
A lot of the cash is being funneled through non-profit groups that aren’t required to name their donors. Here’s CNC’s list of some of the biggest, and most secretive, spenders in this year’s campaign:
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce ($24.34 million), the Service Employees International Union ($14.42 million), the conservative American Action Network ($16.95 million), the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees ($9.86 million), the conservative American Future Fund ($8.59 million) and the conservative Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies ($10.48 million). The later was founded by former Bush political adviser Karl Rove.
As you can see, it’s a non-partisan list: There are secretive donors funneling money to Democrats and Republicans.
But by all accounts the vast majority of the anonymous-donor dough is going to the GOP, helping to build the big Republican wave of 2010.
One of the reasons these secret donations are dangerous is that they can skew our understanding of how much support a particular cause or candidate has.
Karl Rove’s new group calls itself “grassroots,” and has largely eclipsed the Republican National Committee in funding TV spots and get out the votes efforts across the country.
But according to a Politico report this morning, the vast majority of its huge war chest comes from just three billionaire donors.
When an Oregon congressman was hit by attack ads in his re-election campaign this fall, the spots said they were funded by a group called “Concerned Taxpayers of America.”
But an Oregon newspaper discovered that the only donor to the $200,000 campaign was a hedge fund manager here in New York state.
The vast sums of money in American politics already pose serious risks to our democracy, with the super-inflated “free speech” of the few threatening to drown out the far more modest expressions that average citizens can afford.
But if significant amounts of the cash shaping our government continue to come from shadowy sources, it will be harder and harder to know who’s pulling the string.
Your thoughts welcome.
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It would help if people would follow a few rules.
Turn your eyes and ears off to all political ads. If someone won’t tell you who they are, don’t listen to anything they say.
Privacy is one thing. Secrecy is something else. If someone wants to support someone, shouldn’t they be proud of it and want you to know who they are?
Cowards are never to be trusted. If you can’t stand up for what you believe and be counted, you are a coward.
Yes, currently it is legal to be a coward but that doesn’t make it right.
I understand the desire for good clean elections with no mudslinging, etc. But this idea that we should limit speech bothers me. Alright, I don’t much care for Karl Rove, he spent millions. Well, so what? George Soros various organizations have spent tens of millions and no one here seems to care about that. Why is Soros okay but not Rove? Why is it okay for some people/groups to spend lots of money but not others?
It seems to me that if you start limiting who can buy ad’s or airtime sooner or later you’ll end up limiting everyone and that’ll hurt us all in the end.
I think the point is you know Soros is spending the money. We don’t know who is giving money to Rove. I personally don’t like either. Could it be a Saudi King, I don’t know but follow the money.
My suggestions for campaign reform:
1. pass a law that says that corporations, unions etc. are not persons for purposes of campaign contributions.
2. If you are contributing to a campaign you have to do so publicly.
3. No candidate can accept contributions that originate outside the area they will represent if elected.
Maybe then we could get back to politicians representing the voters.
James, do you think AARP, AMA, ACLU, etc. would really stand for that? Would it be right to limit the speech of AARP, for example, when they represent (poorly) a large segment of our population? Would it be right to limit the speech of the Teachers Unions or Medical Associations with regard to subjects they are concerned with?
The problem is if you limit one union or corporation you have to limit them all and sooner or later that trickles down to your local Lions Club, Volunteer Fire Dept or Citizens Committee to Protect Your Backyard.
Right, Bret, you have to limit them all. That’s kind of the idea of campaign spending limits.
To what OA? $1K, $100.00, $10.00? Where do you draw the line? And is it effective? Do you recall during one of the recent elections how campaign laws were circumvented by laundering the money through thousands of donors? It’s more work, but it WORKS. So how do you fund it clean? And don’t tell me public funding because that’s not going to stop the donations at all, it just adds an additional burden on the taxpayer. And the fundamental question of why is it right to limit anyones speech remains. Corporations and unions are made up of people now matter how big.
For good reason, that newspapers, heretofore the bastions of freedom of the press, refuse to publish anonymous letters. The internet (witness this blog, that guards identity), sadly mirrors the Supreme Court’s ruling.
Bret,
I don’t know the answer, but you always attack with these haranguing questions, like somebody’s an idiot for not having birthed a perfect system in the space of a blog comment, trying to make it seem like the whole premise is absurd.
When you’re not all angered up about something, you often display common sense. I’m sure a group of you and your friends could figure out an appropriate spending limit. It’s not really rocket science. It’s done all the time in most other countries in the world, like England.
The easiest thing would be to just ban TV political advertising, same way we ban tobacco advertising. You wouldn’t even have to limit spending. Of course, your local TV station would go under, since they can’t sell any other kind of advertising these days. That’s a consequence I could live with, being a free marketeer.
Sorry, I don’t have all the answers either. But you offered the limit idea and I don’t see it working any better than it did years back. And the question regarding freedom of political speech still lingers. That’s what the first Amendment is all about, the right of the people to call the King an idiot.
McCain-Fiengold was supposed to fix everything. All it did was make it harder for a non-incumbent to campaign, which I think was probably the idea in the first place. So what next? Is it a better idea to open it all up or close it all up? What harm do you unintentionally do when you change things and what back doors and loopholes will our beloved lawyer/politicians leave themselves?