Campaign Finance Reform – A Primer
All attempts at Campaign Finance Reform in these United States have failed. ALL. Every single one of them.
If that sounds like exaggeration, just consider that attempts to limit the influence of money on politics goes back to not long after the presidency of Andrew Jackson, the pro-slavery founder of the Democratic party, whose administration ultimately produced the political “spoils system.” Good ol’ “Honest Abe” himself was bankrupted trying to personally finance his first Senatorial campaign in 1858, so he had to rely upon businessman from Philadelphia and New York to finance his Presidential campaign in 1860.
In the United States, concerns over financing campaigns for public office have been around since before the writing of the Constitution. Candidates traded influence, power, and gifts, for constituents’ money and votes even before the dawn of the Republic. George Washington – later President, but at the time, a candidate for the Virginia House of Burgesses – bestowed upon the 391 voters in his district the “customary means” of winning votes: “28 gallons of rum, 50 gallons of rum punch, 34 gallons of wine, 46 gallons of beer, and 2 gallons of cider royal.” James Madison lost his reelection campaign to the Virginia legislature 20 years later because he refused to provide voters with the customary whiskey.
Gardner and Charles, “Election Law in the American Political System,” p. 637.
In 1867, just two years after the Civil War, the first legislative attempt at campaign finance reform appeared in a Naval Appropriations bill. It forbade government officials from soliciting (i.e. “shaking down”) Navy Yard workers for money to finance the ruling party’s election campaigns. This had become a routine practice in prior years. So routine was it that federal employees would have some portion of their pay directly “assessed” by the government to the Party’s re-election fund. The protections of the 1867 Navy yard workers were eventually extended to all civil service workers… (But not the rest of us, evidently.) The Presidential campaign of 1896 was so openly a case of dueling donors obtaining political promises from each Parties’ respectively well-financed candidates (William Jennings Bryan for Team Blue and William McKinley for Team Red) that the public began yelling for campaign finance reform… and here we are 120 years later. This brief timeline of attempts at reform shows just how fruitless they all have been.
Modern, seemingly sophisticated attempts at campaign finance reform, by people from both political parties in Congress, have ultimately been set aside by Supreme Court decisions. While it’s unpalatable to say this, the Supreme Court’s rulings in these cases are very solid reads of the First Amendment… (proving yet again the old adage that “sometimes even a blind squirrel finds a nut” or that “even a broken clock is right twice a day.”) Lawsuits by public interest groups have ultimately failed to produce anything even close to a good result. And now the public feels so desperate for something to happen that they’ll embrace even nonsensical calls for reform by (of all people!!) Hilary Clinton (man, that is some brass right there.)
How the Legislative Sausage Gets Made
To understand why campaign finance reform doesn’t work – and what simple fix would work – you have to understand some basic economics around how the political sausage gets made, so to speak.
First, you must know what politicians all know: there has only been one time in the last 42 years that the rate of re-election for Congressional incumbents dipped below 90% – that was 1974, when it was only 89.7%, a rounding of tenths away from being 90%. Muse on that for minute – Congress has had historically bad approval ratings – like below 20%, for decades, by any polling company. Everyone thinks Congress sucks; yet Congressional incumbents get re-elected over 90% of the time. It’s a near-certainty. Many people have speculated or offered reasoned opinions about this phenomenon, but I don’t really care about the “why” because the mere statistical truth of it is all that matters for my argument.
Second, we must make the rather short “hop” of faith and assume that politicians are at least as self-interested as the rest of us… one might humbly suggest that they are (perhaps) even a bit more self-interested than the rest of us, or claim that the job attracts the type, but I don’t need to prove that as crucial to my theory. Suffice it that my claim rests on what I believe to be a rather well-observed phenomenon about the self-interest of politicians. Lord Acton wrote an entire tract explaining this, but unfortunately no one reads it and all that we (poorly, it seems) remember is this quote: “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” My own observation from many years of government service is simply that the government does not choose its prospective employees from some magical pool of magnanimous, morally benevolent, and personally disinterested human beings. If you think I am incorrect, you’ve obviously never been to the Department of Motor Vehicles to register your car, or change the title, or correct a typo on a Vehicle Identification Number (VIN). (Try to manage that over your lunch break and let me know how it goes).
The Currency of the Politician is Legislation
Two the above two simple facts, we have to add in some economics. The best way to come at this is to ask a very simple question: if you were a legislator looking to raise some cash, what do you have to sell? ANS: Legislation.
Legislation is all that a lawmaker can offer any prospective “buyer.” It is the medium of exchange (i.e. the currency) of the political class and a specific instance of the more general “Law of the Instrument.”* In return for a piece of favorable legislation, or a clause in the next bill – or exemption from both – political donors deposit sums into re-elections campaigns, or exchange different favors with lobbyists, the “middlemen” of the entire Money-for-Favor-for-Reelection Triangle.
If this seems unduly cynical, it shouldn’t be. If one has a friend who is a cop, who hasn’t heard of, or considered, asking him or her to “look into” a ticket…? Now magnify that onto a scale where instead of your hundred-fifty bucks plus court costs being at stake, it’s someone else’s multi-million dollar, multinational business and a piece of legislation that would ensure government contracts flowing that direction for the next 10 years.
You send us to Congress; we pass laws under which you make money…and out of your profits, you further contribute to our campaign funds to send us back again to pass more laws to enable you to make more money.
— Senator Boies Penrose, 1896 (quoted in Id., Gardner and Charles, p. 638.)
I always hear people complain about the influence of “corporate money” in politics and yet no one ever seems to consider that if their Senator wasn’t offering legislation for sale, the corporation wouldn’t be able to make a purchase. And it is in no way only corporations buying off politicians. Unions are at least as powerful and well-off as any corporation and billionaires with agendas sit on both the left and the right of the political spectrum. In fact, if we’re dealing in generalities, it is worth wondering: if corporations are filled with greedy, capital-obsessed Scrooges, why would those folks ever want to give up their money to a politician in the first place? It’s not like when you’re starting a company that you start in your garage by building up your political lobbying budget, then make whatever widget, software, or equipment for digging oil. No, legislators aren’t merely the unfortunate victims of some “system” that is foisted upon them. What Senators and Congressman do to fill the coffers of their re-elections campaigns is a perfectly natural, foreseeable byproduct of the entire system.