Civics 101: America’s politics are awash in money. Duty for wise choices falls to voters
Editor’s note: This is another in a series of essays by Fresno State political science and history professors on the theme of Civics 101 — a review the American system of government and how it is supposed to work. The essays will be published leading up to the June 7 California primary.
The founders did not intend for our political system to be awash in money. Thomas Jefferson expressed serious concern about the New England financiers trying to influence Alexander Hamilton’s efforts to create a national economic policy and assume the war debt of the states. Members of the first Congress murmured disapprovingly about Rep. John Vining of Vermont, who they believed had been bought off for 1,000 guineas. Nonetheless, our political system today is awash in money — and we are talking about billions of dollars.
Yes, the problem has always been there. In 1833, Sen. Daniel Webster of Massachusetts threatened the president of the Bank of the United States with lobbying to end the bank’s existence unless his “retainer” for defending it was immediately “refreshed.” In the 1870s, dozens of members of Congress were caught in the noxious Credit Mobilier scandal, taking bribes from railroad companies in exchange for low interest government loans and the public land right-of-way that the railroads said they needed to build transcontinental rail networks.
Raising political money became such big business by the end of the 19th century that President William McKinley’s campaign manager, Mark Hanna, who was known for shaking down businesses for campaign money, could quip that “There are two things that are important in politics. The first is money and I can’t remember what the second one is.”
Businesses didn’t always like being shaken down, so in 1907 Congress enacted the Tillman Act, banning businesses contributions in national elections. Unfortunately, it had little effect, and by the 1920s, President Warren Harding’s administration was in trouble for taking oil company money in the Teapot Dome scandal.
Like water, money always finds a way to flow around barriers. In 1947, congressional Republicans, worried about the political influence of labor unions, enacted the Taft-Hartley Act (over President Harry Truman’s veto) banning union contributions. The Congress of Industrial Organizations responded by simply shifting responsibility for raising and contributing union money to a new legally separate, but union-controlled organization called Political Action Committee (PAC). The name, of course, became the general term for all such organizations. While concerns about the legality of PACs delayed their widespread use, when legalized by the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1974, their numbers exploded. Today, there are over 6,000 PACs registered with the Federal Election Commission.
A quick perusal of the website of the Center for Responsive Politics (www.opensecrets.org) which tracks political money, reveals the scope of contributions today. In the 2020 election, Democratic candidates and their parties took in about $291 million from PACs, while Republicans received $274 million. PAC money is bipartisan, it seems. So far in the current campaign cycle, we see that the biggest contributor is the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, a public sector labor union, at $876,750, followed closely by the Council of Insurance Agents and Brokers, an interest group representing insurance agents, at $876,000.
But focusing on PACs misses larger movements of money in politics. A series of recent court decisions, including the infamous Citizens United, largely obliterated any remaining legal restrictions on how much money can be raised and spent. The result are Super PACs (technically called independent-expenditure committees), which can solicit unlimited amounts of money from donors and then spend unlimited amounts on traditional and social media advertising to promote or (more frequently) attack candidates, or raise uncomfortable (and often untrue) issues to derail campaigns. The only restriction is that there can be no direct interaction between the Super PAC and a candidate, which is no meaningful restriction at all. In 2020 there were 2,276 Super PACs that raised $3.4 billion and spent $2.1 billion on issue advertising, with only slightly more going to conservatives than liberals.
Then there is “dark money.” If an interest group receives $1 million from a donor for its general fund, and then takes an equivalent amount out of that fund for campaign purposes, whose is to say that it is the same money requiring disclosure of the donor? Through this and similar tricks, millions of undisclosed dollars are now flooding into national campaigns.
The reason why laws restricting campaign contributions have largely failed is because the Supreme Court’s 1976 decision in Buckley v. Valeo determined that contributing money in elections is free speech and therefore protected by the First Amendment. Supporters of this view point to an earlier opinion by Justice Louis Brandeis in 1927’s Whitney v. California, in which he argued that the best remedy to abusive free speech was more free speech, and that the burden is on citizens to be informed about political issues and make reasoned decisions. Apparently what we need are more Super PACs spending more money.
There are two problems with this free speech argument. First, if money equals speech, and one side in a campaign has most of the money (and incumbent politicians generally have a lot more than challengers), then only one side gets heard and citizens cannot evaluate all sides in order to make reasoned decisions. Second, political advertising today tends to distort facts so badly that there is almost nothing for citizens to work with in making reasoned decisions. Rather than speech, all citizens hear is noise, and noise is not protected by the First Amendment. We can and do regulate noise in the United States.
The majority of Americans deeply disapprove of money in politics, and with good reason. Money is being contributed in campaigns to change the ideological balance of Congress, or at least to give contributors privileged access to key politicians so they can argue for or against legislation (blatant vote buying is actually rare).
Since the Supreme Court appears unlikely to change its protected free speech argument any time soon, efforts to pass new campaign finance laws are probably futile. We are therefore left with Justice Brandeis’ hope that citizens will step up. Voters should not passively believe what political advertising tells them, or become so cynical about politics that they simply give up on voting. The prevalence of money in American politics does not excuse voters from taking the time to understand candidates and issues. They will have to work at it harder, but the burden must be on the voter.
Misleading political advertising, whether from the left or the right, only succeeds because voters often don’t take the time to search for better answers.
