Book Review: Republic Lost

I recently finished reading Lawrence Lessig’s Republic Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress – and a Plan to Stop It and I have to say that I really did enjoy it. Lessig is a professor at Harvard and a progressive voice in the campaign finance world. He has a wealth of knowledge and he is an excellent writer to boot. 

In the book he goes through specific examples of how money truly sways our elected officials. This is hard evidence and if you feel that money doesn’t have an influence in legislative voting procedures after you read his works, you need to read closer. He calls the system “legal but corrupt” and I couldn’t have put it any better.  The book also includes public opinion polls and the answer that I found to be most alarming was this: According to a survey done by Lessig, 71% of Republicans and 81% of Democrats believed that money buys results in Congress.  If that large a percentage of people feel that way, why isn’t there more of a call to action? 

The book also goes farther into the issue of Lobbying and I was personally so upset while reading that part that I did not absorb all of the information. The amount of money being thrown around in the lobbying sector is absolutely sickening.

As I mentioned in my last post, there were experiments in Connecticut with small-dollar funded elections, and Lessig’s pitch is matching small-dollar donations and using vouchers so that the people are more in control. Those who normally would not be able to afford political donations are given a voice.  Lessig later goes on to propose a Constitutional Convention and that is where he lost me for a bit. I think that our constitution is working pretty well and I don’t think that it needs to be rewritten. But you can’t win them all, Mr. Lessig.

All-in-all, I think this book was an excellent summation of ideas and years of research. Lessig is not going anywhere anytime soon, either. He has joined the fight for net neutrality and is on a cross-country campaign for fairness in Congress. 

 

How does a Bill work?

I know this is another Schoolhouse Rock related post, but I thought that it was very appropriate to include on my blog. It really does reflect the view that corporations are controlling our elected officials. No matter how you feel about campaign finance reform, there’s no denying the influence corporations have on government.

Final long-form Post :: In closure

For my final lengthy post, I want to summarize the research that I have worked on this semester. Before January, I did not care for the topic of Campaign Finance Laws very much. In fact, I thought that it was stupid and a waste of time since there are federal elections only every two years or so. Boy was I wrong! This issue is one that is near and dear to my heart now and I do not plan on stopping my research anytime soon. Without further adieu, here is my research summary:

 

Imagine a world without politics. I don’t mean anarchy – which is the absence of government – I mean a world without the conniving, backstabbing nature of politicking; none of this “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine” and cutthroat deal-making that happens every day all around the United States on the local, state and federal levels. Our political system has evolved over time into a money game; elected officials spend between 30 and 70% of their time fundraising for their next campaign or securing for themselves highly lucrative jobs in the lobbying sector. Our voices, opinions and hard-earned money are all part of a game that they play. 

The reason behind this greed for power and money stems from the core of our electioneering system. In order to run in public elections, people must raise money – lots of it. Unless political hopefuls come from powerful families or are able to fundraise until the cows come home, it is very hard to even be considered for election. A quick way that candidates can raise major sums of money for a campaign is by gaining the favor of large donors such as wealthy individuals and corporations. Once in office, these politicians who accepted large donations on the campaign trail become a kind of puppet for the mega donors because they want to stay in good graces and keep their line of funding open. They sell their souls for campaign dollars. This is a major problem in our political system because this allows our politicians to be swayed in their decisions as not to upset their mega donors.

One of the main questions I found in campaign finance reform discussions was: “Where does all this money come from?” According to research done by Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig, 144,000 Americans, or 0.05% of the total population, gave the maximum allowed amount to any one federal candidate in the 2010 election cycle. Furthermore, 132 Americans donated 60% of the total money spent in that election cycle. These statistics show that a very small handful of Americans are the source of more than half of the money that is spent in political campaigns across the United States. 

The money is funneled from personal contributions direct to candidates, political parties or PACs. The most powerful PACs in the United States thrive off of donations small and large, and the left and right are fairly competitive in their total numbers of dollars donated; the main difference is the size of donations garnered. The common trend is that Conservative labeled PACs and candidates are more likely to get fewer, large-scale donations from wealthy individuals and corporations than Liberal branded PACs and candidates, who get smaller, more numerous donations alongside large-scale donations.

A great deal of a representative’s campaign money comes from PACs, so they spend much time and effort staying in the PAC’s good graces. A study by the American Accounting Association concluded that committee speech and actions by members of Congress closely aligned with the principles of the PACs that gave campaign contributions.

When the framers of the Constitution created our republic, they intended it to be “dependent on the people alone.” When corporations are considered people in the funding game (thanks to Citizens United) that distances people from democracy and mutes their voices. In 2010, 78% of elected officials in Connecticut (from both political parties) gave up large campaign contributions and only accepted small-dollar donations. By doing so, those officials put the election back into the hands of the people and were still able to get elected to office. The difference between those who abolished massive donations and those who did not is this: the officials who did not take big money were dependent on the people alone – just like the framers intended our republic to work.

If this system worked in Connecticut, then why doesn’t the rest of the country adopt it and put the power back into the hands of the people? The solution is completely in the hands of our elected officials. Our political system thrives off of money and its power. Politicians live in an eat-or-be-eaten kind of world, and if they do not have similar funding to their opponents, their chances are slim. It is a vicious cycle that takes up time and money that could be spent fixing our nation’s major problems.

The Santa Clara University Markkula Center for Applied Ethics published a report that stated: “When a politician is influenced by either the need to solicit contributions from special interests to finance a costly election campaign, or by a sense of obligation to benefactors, the politician may no longer represent the interests of his or her entire constituency.” Our representatives do more to please donors and benefactors than they do to fight for the people who elected them in the first place. They are supposed to be our voices in our government, so why aren’t they fighting for us?

Lessig points out in his work that issues such as unemployment do not bring in as much campaign cash as issues that affect the richest of the rich and corporations like credit card swipe fees. When a representative votes in favor of corporations and the rich, they are more likely to receive major kickbacks in the form of donations and political capital than if they vote in favor of the working class. This is detrimental to our democracy because congressmen and women are more likely to spend their time working for those who can give them something real in return than those who can only afford to thank them with words.

The “one man, one vote” principle is lost when we allow influencing factors, such as money, to infiltrate our political system. Corporations matter more than constituents because they can write checks for the maximum donation limit while many people can barely make rent. Representatives no longer care about the people that they represent; they care about their bottom line.

After the Constitutional Convention, a woman in the street asked Benjamin Franklin what he brought, and he replied: “A republic, madam, if you can keep it.” The influence of money in our political system renders this republic dependent on the people alone unattainable until we stop focusing on capital gains and more on what we want and need from our government. Unless we the people take our government that the founding fathers created for us, their posterity, back from greedy politicians and the corporations that control them, we will not see change. We will, in fact, fall deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole until Uncle Sam and the “US of A” are literal ghosts of America past.

The famous author Mark Twain once wrote: “We have the best government that money can buy.” Twain died 100 years before Citizens United v. FEC was decided and I don’t think he could have been more correct in this statement.  

 

Tyrannosaurus Debt – The National Debt and Campaign Finance Law

Now that I have stirred up memories of your childhood with a little Schoolhouse Rock (and I know you watched “I’m just a Bill” too for old times sake), I want to get down to the good stuff. Er, maybe it’s not such a good thing, but it sure is something the U.S. can’t seem to live without. Yes, the National Debt.

The National Debt started in 1790 as a way to pay for the American Revolution. Since the colonies weren’t a real nation at the time of fighting, it was not collecting taxes to finance itself as it was still living off the Crown. Once we were freed (thanks, Declaration of Independence!), we had to find a way to, you know, pay for things. Sure, citizens paid taxes, but the tax dollars that the government collected were only a drop in the bucket. Turns out, running a country is REALLY expensive! After some heckling by our founders, they decided to create this nice deficit and let it handle things. Well, we got involved in some wars and some pretty rough economic times took their toll on the country, and the deficit that the founders made for us was really big and showed no signs of stopping. The government tried to slow spending, but we are America and we must not be outspent by others!

Right now, as I type this, the National Debt is: $17,449,646,278,040.36. That’s a lot of dough, paw paw!

As my Economics professor put it: “We ain’t getting to a zero balance anytime soon.” After that, I kind of zoned out because it was the last 10 minutes of class and I was ready to go. What I did catch, though, was that this deficit is essential to the way our government operates. Exactly how, I am not 100% sure, but it has become something that is a part of America. I wouldn’t go so far as to say like apple pie and baseball, but it is something that is ours – created by us, for us…and those who we are fighting for and aiding and paying off, but that’s another story for another blog post.

Where I want to bring this full-circle with my interest of campaign finance goes back to the issue of taxation. Sure, it seems like the government taxes everything these days, but one of the few exceptions is campaign contributions. When I filed my taxes last month, I had to check a box that said that I donated money to a certain political group that will not be named here. It didn’t alter the amount of my taxes, but they did not tax my donation. In the grand scheme of things, my $25 donation was nothing big, but what happens when an individual donates $2,500? They still are not taxed. End of story.

Under Section 527 of the Internal Revenue Service Code, most all political committees, campaigns and organizations fall into the tax exempt status. The spending is untaxed and the spending that does not expressly support a candidate or party is, for the most part, unregulated. PACs and interest groups who don’t speak the name of any one politician can go and spend money like a kid in a candy store. The problem here is that this isn’t just one kid, it’s a field trip of kindergartners with mommy’s Gold AmEx in M&M’s World.

This rampant spending drives the national debt further and further into the red and current legislation is doing nothing to stop it. It is, in fact, making it easier to spend like crazy and most Americans know nothing about it. My last post on McCutcheon v. FEC outlines the most recent rules and regulations.

Time for me to step off my soap box for now, and I hope this makes you think about spending and where so much money is going. Tyrannosaurus Debt has a sister named Tyrannosaurus PAC and she is very hungry for our money.

McCutcheon v. FEC (2014) and what it means for Campaign Finance

Last week, McCutcheon v. FEC was decided in the Supreme Court and it has spurred many discussions about campaign finance.

Shaun McCutcheon, a very wealthy businessman from Alabama felt that he needed to donate above and beyond the legally allowed limits, but the money he wanted to give would have put him far and beyond the old limit of $48,000. He thought that he needed to give all of this money to make his voice more heard in politics. Since he was not allowed to give the amount of money he wanted to give, he brought up a court case against the Federal Election Commission.

After the case moved its way up through the court system, the Supreme Court decided in a 5-4 vote that these aggregate federal limits are against the First Amendment. The case did, however keep limits on how much an individual can give to a politician’s campaign ($2,600). By doing so, the court further upheld the ruling of Citizens United v. FEC (2010) that said that money is a form of political speech, and that it should not be so strictly limited.

A problem that has been talked about in the media is that the ruling seems to favor conservative donors who tend to give large sums of money at once to campaigns. The new regulations allow larger total federal donations – something that is a trend with right-leaning donors. Even though the Democratic party usually gets a higher total dollar amount, their donations come from more small dollar amount sums than mega donations.

The one thing that I have seen repeatedly in op-ed posts online is a complaint that is completely legitimate and makes me think about the ruling in a new light. People on both ends of the political spectrum have voiced worries about raising the limits because they feel that the donors who give the most money will have more influence over elected officials than the average citizen will. It’s a rather simple concept: keep the people with the fattest checkbooks happy and they’ll keep on writing fat campaign checks. If politicians only focused on keeping the average Joes happy, chances are, they would make their uber-rich donors unhappy in some way, and that, in turn, would make them take their fat checkbooks to another politician who is willing to make them happy. It’s a vicious cycle of eat or be eaten.

I am all for freedom of speech and I think that everyone should be able to do what they want with the money that they earned or were given, but these expanded limits allow politicians’ decisions to be swayed by their donors. I am not saying that every politician makes decisions based on money alone, but no matter how compelling a plea I make to a representative, my sob story will never compete with a high-dollar check made payable to Representative So-and-so. I think this is a major issue that our political society faces today. Politicians should be running for public office because they truly care for the well-being of their constituents and the area that they are representing, not because they want to get rich and secure for themselves a lucrative career as a lobbyist after they are done “representing” the people. There are plenty of people who would love to represent the people of their district/state, but they can’t even get their foot in the door because the small donations they worked very hard to get will never compete with big dollar donations that puppet representatives have collected. 

This makes me question the structure of our election system. If an average citizen who really cares can’t get elected to office because he/she can’t afford to run a competitive campaign against a candidate who comes from a very wealthy family or a political dynasty, the same people will continue to run our government in the same direction it’s been going for a long time. Maybe it’s just my hopeful spirit talking, but I think it’s time to let some new people into politics so we can accomplish things that benefit all Americans, not just the richest of the rich. 

Why can’t we all just get along?

A few days ago, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Democrat, California) spoke on the need for campaign finance reform and her words were few, but pointed. In a clip that I found on Politico, she spoke on last week’s Supreme Court ruling in the case of McCutcheon v. FEC (2014). In the clip, Pelosi says of the Supreme Court ruling: “[It’s a] very bad decision but totally consistent with their backward thinking undermining our democracy.”

When I heard those words come out of her mouth, my jaw just about hit the floor. Sure, everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but the way that I interpreted her statement is that she thinks that the Supreme Court is consistently wrong and is trying to undermine democracy altogether.

Our Founding Fathers established the three branches of government so that no branch is more powerful than another. Checks and balances keep the three at about the same level of power (depending on who you talk to). How the Supreme Court could possibly undermine democracy is beyond me because these checks and balances are still in place.

Sure, Pelosi may not agree with the ruling because it allows larger and more frequent individual contributions to campaigns, but Citizens United v. FEC (2010) ruled that money is free speech and limits on free speech are violations of our First Amendment rights. Is Pelosi, a strong Democrat and a face for the Democratic Party, saying that there should be limits on First Amendment rights? Or is it that she is trying to make the Supreme Court look vastly conservative and right-leaning because “the very same people who are putting up all this money are the very same people who are opposed to raising the minimum wage [and] are the very same people who are advocating for no regulations”?

No matter who you are or what your political beliefs are, why is it that there always has to be finger pointing?

I think that our government needs serious work when it comes to working with each other before they can solve the nation’s problems. Maybe they need some kind of retreat like they made us go on in high school where we all sat around in a big circle and shared our feelings. Something needs to be done because we’re on what seems to be an endless journey of fighting and gridlock.

George Washington warned the newly-formed America of political factions, but by the time that Thomas Jefferson was running for his first term in office, both Jefferson and Adams had aligned themselves with a political party. The rest is history. Though the Democratic-Republicans and the Federalists no longer exist, the two-party system has taken its toll on our political system. Sure, it has been a defining characteristic of our method of governing, but it has definitely made things like passing legislation and, you know, governing quite challenging in the 218 years that political parties have been around.

Am I saying that they should be done away with altogether? Not at all because they are unifying factors in our country. I do, however think that there should be a call to legislators to put aside their differences to get things done.

Source: http://www.politico.com/story/2014/04/nancy-pelosi-campaign-finance-reforms-105352.html

Campaign Finance Web

I found this neat little graphic from the Sunlight Foundation that goes along with my first post about the web of Campaign Finance for you visual learners out there. I think that it does a good job of showing the literal web that goes on in the campaign finance world. It may make things a little easier to understand and I hope it helps.

Diversity Visa Program (Green Card Lottery)

For this post, I decided to take a quick break from my posts about the campaign finance world to talk about something near and dear to my heart. This weekend I was speaking with my mom about politics and such and she told me about something that one of her friends told her about. She said that there is now a “Green Card Lottery” that was instituted in an attempt to get people from countries with low immigration rates and give them permission to live, work and go to school in the U.S. There was an application period in October 2013, and a random number generator will pick 50,000 people to receive Green Cards.

How I have never heard about this until now floored me. 

A little backstory: My grandmother is an Italian citizen and has had a Green Card since she moved here in the early 1960’s after marrying my grandfather while he was stationed in Italy with the U.S. Army. They lived in Italy for a while before she came to the U.S. with my grandfather because she had to get her Green Card. She had to work to get her ticket to live with her husband and young son, who was also a U.S. citizen (because my uncle was born to a soldier while he was stationed in another country).

My main issue with this lottery system is that the people who are getting the Green Cards are not working for their way into the land of opportunity – they are given a pass into the U.S. because their number came up. I am not saying that they are lazy, or that they are coming here to live off of our system, or even that they are not hard-working people. I do not know any of the people who entered the raffle on October 1, 2013 and November 2, 2013 on dvlottery.state.gov, but I question why this lottery is being implemented. I think that immigration is a great thing for this country, but it is only great when it is done the right way. By the right way, I mean by going through all of the steps of the traditional application before the applicant enters the U.S. to live. 

Immigration built the great country that we live in. Just about every one of us is a descendant of immigrants – whether someone in your family was on the Mayflower or if your parents came here from Vietnam in the 1970’s, you are part immigrant. Immigration has fueled our culture and helped attribute to the America we know today. Boston wouldn’t have its St. Patrick’s Day festivities if it weren’t for the Irish immigrants, Miami wouldn’t have its Latin flare if Cuban immigrants hadn’t settled there, and, honestly, New York City would probably look a lot like somewhere really boring like, oh I don’t know, Cleveland if millions of immigrants hadn’t settled or passed through that magnificent city. (No offense to anyone who likes Cleveland, but the only thing that I like about it is the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame).

What I’m trying to say is I think that there is always a right way and a wrong way to go about things.

I did a little research and found the list of places that qualify for the lottery. What I found is that the list of non-qualifiers was much shorter than the list of qualifiers. The countries that do not qualify are as follows: Bangladesh, Brazil, Canada, mainland China, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Haiti, India, Jamaica, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Peru, Philippines, South Korea, United Kingdom (except Northern Ireland), and Vietnam. Every other country’s residents qualify to enter the raffle. That’s a whole lot of potential Green Card holders.

Back to my main issue of this being a “free ticket,” it really makes me wonder why this policy was implemented and the fact that it was not talked about very much until after the application has long passed. Do we need to question our politicians for not talking about its pros or cons to us, their constituency? Or should we question the media for not covering this important event? Since this policy has not been extensively covered in the news, there is not much that is readily known about exactly how, when or why this happened.

I think that this is a great example of the political communication issue of agenda setting. Agenda setting is defined as “a process through which the relative importance of various issues and events to the public” (Rogers & Dearing, 1988, p. 555). Thinking back on the past year or so in the news, there were definitely slow weeks that the media could have covered this story, say, the week of Justin Bieber’s much talked about arrest for a DUI in Miami. The Green Card lottery story was not mentioned in President Obama’s State of the Union address this past January, nor in any notable capacity since it was implemented.

It makes me wonder, as an informed and politically active American, how did I or others in my circle not hear about this? Was this a cover up by the federal government so that it would go through without public opposition because the 50,000 new Green Card holders are potential constituents? Was this not covered by the media because the 50,000 new Green Card holders are potential viewers of their content? Or was this not covered because it happened at a “bad time” and it was assumed that the American public would hear about it when the 50,000 new Green Card holders showed up with their suitcases in hand. I suppose only time will tell, so I will be on the lookout for news and information about the policy.

I could go on for days about immigration issues, but for now I am going to call my wonderful grandmother and tell her how much I love her and thank her for working through the Green Card process so that she could live here and raise her family in the land of opportunity. 

Sources: usa-greencards.org, state.gov

Super PAC Woman’s Hit-n-Run Guide to Campaign Finance

Hey y’all! For my first post, I decided to go through the most talked about terms in the campaign finance world and define them in one handy place for you. I will never be able to talk about every single component of campaign finance, but these are the most common ones and the ones that I will talk most about. I hope you enjoy!

I’ll start off simple – Candidates are the people running for office who usually represent some group, or a party. Now that I have that down, I’ll move on to the more serious stuff. Political Action Committees (PACs) are organizations that pool funds, or campaign contributions, and give them to: 1. campaigns for (or against) a certain candidate, 2. campaigns for ballot initiatives, or 3. campaigns for legislature. An organization becomes a full-fledged PAC when it either gives or receives at least $1,000 that is used to influence a federal election in one way or another. Laws concerning PACs at a state level vary, depending on the state.

In 2010, the Super PAC was born from two important Supreme Court decisions, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission and Speechnow.org v. Federal Election Commission (don’t worry about these right now, I have a lot to say about them at a later time). These newfangled Super PACs have very few restrictions, as in, one restriction: they can’t give money to a specific candidate or party. The money can come from whoever wants to give it to them and can be however much said donors wish to fork over, but it cannot for whatever reason be given to a specific person or political party.

Next in the line up of campaign finance players is the 527 Organization. They get their name from the section of the Internal Revenue Service Code that outlines their guidelines. They, too, have very few guidelines. Just like Super PACs, they cannot expressly advocate for or against a campaign or party and they have no limits on the amount of money they can spend. The only things that they must do to keep out of trouble are register with the IRS, disclose their donors in some public form, and release reports of where the money is going every so often. They are more or less the influencers of elections; they are the groups who pick who should or should not run for office at the local, state and federal levels (I know that sounds kind of sketchy, but they do this through giving money to the people they like until their people have more money and a better campaign than the opponent).

Another group of tax-exempts that play a major role in the campaign finance world is the realm of 501(c)‘s. They are mainly social welfare organizations and local associations of employees (this can not include any national unions/organizations and the net earnings of the group must be devoted to social welfare). The 501 Category can be broken into many sub-categories of nonprofits.

As an aside, Hard Money is the money that is regulated by laws and rules. It has limits and regulations that make it so hard to raise. Soft Money is any kind of political contribution that is not regulated by law. They are supposed to be used for party building activities and general get out the vote drives, but they oftentimes find their ways into places that they shouldn’t be…like funding ads that advocate for the election of defeat of a person or party.

You may be asking yourself right now how all of this came about. Oh, I’m so glad you said something!

The Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 is the official and what was once thought to be complete law that regulates how candidates for Congress and President can (and can’t) raise campaign cash. It has had to be amended and tweaked a few times, most notably in 1974, when the Federal Election Commission (FEC) was formed. The FEC is the agency that administers and enforces election laws. It is headed by six people, three Democrats and three Republicans, and in order for any action to take place at all, four of the six members must agree. The FEC stands deadlocked on many issues because most issues are partisan and they are an even three versus three.

In 1976, a very important Supreme Court case, Buckley v. Valeo, decided the constitutionality of key parts of The Federal Election Campaign Finance Act of 1971 and its amendments in 1974. The parts in question limited campaign expenditures as well as independent expenditures by individuals and groups. Long story short, the court decided that money counts as speech and the limits set out in the FECA were violations of the First Amendment.

Jump ahead to 2002, The Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA), also called the McCain-Feingold Law, prohibited federal office holders, candidates and the parties from raising and spending soft money for federal elections. The law also covers things like redefining and regulating political advertising and increasing hard money limits for candidates and parties.

Phew! That should just about wrap up Super PAC Woman’s Hit-n-Run Guide to Campaign Finance. I hope that this makes the campaign finance world a little clearer for you because it is often pretty confusing. With that, I’ll leave you with a quote from Mark Twain:

“We have the best government that money can buy.”

-Super PAC Woman