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.
Super PAC Woman 