The Problem is Bigger Than Citizens United

Campaign finance reform activists have been saying it since decades before Citizens United: the source of what's wrong with our elections is money - regardless of the source.

Until we remove money from the equation - either by "clean election" public financing, or by requiring free television time on publicly-owned airwaves - the special interest with the most money will buy elections every time.

Digby:

It's clear that many of us are confused about Citizens United --- the fact is that nothing any wealthy individual like Sheldon Adelson is doing in this cycle is a result of that ruling. Citizens United lifted the restrictions on corporations and union spending in elections, period. It had nothing to do with wealthy individuals donating to PACs in order to support candidates. That has been legal since 1976:

The Supreme Court's ruling in Buckley v. Valeo (1976) held that expenditures made independently of a candidate's campaign could not be limited under the Constitution. If expenditures are made in "coordination" with a campaign, however, they may be regulated as contributions.

Citizens United brought about the SuperPAC in order to facilitate the newly legal unlimited corporate giving, but the huge donations from wealthy individuals to these PACs is something they always could have done. Indeed, the single largest donation to Romney's SuperPAC is "John Paulson, a billionaire and hedge fund manager who is, according to Politico, 'famous for [having enriched] himself by betting on the collapse of the housing industry.'" There was nothing stopping him from doing this before either.

So why the big change? I think it has to do with two things, one cultural and one economic. The first is simply that wealthy benefactors are willing to put their names on their politics. The overt lobbying for Randroid values among the super wealthy has been well documented. They are shameless.

The second, and probably more important, is that these wealthy people have so much more money than they had before. Adelson is the 8th richest man in the United States. The Koch Brothers are the 4th and 5th. And their wealth has grown exponentially in recent years as everyone else has been struggling:

When you have this much money, buying elections is a very cheap investment. It's these two factors --- the swashbuckling culture of wealth and income disparity that lie at the heart of our current problems.

But there are reforms we can start on now. James Lardner at The Nation:

It is time to make an issue, and not just a punching bag, out of this dysfunctional and deformed institution — time to mobilize some of the Congress - disapproving 84 percent of Americans behind a high-profile effort to ultimately address (and in the meantime highlight) the root cause of Congress’s dysfunction: its built-in subservience to the corporate and financial powers that, more than any other force in today’s America, and regardless of the party balance, determine who wins, who loses and who is considered a “serious candidate” for election to the House or Senate.

The kernel of such an effort can be found in the Fair Elections Now Act, a proposal to provide matching funds (drawn, in the Senate’s case, from a fee on major government contractors; in the House’s, from the sale of unused broadcast spectrum) to candidates who otherwise agree to rely on small contributions from within their states and districts. Based on public financing systems road-tested in Arizona, Maine and Connecticut, Fair Elections Now polls favorably across the political spectrum and counts two brave Republican House members—Walter Jones of North Carolina and Todd Platts of Pennsylvania—among its ninety-five co-sponsors.

Fair Elections Now allows citizens of modest wealth to wage credible campaigns without kowtowing to lobbyists, bundlers, and corporate and financial insiders. It should be Item One in an agenda of reforms designed to clean up Congressional elections.

Item Two, whose urgency is becoming more apparent by the hour, is to confront the monster unleashed by the Citizens United decision: the pseudo-independent money machines known as Super PACs, which have lately been set loose by and against Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, but which can be counted on to work much of their mayhem against progressives.

Long-term goal: get the money out of politics. Short-term goal: put legislative and constitutional leashes on the Super Pacs undermining democracy right now.