Maggie Grove

There's more money in American politics than ever. The amount has increased by 500% over the last decade (and the amount coming from billionaires has grown 3,700%). This is a serious problem. Because the more money that's on the table, the more time our politicians spend pursuing it.

 

Today, Congress spends 25-50% of their time on political fundraising – not working to address the People's needs, but rather cozying up to big donors. This is terrible for democracy. "Hours spent grubbing for money from rich donors changes candidates' priorities and sense of the people's needs. They hear over and over about high taxes on the wealthy, and 'wasteful' spending on social programs. Special tax breaks for corporations and hedge fund managers start to sound reasonable," writes Northwestern political scientist Benjamin Page. As our politicians become more biased towards elite interests, the less they answer to us.

 

So it’s probably not surprising that today, with Washington more awash in money than ever, our politics have become completely decoupled from the interests of everyday Americans.

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Nearly 3-in-4 Americans support nonprofit healthcare. Why are we only the modern country that doesn't have it? Because over the last two decades, the healthcare industry has spent $3.6 billion “lobbying” (bribing) Congress against it. Despite our healthcare system being more expensive than any other OECD country and producing the worst health outcomes, despite 1-in-5 Americans being unable to afford necessary healthcare services and two-thirds of US bankruptcies being caused by medical debt, our elites insist we not reform it. They say this for one reason: because reform will destroy health insurers’ profits. An industry insider says insurers are "freaking out" over non-profit healthcare, "but the industry is mindful of optics, and is largely lobbying behind the scenes."

 

Significant majorities of Democrats and Republicans support tougher regulations for Wall Street. Alas, Wall Street has spent $13 billion bribing lawmakers against it. 84% of Americans support drug price regulation. But alas, Big Pharma has spent $5.2 billion on bribes. 3-in-4 support legislation to protect user privacy… but Big Tech/Media has spent $8.9 billion to shut it down. 7-in-10 Americans support investing in clean energy over coal/oil... but Big Energy has spent $7.2 billion fighting it. (Figures reflect spending on lobbying and candidate donations, past 20 years).

 

This is the biggest political issue of our time. If you care about reforming healthcare, education, gun control, environmental policy, childcare, racial justice, anything... guess what? None of it's going to happen when Big Business is bribing Congress against our interests. We can't make progress on any of these issues until the foundational issue – a recent explosion of dark money that subverts the will of the People – is fixed.

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So let's understand how we got to this point (and how we fix it). The short answer: through a coordinated, shadowy effort by elite interests. As for the longer answer…

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How We Got Here​

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There's one key reason that money in politics has blown up today: the 2010 Citizens United and SpeechNow Supreme Court decisions. Citizens United ruled that corpor­a­tions and other interest groups can spend unlim­ited money in our elections. SpeechNow ruled that political organizations (PACs) could do the same, and made it so they didn't have to disclose (reveal) their donations.

 

Our elites want us to believe this is normal, natural, no problem. It is none of those things. It reflects a 180 from America's historical legal stance on campaign finance limitations (see: Tillman Act, Taft-Hartley Act, Federal Election Campaign Act, Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, etc.). Because as corporations have risen to power over the past half-decade, America has consistently prioritized the political power of the People over Big Business. Or at least has tried to. America was literally founded on rejecting monarchistic rule! We came to exist by standing up against concentrated power in the hands of a wealthy few who refuse to honor our interests. Flooding our politics with money is antithetical to America’s legacy. But not only is it ideologically inconsistent: there's no legal or conceptual basis for it. Which leads me to seriously question the intentions here.

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Let’s look at their legal argument for Citizens United. It rests on three key premises:

 

1. Corporations are people

2. Money is speech

3. As a result of 1 & 2, we cannot put limitations on corporate political donations. Because in America, we ensure

free speech for all Americans. The Court argued that if we limit the money we let corporations (people) pour into

our elections, we’re limiting their free speech.

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To quickly state the obvious: corporations are not people. They are not humans, they are not American citizens with rights or a vote. They aren’t counted in our Census or entitled to the same legal protections. Corporations are legal entities that exist solely to structure businesses filled with actual human people. Centuries of established legal thought rejects their thinking.

 

Also, money doesn’t equal speech. The Court's justification was that both speech and monetary donations are means of influencing the political process and conversation; people express their opinions with their money.

 

Again, on a legal, logical level: just because two things play the same functional purpose – in this case, influencing political discourse – it doesn’t make them the same thing. A gym and a nutritional plan both play the same purpose, making you healthier, but we certainly don’t equate them and regulate them in the same way.

 

You have to spin a real tangled web to arrive at the conclusion that corporations are people and money is speech. But our elites are good at that. It reeks of the same elitist, jargon-filled argumentation used by Milton Friedman (a soulless Reagan economist) in the 70s to justify his radical new “shareholder theory” — "the economic philosophy of our time" that asserts businesses must prioritize corporate profits (returns for their shareholders) over all else. Friedman argued that shareholders are employees of the corporations they’ve invested in, which means that the corporations must answer to those shareholders (their employees) first. He claimed that serving them was a company’s primary “moral obligation.”

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It’s all the same bullshit. “Corporations are people,” “money is speech,” and “shareholders are employees.” Again: shareholders are not employees. They do not punch the clock, fill out timesheets, receive wages, or file employee taxes. And even if they were employees… why are they suddenly more important than your other employees, your actual workers? Basically what Friedman did is point to the rich shareholders and said "we support those ‘employees’"...  then pointed at their everyday workers and said under their breaths "... but not those." Citizens United says the same: we support the speech of corporations, no matter that it drowns out and dilutes the free speech of real people.

 

Again, there are countless legal precedents that support campaign finance limitations — it’s always been our country’s MO. But instead, our justices chose to cherry-pick the most obscure precedents to justify a clearly unjustifiable case. And even if there was real legal mettle behind it… it flies in the face of everything America stands for.

 

Our founders enshrined free speech because they saw it as a way of ensuring that everyone – not just our elites who control the economy and media – have a voice. So then how does it make any sense to allow corporations to inject 100x more money than everyday people into our elections? That literally gives a greater voice to a smaller number of elite voices!

 

There is nothing American about giving outsized, kingly power to corporations. We may not be facing monarchy as our ancestors did, but we’re staring down the barrel of true oligarchy.

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Why This Matters *So Much*

 

Let’s return to the example of drug price regulation in America. Americans pay nearly three times as much for drugs as patients in similar (OECD) countries. Prices have risen 50% over the last decade, far outpacing inflation. Again, 84% of Americans say the government should put price limits on lifesaving drugs, while 83% support Medicare drug price negotiations. It isn’t right that Americans can’t afford basic medications that enable them to function.

 

This is low-hanging fruit. People are dying. There is a clear problem that needs to be solved, and we can solve it pretty easily. It has wide bipartisan support. It makes sense. So why don't we do it?

 

Because Big Pharma has pulled out all the stops to kill it. Again, the industry has spent $5.2 billion on bribing Congress over the last two decades. And when the Prescription Drug Price Relief Act was finally introduced last year – a year marked by  “significant discussion about drug pricing reform" – Big Pharma brought out the big guns. They spent $356 million on lobbying in 2021, a 20-year, all-time record high. And gave another $50M directly to candidates' campaigns in the year leading up to the fight.

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Pharma is doing this for one reason: if we enact drug price regulation, making it so they can’t price-gouge anymore, it will eat into their profits. The top-5 pharma companies made a whopping $53 billion in 2020 (note: that would be enough to cover the cost of free public college for all). A study from the National Institute of Health found that the Pharma industry has "significantly higher annual profit margins" compared with other major US corporations. AKA: they make more money than virtually anyone else. They don't need this money. And people die because of their greed.

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Cleaning Up Washington

 

This is all just legalized corruption. This is dirty, filthy politics, and it didn't just magically happen – it was the pet project of a conservative group, the Federalist Society, who has strategically, silently seized control of the Judiciary to bias it towards elite interests (read more here). These terrible rulings are a product of their belief that our economic elites should call all the shots, that only they in their infinite wisdom know what to do. It reflects our elites' ruling philosophy of the last half-decade: give us power and give everyone else none.

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We have two options: fix this, or don't. And if we don't, I throw up my hands for humanity. Because we can fix this with so little effort. We can make so much difference in the daily lives of everyday people, make policies that help them again. If our government is no longer capable of delivering low-hanging fruit legislation that transforms American life for the better, democracy is dead. And not because government is inherently bad – it’s actually one of the greatest parts of modern civilization – but because bad actors have been sabotaging it. Corrupting it. With the intention of delegitimizing it, and further eroding the institution’s ability to represent the everyday people they disdain.

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Like with every other issue facing our country today, we have recourse and we must use it. 77% of Americans support a Constitutional amendment to reverse Citizens United. Such legislation, like the Democracy for All or the People's Rights amendments introduced in the last year, have a mandate from the people. Beyond spend limits, we can also enact policies that force donors to disclose their donations (of the $4.4 billion spent on elections in the last decade, $1 billion of it was 'dark money' – i.e., spending off-the-books). And we can go further: the Brennan Center "has pion­eered the most effect­ive and prom­ising solu­tion to the prob­lem of big money in polit­ics: small donor public finan­cing, a system in which public funds match and multiply small dona­tions." A grassroots system like this ensures that a candidate's success is based on the strength of their ideas, not their ability to cozy up to rich donors.

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76% of us believe that our government today is "run by a few big interests." 88% of Americans "want to reduce the influence large campaign donors wield over lawmakers." It's time we do it. Because nothing is going to change when our leaders are busy fighting over money instead of fighting for us. Kids will keep getting shot in their schools, workers will keep being denied basic care, and climate change will make good on its "existential threat to human civilization." We can't solve all our problems. But we can solve a good deal. The question that remains is whether we care enough to.