President of the Progressive Policy Institute, Will Marshall participated in the Politico’s Arena today discussing the implications of yesterday’s presidential press conference.
“President Obama was dead right in calling out Republicans for their childish flight from political responsibility. The only question is why it took him so long.”
Read the full opinion here.
While ordinary Americans celebrate the start of summer warm weather and bemoan the lack of progress on a deficit reduction deal in Congress, members of Congress themselves have been gearing up for the July 4th recess by engaging in a different sort of Washington pastime–by raising money.
The week before the July 4th recess has seen a flurry of congressional fundraising ahead of the upcoming June 30th quarterly deadline.
The National Republican Congressional Committee reports that GOP House members are scheduled to hold one hundred fundraisers before then with over 50 alone scheduled for this week. House Democrats are not far behind.
Republican fundraisers are bullish about the potential of their party to bring in the money principally because their party is now in the majority in the House. Roll Call cites one GOP fundraiser as saying that he expects incumbents to increase their fundraising by 40% this cycle.
Being out of power in the House has hindered Democratic fundraising. Democratic fundraiser Michael Fraioli told Roll Call, “Things have gotten harder, there is no question about it”. But Fraioli also maintained that fundraising possibilities are rising as expectations of the 2012 electoral prospects of House Democrat improve.
Data on campaign contributions from the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics backs up the anecdotal evidence of the advantage that power gives in terms of fundraising.
The graph below shows total contributions to federal elections campaigns for each electoral cycle since 2000.
In each cycle the party that controlled the House raised the most in campaign contributions. The effect was reinforced when that party held other branches of government – for the Republicans during in the 2002, 2004 and 2006 cycles and for the Democrats in 2010.
What’s interesting about this fact is that the extended periods where a party has dominated fundraising coincide with times when the base of the opposition party seems to be most fired up. For example, the Republicans effortlessly out raised Democrats in election cycles when liberals were furious at George W. Bush and the war in Iraq. And in the 2010 cycle – with an ascendant Tea Party scornful of Barack Obama, healthcare reform, and economic stimulus dominating the headlines – Democrats raised $3 for every $2 raised by Republicans.
A logical explanation for this phenomenon can be found when we consider the source of money that actually funds campaigns. In 2008, less than half of one percent of Americans gave donations larger than $200 to federal candidates, yet these larger donations counted for over 80% of the total amount given. Over half of the money contributed came from individuals and PACs operating in just five industries: finance, lawyers and lobbyists, healthcare, communications, and energy and transport.
As the data and anecdotal evidence from fundraisers demonstrates, this giving particularly favors the party in power because it is they who make decisions which directly affect the interests of the groups that dominate giving to political campaigns. What’s more, analysis of the patterns of giving by individual industries and firms finds that most heavy hitters willingly give to both parties with little apparent regard for ideological bent – so long as the candidate and party is in power.
As members of Congress scramble around Washington this week to raise money, before returning to the voters that elected them; let’s mark the birth of American democracy on July 4th, by taking a good hard look at just who it is they’re representing.
In the era of big money, it is a familiar, if sobering, theme in modern presidential administrations, and this week President Obama’s administration took its turn.
A report published this week by iWatch news details the nearly 200 “bundlers” – individuals who channel multiple large donations to particular candidates – from President Obama’s 2008 campaign who have subsequently taken jobs or advisory roles in the administration.
True to form, White House spokesman Eric Shultz was quick to defend administration’s appointments, saying that all appointees “have sterling academic credentials, years of public services and private sector experience that make them eminently qualified for the positions to which they were appointed”.
This is probably true, in part because many of those qualities are what put people in the position to persuade wealthy friends and contacts to make donations in the first place. However, the appointment of bundlers today, as in past administrations, is worrisome for three reasons. Such appointments create at least the appearance that selections for executive positions may not be made on merit alone, undermining the public’s confidence in government, and they also narrow the pool of talent that the administration is likely to call upon in making their final decisions.
Regardless of the number of highly talented and qualified individuals Mr. Schultz can point out, public doubt inevitably lingers over such appointments. The American Foreign Service Association has long raised concerns over the appointment of campaign bundlers as ambassadors. Former U.S. Ambassador to Russia and career diplomat Thomas Pickering told iWatch that individuals could “multiply their chances” of gaining diplomatic appointments by bundling campaign contributions. Indeed, 24 ambassadors appointed by the administration were campaign bundlers, fourteen of whom raised at least $500,000 for the campaign.
It is likely that the prevalence of bundlers in certain positions within the administration narrows the field from which candidates are drawn. Half of those raising $200,000 or more for President Obama in 2008 were appointed to some role in the administration and fully 80 percent of those raising $500,000 or more were appointed. It is hard to imagine that when comparing candidates of similar qualification, the total money raised does not play a role, not least because the president will rely on many of these same people to raise money for his next campaign.
A narrower pool of talent means that those who supported former opponents are less likely to be appointed. Bi-partisan appointments, beyond a few high-profile exceptions, are even less likely. This is damaging at a time when finding common ground is vital to making major decisions about the challenges we face.
There is a solution to this problem; voluntary public funding of elections would allow candidates to raise money from a much broader base of public support. That would enable presidents to make appointments of talented and loyal supporters without doubts being raised as to whether such appointments were traded for financial support. It would also encourage the administration to cast its net more widely for the best available talent, perhaps even across the aisle. Such a change has to be good for our democracy.
Photo Credit: Enoch Lai
As if the damage to fair and accountable campaigns in Citizens United was not enough, a decision this week in the Federal District Court of Virginia raises the daunting prospect that the Supreme Court’s logic in favor of corporate speech can be extended to a second, more direct, form of political participation: contributions to political candidates. The verdict of the case, United States v. William Danielczyk Jr. & Eugene Biagi, found that Virginian corporations could legally donate directly to Virginian Congressional candidates. It goes one step beyond the Citizens United verdict that permitted campaign donations from corporations to political action committees and run advertisements impacting campaigns, but not the candidates themselves. (Before Citizens United, corporations had previously been unable to financially support political candidates and had been restricted in their political spending.) This latest ruling directly challenges more than a century of settled campaign law.
That corporate contributions will now become the norm is far from certain or even likely; nevertheless, the prospect of making campaign reforms in a judicial environment that is hostile to restrictions on spending invites more focus on alternative means to promote plurality and fairness in our democracy.
In Danielczyk & Biagi, Judge James Cacheris of the Virginia District Court this week upheld his earlier ruling that “the flat ban on corporate contributions [to candidates] is unconstitutional”, while clarifying that this decision was limited to the case’s particular circumstances. However, if other judges adverse to reform embrace Cacheris’ reasoning, then their combined opinion could have widespread implications.
Central to Cacheris’ decision is his reaffirmation of Citizens United: “the First Amendment does not allow political speech restrictions based on a speaker’s corporate identity”. Current caps on individual contributions are supposedly sufficient to avoid the risk or appearance of quid pro quo arrangements, which provide a historical basis for some restrictions on speech under the landmark Buckley v. Valeo decision in 1976. Given the inability of the law to discriminate between individuals and corporations, the Danielczyk decision states that if the Buckley v. Valeo contribution limits are sufficient for individuals, then they must be equally sufficient for corporations.
The Virginian court’s argument is open to a number of challenges, particularly over its implicit assumption that allowing corporate, in addition to individual, donations to candidates will not increase the risk of quid pro quo arrangements. A more ominous possibility however remains that Citizens United has opened the floodgates against laws that prohibit indirect corporate spending or candidate contributions in elections.
There remains at least one avenue for meaningful reform available to democracy advocates: offering significant public funds matching small donations to qualifying candidates. This type of systematic reform is not subject to the same legal challenges and would do more to promote a plural and open democracy than previous reforms focused on capping spending.
An example currently before Congress is the Fair Elections Now Act, which would for Congressional race donations of $100 or less, provide $5 for every $1 raised by candidates. Participating candidates must accept limits on the size of donations they are able to receive.
Such reforms would not limit the donations that corporations can offer, but rather encourage candidates to turn down such offers in order to qualify for matching funds. It doesn’t limit free speech, but rather offers a more speech alternative.
Research by Americans for Campaign Reform suggests that such measures would allow candidates relying on small contributions to be competitive, even against those candidates backed by large corporate war chests. The relationship between money spent and votes gained is strong up until about the $1 million mark in the average House race, a level at which most candidates can establish their name and get their message out to prospective voters. After that spending threshold, there is little correlation between spending and votes.
Public funding would enable more candidates to get over this crucial threshold without requiring support, whether it is direct or indirect, from private interests. The presence of such candidates would in itself create a strong argument against politicians accepting large contributions, and so reduce the role of money in politics. Overturning the century-long ban on direct corporate contributions to candidates is indeed a worrying sign and one that directly violates the Supreme Court’s recent findings; but the avenues for meaningful reform are far from closed.
Photo Credit: TalkMediaNews
Last week’s less-than-positive jobs report revived ever-hopeful mainstream media talk that economic issues would decisively trump cultural or constitutional issues in the Republican Party’s councils. And indeed, some reporters saw this long-awaited sign even in the entrails of the Christian Right: the annual Washington get-together of Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition, which attracted most of the GOP presidential field. Here’s how Reuters described the confab, under the title, “Social issues fade as Republicans court conservatives”:
Christian conservatives looking to put a Republican in the White House heard a lot about the economy on Friday in a sign that their social issues may take a back seat in 2012…. In contrast to some previous presidential campaigns, social issues like gay marriage and abortion have not been prominent topics for Republicans hopefuls seeking to replace President Barack Obama in next year’s election.
That’s a Beltway wish-fulfillment view of the FFC event, and of contemporary Republican politics generally.
But it’s also not exactly right: There was lots of talk about those supposedly forgotten “social issues” at Ralph’s soiree. The proto-candidate for president who defines the left wing of the GOP these days, Jon Huntsman, did not consign these issues to the “back seat.” Here’s what he had to say:
“As governor of Utah I supported and signed every pro-life bill that came to my desk,” Huntsman said, rattling off legislation that made second trimester abortions illegal, a bill that he said allowed “women to know about the pain that abortion causes an unborn child,” a bill “requiring parental permission for an abortion,” and another piece of legislation “that would trigger a ban on abortions in Utah if Roe vs. Wade were overturned.”
“You see,” Huntsman explained, “I do not believe the Republican Party should focus only on our economic life to the neglect of our human life.”
Turning the “social issues don’t matter” meme on its head, another supposedly non-social-conservative candidate, Mitt Romney, argued that economic and fiscal problems represented a “moral crisis.”
Most MSM treatment of the FFC event missed the rather central point that Ralph Reed’s organization is not a full-on Christian Right group purely devoted to social issues, but instead a “teavangelical” effort explicitly designed to merge the religious and limited-government impulses of the GOP. There is already a massive overlap of affiliation with Tea Party and Christian Right identities. And there’s a more important if less understood overlap in the Tea Party and Christian Right theories of what’s gone wrong with America: an emphasis on alleged judicial usurpations of state and private-sector powers going back to the New Deal, and a hostility to supposed cultural elites who favor both secularization of American society and maintenance of the progressive legacy of New Deal/Great Society programs.
There’s really not that much tension between the economic and social wings of today’s conservative movement. And both appear to converge in an aggressive foreign policy, focused especially on the Middle East. FFC Speaker Rep. Michele Bachmann ended her remarks with a prayer that concluded:
Our nation hangs precariously in the balance financially, morally and also in our relationship with the rest of the world — with our position toward Israel.
Another already-announced presidential candidate, who reportedly received the most impressive response, Herman Cain, told FFC attendee:
“The Cain doctrine would be real simple when it comes to Israel: You mess with Israel, you mess with the United States of America,” he said to a long standing ovation.
In general, bad economic indicators don’t seem to be tilting the conservative movement or the Republican Party in any sort of economics-only direction. Indeed, to the extent that Republican economic policy now focuses on short-term federal spending cuts and long-term elimination of New Deal/Great Society entitlements, it converges with non-economic policies aimed at a cultural counter-revolution remaking America according to mid-twentieth-century values and opportunities. The very people who want to criminalize abortions and restore “traditional marriages,” also want to get rid of unions and collective efforts to make health care or pensions universally available.
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On the presidential campaign trail, Mitt Romney formally declared his candidacy, but on the same day, in Boston, Sarah Palin spoke out against the Massachusetts health reform plan. Palin’s impossible-to-divine ambitions received vast attention. … Michele Bachmann has reportedly recruited Ed Rollins, Mike Huckabee’s 2008 campaign manager, to her cause. … Newt Gingrich followed up his disastrous campaign launch by suddenly announcing a two-week vacation to the Greek Islands, subsequently losing his Iowa political director. … Jon Huntsman became the first candidate to officially announce he was skipping Iowa. And polls consistently show Mitt Romney narrowly leading a field of candidates who will soon be attacking him on many grounds, most notably RomneyCare. While Romney appears to think his economic message and resume will make him ultimately irresistible to both primary and general election voters, it’s unclear he can overcome hostility to his health care record among the former, and coolness towards his Wall Street Republican orientation among the latter. We’ll soon know if what Romney has to do to get the Republican presidential nomination will prove to be too much for him, or too much for the November 2012 electorate.
If Newt Gingrich’s self-destructive criticism of Paul Ryan’s Medicare proposals pushed Republicans more firmly into Ryan’s corner (e.g., Tim Pawlenty’s forced statement that he would sign a bill implementing
Ryan’s budget as president, even though he intends to present his own “ideas”), you might think the results of last Tuesday’s special congressional election in New York would then exert counter-pressure against Ryan’s plan. After all, it’s pretty clear that Republican candidate Jane Corwin’s support for Ryan’s budget was the central issue in the campaign, and contributed to her loss in a strong GOP district. But for the most part, conservative opinion-leaders are resisting the pressure, either rationalizing Corwin’s loss as attributable to other factors (mainly through an unconvincing claim she would have won without the presence of self-proclaimed Tea Party candidate Jack Davis splitting the GOP vote), or simply arguing that Republicans need to do a better job of explaining Ryan’s proposal.
In any event, last week’s results guarantee that Democrats will keep relentlessly tarring the entire GOP with the unpopularity of Ryan’s specific take on Medicare. Whatever individual Republicans actually think, they probably calculate they’d rather take their chances on a general election loss over Medicare than invite a primary challenge by dissing Ryan. Many also undoubtedly hope the president will eventually give them “cover” by supporting a budget deal including enough changes to Medicare and Medicaid that makes it describable, accurately or not, as Ryan Lite.
Elsewhere, it’s been another wild week on the Republican presidential campaign trail, particularly on the Wingnut Right. Three national polls of Republicans have shown Georgia-based radio talk host Herman Cain leaping past more highly-regarded competitors to a high-single or low-double digit position of support, despite low name ID and meager (up until now) media coverage. The Hermanator (as he likes to call himself) has already been regularly winning straw polls after candidate speaking engagements, and is at this point the unquestioned favorite of Tea Party activists around the country. He’s been wowing audiences in Iowa in particular, and a Public Policy Institute poll of likely Caucus-goers in the Hawkeye state to be released later today will reportedly show him running second.
The media attention Cain has now earned will be a mixed blessing, making him more of a national conservative celebrity, but also inviting the kind of negative scrutiny he has avoided as a fringe candidate. It could well produce both effects, as illustrated by the mockery he’s already getting for conflating the Declaration of Independence with the Constitution in his announcement speech. In Wingnut World, it’s gospel that the latter document incorporates the former, which is how both Christian Right and Tea Party folk import God, natural law, and an implicit right of resistance against Big Government into the Constitution. Odds are Cain wasn’t being ignorant, but was simply blowing a dog whistle to conservative activists. His insouciance about foreign affairs could be a bigger problem, as could publicity about his past support for TARP and his service on the Federal Reserve Board back in the 1990s. Above all, Cain’s new prominence will bring race back into the national political discussion with a vengeance, even though many of his supporters seem to feel he represents sort of definitive rebuttal against charges that anti-Obama sentiments reflect racial undertones.
Even as polls have been raising Cain, however, an even bigger phenomenon could be unfolding as Sarah Palin—assumed to have been driven away from a 2012 run by poor poll numbers, savage Republican Elite criticism, and her highly remunerative day jobs—is suddenly behaving very much like a proto-candidate. First up, it came out that she had commissioned a full-length feature film centering on her persecution by the forces of Establishment Evil, to be released next month in Iowa, followed by other early primary states. Then she sprang into action by becoming the chief Celebrity Guest at the annual Rolling Thunder motorcycle rally in Washington, and is on the verge of launching a bus tour that will eventually make its way to Iowa. By all accounts, she’s viewing this re-emergence on the national scene as a test of whether she could launch a viable candidacy while pursuing an “unconventional campaign” that apparently would involve low-substance “patriotic” appearances with her large and famous family in tow.
The impact of all this turbulence on the rest of the field is an interesting sub-plot. As someone whose candidacy would be mortally endangered by a Christian Right/Tea Party coalescence around Cain, or a campaign by her doppelganger Palin, Michele Bachmann had quite the nerve-wracking week, including a damaging and clumsily handled no-show at an important Iowa Republican fundraiser she was supposed to headline. Meanwhile, Mitt Romney, considered the likely beneficiary of any surge of support for a presumably unelectable right-wing candidate like Cain or Palin, made his first appearance in Iowa in many months. As he sought to maintain a delicate balance between dissing Iowa and committing to the kind of full-tilt campaign in the state that undid him in 2008, Romney delivered a shirt-sleeve speech to an audience at a state facility in Des Moines. But before he could get into his altar call, fire alarms went off and Romney had to cut short his remarks and urge the crowd to calmly head to the exits. Ever snake-bit in Iowa, the Mittster was foiled on this occasion by someone overcooking a bag of microwave popcorn.
Picture Credit: DonkeyHotey
In recent weeks Mitt Romney has been seeking to bolster his claim to be the mainstream establishment candidate capable of beating Barack Obama in the general election. It’s a logical enough claim for any candidate to seek to make, except that his most compelling argument has had more to do with dollars than ideas.
Last week, the Romney campaign arranged for more than 400 activists to travel to Las Vegas to participate in a telethon that the campaign claims raised $10.25 million in a single day. Two events in Boston later in the week were reported to have raised $2 million.
By June 30, the date on which donations from the last quarter will be published, the Romney campaign is hoping to be able to comprehensively demonstrate financial dominance over the rest of the field. Romney’s staff is keen to emphasize its fundraising prowess, not as a means to articulate Romney’s arguments about issues, but as an argument in and of itself.
Following the latest fundraising effort, the Romney campaign posted an article on their website claiming, “When it comes to money, President Obama and Mitt Romney occupy a plateau far above everyone else”. The message is clear: it doesn’t matter if you really like Tim Pawlenty or Ron Paul or any of the several other respected Republicans in the race: Mitt Romney is the only candidate with the cash to win.
Arguments about fundraising power and the supposed credibility that it gives a candidate are ubiquitous in primary campaigns. Newt Gingrich has already felt this bite: One of the key ideological moments in the GOP contest so far was perhaps Newt Gingrich’s apparent flip-flop over Paul Ryan’s budget plans for Medicare. The moment may well have made support for the budget a shibboleth for conservative voters, while the attention given to Gingrich’s misstep will make it harder for candidates to evade the issue.
Amidst the furor, however, one of the key arguments made by Gingrich’s detractors was that it had damaged his campaign’s ability to raise funds. Much was made of the fact that within 24 hours of his comments on ”Meet the Press”, 13 out of 18 co-chairs for Gingrich’s Florida fundraising effort dropped out. A ‘veteran Republican strategist’ was widely quoted as questioning whether Gingrich can “even make it to July 4th, because his fundraising is going to dry up.”
Primary elections are a vibrant part of American democracy. They contrast favorably with systems in most other democracies where the selection of candidates that the electorate chooses between is still largely controlled by party bosses.
Therefore, it’s tragic that the opportunity to have open discussions about ideas within America’s two great ideological traditions can be drowned out by questions about fundraising. This focus not only distracts from important issues, but also maintains the role for party elites that primary elections were intended to abolish.
Thirteen Florida co-chairs are supposedly able to hail the demise of Newt Gingrich’s campaign, while a small group of Romney fundraisers send a dramatic message to party activists and primary voters that, arguments over issues aside, his is the only campaign capable of defeating Obama’s formidable electoral machine.
There is currently legislation before Congress that would mitigate the oppressive effect that money in politics can have on the vibrancy of American democracy. The Presidential Funding Act would provide $4 for every $1 raised by candidates from small donations of $200 or less. Participating candidates must accept limits on the size of donations they are able to receive.
Such reforms would make candidates who inspire widespread support, but lack access to the tiny proportion of wealthy donors who contribute the majority of campaign finance funds, to be competitive. That would allow primary campaigns to be more about issues and less about money and organization. By negating “I can raise the most” as an argument it would enrich and broaden public discourse and keep our democracy lively and strong.
To find out more about the damaging role of money in politics please visit http://www.youstreet.org/ or go to Americans for Campaign Reform (ACR) on Facebook.
photo credit: las – initally
It’s happened so quickly that its significance may have been obscured, but one of the biggest recent developments in Wingnut World has been the rapid devolution of conservative opinion on the pending debt limit crisis–from demands for hard-line negotiations to outright rejection of negotiations at all, often supplemented by claims that the government doesn’t need new debt authority anyway.
This last phenomenon, which Jonathan Chait and others have been calling “debt-ceiling denialism,” is spreading like kudzu since it was first notably articulated by Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) in a January column in the Wall Street Journal. There are different forms of the argument, but the common threads are the claim that the federal government can prioritize the use of revenues in a way that avoids debt default, and the complaint that the whole issue has been manufactured by Democrats to avoid big spending cuts. Toomey attracted 100 House members and 22 Senators to his “Full Faith and Credit Act” legislation that would supposedly avoid a default by forcing debt payments to the top of the spending priority list.
Short of explicit denial that a real breaching of the debt limit would be a bad thing, other conservatives (including presidential candidates Tim Pawlenty, Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain) take the parallel position of opposing any increase in the debt limit on grounds that spending (without, of course, any tax increases) should be cut enough to make the increase unnecessary.
The usual reaction in Washington to this sort of talk is to dismiss it as tactical positioning for the “deal” that will ultimately be cut—as “hostage-taking” aimed at maximizing the “ransom.” Perhaps that’s exactly what it was initially. But at some point, arguments that the hostage’s life is worth nothing, or worse yet, that the ransom can be earned precisely by killing the hostage, undermine the very idea of a deal, particularly when refusing to negotiate with Democrats is a posture that conservatives value as an end in itself anyway. Indeed, the trend in conservative rhetoric on this subject is to accuse Democrats of hostage-taking by their adamant refusal to accept vast spending reductions. It’s a dangerous gambit, made even more tempting to Republicans by the fact that debt limit increases are perpetually unpopular among the overwhelming percentage of Americans who have no real idea of the merits of either side of the dispute.
The key question is the extent to which the GOP’s business elites forcefully push back and demand a more reasonable attitude before things get out of hand. That’s particularly urgent since debt-limit deniers and hard-liners alike are getting into the habit of arguing that financial markets care more about spending reductions than any hypothetical default on the debt. Moreover, debt-limit ultras are also playing with fire by systematically eliminating any incentive for the Obama administration or congressional Democrats to make concessions to a credible negotiating partner. Why offer a ransom when the hostage-takers no longer seem to care what you offer? Better to just send in the SWAT team and take your chances.
Meanwhile, the last week offered more news in the shaping of the 2012 Republican presidential nomination field: Mitch Daniels disappointed his Beltway cheerleading squad by deciding against a run; Newt Gingrich imploded his long-shot campaign with a series of disastrous remarks and revelations; and Tim Pawlenty and Herman Cain formally announced candidacies.
Assessments of the impact of Daniels’ non-candidacy vary according to perspective. Some think it will lead Establishment Republicans to make a last-ditch effort to find another savior such as Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ) or even Jeb Bush. And if that fails, to resign themselves to the existing field and get behind Romney, Pawlenty, or Huntsman (though the last option remains implausible because his path to the nomination remains extremely difficult). Others combine the Daniels and Huckabee withdrawals and suggest the weak field will produce a big opening for a southern Tea Party conservative with deep pockets like Rick Perry. Both Establishment types and fans of a late entry are beginning to burrow away to undermine the credibility of the Iowa Caucuses as the essential starting-point for the real campaign (for the latter camp, it’s in part because competing in Iowa requires competing in the state party Straw Poll that is held this August).
Though the Gingrich implosion has interested the conservative commentariat less than Daniels’ decision–for the good reason that very few observers considered the Newster viable in the first place–its long-term significance should not be underestimated: it proved once again that ideological purity is the preeminent demand of conservatives for GOP presidential candidates. If nothing else, the incident will make it very difficult for other candidates to distance themselves from Paul Ryan’s politically perilous Medicare proposals. But it should also serve as a dashboard idiot light to Mitt Romney warning him that his hopes of being forgiven for his health care heresy may not be terribly realistic.
This week Donald Trump officially announced that he would not run for President in 2012 saying, “business is my greatest passion” and that he was not ready to leave the private sector. A look at Trump’s contributions to political campaigns suggests that he is quite prepared to put his money where his mouth is when it comes to setting priorities: business before politics.
According to The Washington Post, Trump has made a total of $1.3 million of political contributions to date. These donations have been fairly evenly split between the two parties, with 54% going to Democrats. Indeed, Trump’s loudmouthed criticism of Democratic policies in recent days did not stop him from donating to prominent Democrats closely associated with President Obama over several years, including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and the President’s former Chief of Staff, Rahm Emmanuel.
In an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity, Trump justified donating to Democrats on the grounds that it was good business to do so. Trump was keen to point out that many of his donations have been in Democrat-controlled New York, the place where he does business. “Why should I contribute to a Republican for my whole life when…the most they can get is one percent of the vote?” Trump asked. In New York and other states where Trump has business interests, Democrats are the incumbents and so are the logical beneficiaries of Trump’s largesse. As Trump told Hannity he’s “not stupid”; why would he donate to candidates who can’t win and will not hold power or affect his interests?
While Trump may be an eccentric politician, he is–at least in this respect–a very typical businessman. Corporate political giving is overwhelmingly directed at incumbents and tends to significantly favor the political party in power. In 2008 PACs and individuals in the energy industry gave 82% of their contributions to incumbents, Wall Street gave 74%, and the pharmaceutical industry gave 89% regardless of political party, according to Americans for Campaign Reform.
It is hardly surprising that Trump and others in business should direct campaign contributions towards politicians likely to wield power. But the idea that Trump’s calculating self-interest remains in the headlines is somewhat of a shock, suggesting that much of the small dollar donations given by individuals is still representative of deeply-held personal political convictions.
As Trump leaves the Republican presidential field, perhaps he can bring a bit of straight talking to the debate on campaign finance reform. The issue has many complexities, but one key is quite simple after all: the bulk of big-dollar campaign donations aren’t made in support of deeply held ideological beliefs. They’re made as a business investment to the candidate most likely to win, regardless of the party they’re in.
The Donald doesn’t pretend otherwise and nor should we. You don’t need a gold toupee stand to see this.
In today’s Washington Post, David A. Fahrentold marvels at what he calls the “Line Items That Won’t Die” – federal programs that benefit narrow interests, but somehow manage to keep getting funded: “One spends federal money to store cotton bales. Another offers scholars a chance to study Asian-American relations. Two others pay to market U.S. oranges in Asia and clean up abandoned coal mines.”
Fahrenthold attributes their success to having Congressional champions. The study of Asian-American relations, for example, takes place at a Honolulu nonprofit called the East-West Center, and enjoys the support of Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), who also happens to be chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee.
But there’s also a broader story: the simple fact that when a government program benefits a narrow constituency, it’s very easy for that constituency to organize and make demands on legislators about why this program is worth keeping. The larger public, meanwhile is rarely aware, and even if it were aware, is unlikely to do anything.
Take the Market Access Program discussed in the article, which helps promote U.S. agricultural products abroad. A coalition of agricultural interests benefit greatly from this, and they are organized to advocate fiercely for its continuance and threaten to punish any Senator or Congressman who would vote against the program by withdrawing votes and campaign contributions. Nobody in the general public, however, is likely to care about or vote based solely on this single issue.
This is the difference in what congressional scholar R. Douglas Arnold has called “attentive publics” and “inattentive publics.” Attentive publics are the small groups that care deeply about particular policies, and as a result, are likely to be more influential because they care so intensely about that one issue. Inattentive publics are everyone else. The public might be outraged after reading about the Market Access Program, but the likelihood of most people following up are small. Think of it this way: If 1,000 people want money from you, but only one bothers to keep calling you up telling you why he’s so deserving and threatens to punch you in the face if you don’t give him the money, you’re probably going to give that one person money, especially if it’s likely the other 999 will not even notice or if they do, won’t remember.
Another way to think about it (borrowing from James Q. Wilson) is in terms of distributed costs and concentrated benefits. The benefits of a program that pays peanut and cotton farmers to store their bales and bushels in warehouses are solidly concentrated among peanut and cotton farmers. The costs are distributed to everybody else. But the cost per taxpayer is so small that it’s hard to imagine any group getting organized to fight this particular program. Whereas the farmers – well, they’re damn certain to do fight any cuts to the program. What results is what Wilson calls “client politics” – where small narrow interests work with the relevant congressional committee and executive agency staff to build a usually impenetrable consensus around the importance of a single program.
The challenge for governing is that the federal budget and tax code and regulatory apparatus are filled with thousands upon thousands of these programs, each protected by a small consensus, and without any public coverage. One only need to scroll through the Federal Register to see all the small issues that could potentially benefit small attentive publics at the expense of everyone else. Or better yet, look through the tax code to find all the little credits and deductions for very narrow benefits. It’s enough to make your head spin round and round and round. Jonathan Rauch has pessimistically called this condition “Government’s End.”
I don’t really have a solution. In part, this is the nature of our current system of government and the size and complexity of our economy. But the point is, these programs are very difficult to kill, and Fahrenthold’s story is just the tip of the iceberg.
Maybe the Tea Party is finally starting to boil over, after all. According to CNN’s latest polling, 47 percent of the public now views the Tea Party unfavorably, a new high (up four points from December, and up 21 points from January 2010). By contrast only 32 percent now view the movement favorably, down five percent from December. Tea Party favorability had actually been pretty stable for the last year in the high 30s, so the recent downslide is significant.
Meanwhile, in Washington, House Speaker John Boehner appears increasingly willing to leave Tea Party demands for $100-billion-in-cuts-or-bust behind, and instead gamble that he can find enough moderate Democrats to support a shutdown-averting deal.
Tea Partiers are descending on the Capitol today to hold a “continuing revolution rally” to demand no surrender on the budget. Tea Party nation founder Judson Phillips wrote in an email to supporters that: “Boehner must go. The Tea Party must unite and make sure Boehner is replaced in the next election. Boehner is living proof of something I have said for a long time. It is not enough that we vote out bad leaders, we must replace them with good leaders.”
I hope Boehner’s stand will be a decisive moment: a solid break that begins the marginalization of the Tea Party as too-crazy-to-govern.
Presumably, Boehner the strategist understands a few things that the Tea Partiers do not.
First: that, if there is a government shutdown, Republicans are much more likely to get blamed, and nobody really wants a government shutdown.
Second: Many voters are symbolic conservatives in that they like to say they are for things like small government and fiscal discipline. But when it comes to specific government programs, well, they like those. As a recent Pew poll reminds us, there is not a single budgetary area in which a majority of voters would favor a decrease, and only two federal programs in which more respondents favored a decrease in spending than an increase: Global poverty assistance (45 percent for a decrease, 21 percent for an increase) and unemployment assistance (28 percent for a decrease, 27 percent for an increase). The only other program that at least 30 percent of voters support decreasing is military defense. (I’m still mystified with how this squares with the fact that 64 percent of Americans think “federal spending and the budget deficit” is a problem that they worry “a great deal” about, but that’s a rant for another time)
If Boehner can make a break with the Tea Party, it will presumably drive the Tea Party into over-boil (I envision more Boehner-must-go memes). And that’s good.
The more visibly extremist the Tea Party gets, the high the level of disapproval (I hope!). But even better, if they’ve declared war on Republican leadership, it means that Republican leadership now has a vested interest in casting them as unhelpful extremists. And this is the key.
So could this be the moment for some GOP leaders to re-discover a bit of courage in moderation and finally offer some real thought leadership that gives ordinary Republicans an alternative to the exasperating slash-and-burn anger that has dominated the dialogue for too long? I certainly hope so.
When the U.S. Supreme Court last year ruled in Citizens United that incorporated entities have the same First Amendment rights as individuals to spend money in political campaigns, it upended a century of settled law aimed at limited special interest influence in American politics. The predictable result was a torrent of new spending in the 2010 midterm election, with nearly $300 million in electioneering ads by outside interest groups, half of which was undisclosed.
On Monday, the Supreme Court waded back in to the campaign finance issue when it heard oral arguments in McComish v. Bennett, concerning one of the most sweeping and successful forms of campaign finance regulation to emerge in recent years, publicly funded “Clean” or “Fair Elections”.
The case in question involves a challenge to the constitutionality of a specific “trigger funds” provision of Arizona’s Citizen’s Clean Elections Act of 1998, the law which established voluntary public funding for qualifying candidates for any state office in Arizona. Under the challenged provision, candidates who opt in to the Clean Elections system receive matching funds beyond their initial allocation if they are outspent by a privately funded opponent. The aim of the provision, as of the law in general, is to provide serious and hardworking candidates who attract broad-based constituent support in the form of small donations and who agree to forego private special interest contributions with enough money to mount a credible campaign.
The law is being challenged by a group of Arizona candidates and political committees who claim that triggered funds to participating candidates have a “chilling” effect on the First Amendment free speech of privately funded candidates and independent spenders. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the challenge last May, which concluded that no candidate or group had been prevented from spending money by the law.
Contrary to petitioners’ characterization of the Arizona law as curtailing First Amendment speech, Arizona’s Clean Elections program places no limits on the ability of privately funded candidates or independent spenders to enter the political debate, including by spending far in excess of the triggered funds provided to participating candidates. Instead, as argued by former Reagan Solicitor General Charles Fried in an amicus brief to the Court:
Arizona extends public financing to any candidate who meets certain qualifications and agrees to forego fundraising from private sources. Thus, if the government violates no one’s First Amendment rights, does not silence, suppress or deter anyone’s speech by speaking a contrary message in its own voice, so most assuredly it burdens no speech when it makes funds available to all comers on a viewpoint neutral basis. More speech may answer speech but it does not silence it. What effect speech has on its audience the First Amendment leaves up to the audience.
The brief, which was signed by a bipartisan committee of former Senators, Representatives, and Governors on behalf of Americans for Campaign Reform, established in no uncertain terms the constitutional imperative of voluntary public funding as an effective means of expanding and enhancing First Amendment free speech: ”The law at issue in this case is not, in the words of the First Amendment, a law ‘abridging the freedom of speech.’ Rather, it adds voices to the political forum and thereby expands speech… If there is one fixed star in the constitutional firmament, it is that arguments seeking to compel a reduction in speech face an extraordinary hurdle.”
That message, at least, the Court heard loud and clear in the oral arguments on Monday: public funding writ large, regardless of the specific provisions of Arizona’s law, does not violate the Constitution. In the the post-Citizens United world of big spending by corporate and union interests, public funding may be the only means left to effectively combat the power of special interest money in politics.
A decision is expected before the end of the Supreme Court Term in June.
