Tag Archives: Super Pacs

A Couple of Gloomy Observations

Yesterday, I got a phone call from an old friend. Unlike most of my other Republican friends, who have been appalled by the Lugar-Mourdock results, he was euphoric. Why? Because Mourdock “is a bomb thrower! He’ll go to Washington and he won’t play the game!”

Also yesterday, a commenter to one of my recent blogs on the subject questioned the idea that Lugar had moved to the right during his long career. Why, he had voted for the President’s Supreme Court Justices and the bailouts, and supported the Dream Act! How could he be conservative?

If there is any lesson to be learned from the expression of these sentiments, it is that political advertising is effective, especially when coupled with an audience’s lack of understanding of basic democratic (note small d) governance. The examples cited by the commenter as evidence that Lugar is really a “moderate” who (in the opinion of my Republican friend) “played with the liberals” amount to little more than a regurgitation of Mourdock’s ads. Three or four examples were plucked from a 36-year career and relentlessly pounded on; voila! the man’s a  squishy bipartisan compromiser. And compromise is bad, bomb-throwing and intransigence are what we need!

The people expressing these opinions aren’t uneducated. But they  were clearly swayed by an unrelenting ad campaign fueled by lots of Super Pac money.

I don’t worry about two people with uninformed opinions.  Nor do I fault these folks for not doing the research necessary to counter the 30-second sound-bites.

But I am deeply worried about the extent to which billionaires and Super Pacs will influence the millions of equally uninformed voters in November.

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Two Wrongs, Eroding Rights

January 21st was the 2-year anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United. 

The anniversary was marked with a number of protests, and an even larger number of news articles and blog posts documenting the dramatic growth of political “Super Pacs” and other unaccountable third-party political actors in the wake of that decision.  We have seen an almost unimaginable amount of money being spent to influence–okay, buy–elections.

As a guest blogger for the American Constitution Society recently wrote,  “people are expressing outrage about the corrosive effect of big money in politics, particularly in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United v. FEC.

This outrage is well founded –  in a report Public Citizen published one year after the Court’s disastrous decision – we found that spending by outside groups jumped to nearly $300 million in the 2010 election cycle, from just $68.9 million in 2006.  The donors for nearly half of this independent money spent remain undisclosed. And, that’s just a taste of what’s to come.  The influx of independent expenditures in allowed by Citizens United will bump up election campaign spending to record levels in 2012; by some accounts to as much as $8 billion, dwarfing previous records.

We want to get big money out of politics, but do that, you have to engage the very system that is weakened and undermined by that money. The deck seems stacked.  How does an ordinary person find a way to make that change happen?”

The entire post is worth reading, and the author concludes–as have many others–that we need a constitutional amendment that would overturn the decision and confirm that corporations are not people.

I agree that such an amendment is warranted, if incredibly difficult to pass. But as a retired Judge told me several months ago when we were discussing the case, the real travesty was the earlier decision in Buckley v. Valeo, in which the Court equated money with speech. That was the decision that made Citizens United possible.

We all know that wealthier people have more clout in every society; they always have and probably always will. Wealth buys privileges–it allows people to get better educations, join organizations that are influential, have more leisure, hire lobbyists, and access a wide variety of other social “megaphones” that allow them to influence others. That’s just reality–an inescapable consequence of free speech in a market economy, and in my view, an acceptable if regrettable trade-off.

But Buckley and Citizens United  vastly increase the power of the rich at the expense of everyone else. Rather than helping to level the playing field by upholding laws that would have moderated political advantage, those decisions dramatically increased the disparity.

If money is speech, and corporations are people, the 1% will always own the political process.

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