R.I.P McCain Feingold
After the supreme courts decision regarding firm campaign contributions (a decision that essentially nullifies the McCain Feingold Act) a lot of people I have spoken to, who happen to be mostly democratic academics, think the cash resources available to different companies will essentially destroy democracy.
There exists, according to the data, a strong correlation between campaign fund resources and the outcome of elections, from local to national campaigns. However, is this sky is falling mentality really warranted? How much money are these companies really going to put forward to these campaigns? More importantly, do the shareholders want company funds going towards campaigns or their bank accounts?
When you look at the potential ramifications banking regulations can have the contributions to politicians to possibly prevent this don't look so huge after all.
As an active Republican within the party structure, I can tell you why McCain-Feingold got so much resistance, at least from the conservative perspective. There has been an anti-establishment trend in the GOP for several decades now with most of us supporting term limits. Campaign finance legislation is in place NOT to deter corruption but to protect incumbency. There is a reason that there is a 95+% incumbency re-election rate in this country despite congress typically having approval ratings well under 30%. Incumbents typically have no problem raising money, but challengers often do (people don't bet on the challenger often when they have 5% chance of winning). Regulating how much, when, and in what capacity money in campaigns can be distributed and at which time advertisements can be run is direct protection to incumbents because it is so much easier for them to raise money and to contact constituents (after all, incumbent congressmen have rather large travel and administrative budgets paid for by the tax payers).
From my point of view, regulating freedom of speech is unhealthy for democracy; letting interests (i.e. groups of citizens) run ads against our corrupt incumbency is actually healthy for democracy.
I think the real question is how far the personhood of the corporation extends. Remember that the notion of a corporation is only 120 years old and is a creation of government policy.
That said, I think an individual should be allowed to spend as much as he or she wants on someone else's candidacy. Actually, I think the Hunts had a point when they suggested that people who pay more in taxes should get more voting power over the nation's FISCAL policy. (Ironically, this would probably result in higher taxes if Warren Buffett and Bill Gates get to vote.)
In the long run, money tends to flow in the direction of wisdom, experience, and genuine success. I don't think it's the end of the world if the people who pay more to our government than they get in return get more influence over its fiscal policies than the people who benefit more from government than they pay in taxes.
Ah, good old-fashioned plutocracy.
Only a plutocracy on fiscal policy. Everything else should be a democracy- except maybe people who are registered for the draft or serve in the armed services should get more a little more say on our foreign policy.
Absurd. Where does it stop? Do I get more of a say on the ice cream industry regulation because I buy more ice cream than most people? Who keeps track of and manages the weightings of people's votes? The government?
Nobody has to stay a US citizen. We lost a lot of able-bodied soldiers to Canada during Vietnam because a lot of people never bought into the war. We missed out on a lot of rich, taxpaying immigrants between 1940 and 1980 because of high taxes.
Democracy evolves and gets more complicated. What we have today is a lot more complicated than what we had 200 years ago, and if minorities that the country needs to keep (like able-bodied soldiers or tax-revenue generators) get more of a say over policies that affect them, we can at least do a better job of avoiding unnecessary wars and less effective spending.
At the very least if you pay no federal income tax you shouldn't get to vote for federal representatives. How did we get on this topic again?
Unlimited spending would be fine if:
Campaigns, especially on the financing/advertising side have naturally developed into propaganda machines. In the recent Brown vs Coakley, Massachusetts politics displayed this very point. The ads suggested nothing less than "Coakley supports terrorists" and "Brown is a local Playboy".
The only way to clean up campaign financing is to clean up the campaign. The voters have to demand a clean race and the candidates will start following their lead. Remember, politicians are supposed to represent the constituents, not just lead them.
Getting back to the orginal questions asked, why wouldn't large corporations bribe cough I mean donate money to politicians? If I was a Seattle based producer of say... aircraft, and the military had $35B contract for cargo planes that was being awarded to a competitor, why wouldn't I spend 10, 25 or even $35M in campaign contributions to get that contract? It's a 100,000% ROI!!! Where else Ican make that much except in similar "rent seeking" behavior??
That said, corporations provide about a third of our jobs and I think we can be more competitive globally if we adopted a more business-friendly mentality. Corporations are cut-throat but the world is cut-throat. This is not 1950 we are not the only industrialized economic power (or one of two if you count the Soviets). We need to be able to compete.
Right now, we're all whining about banker payout and claiming it's immoral to make lots of money. That's just one more step towards communism.
Just for clarification, I think there is an equal portion of the argument to be had with regards to completely legal campaign contribution rather than bribery. I personally think this will effect mid level to lower level elections more than large scale presidential campaigns. When you dealing with local laws or even state laws, there are plenty of pieces of legislation that can hurt firm interests. It is also correlated that these mid level elections are often decided according to who has the most exposure during a race, and as BC Banker said who can seemingly fling the most dirt on the other candidate. Given that the populace has not rejected smear campaigns, the fact remains that a large in flux of money (basically more signs with joe shmoes name on it) is going to win elections. I do agree with BC Banker in that its the people responsibility to reject campaigns that are run in a negative manner, regardless of the amount of money spent on the campaign. But it doesn't seem that that is going to change before the firms money can impact some elections. Another question however, could the government somehow tax such campaign contributions (wouldn't be the first time congress made legislation against something the supreme court said was unconstitutional) and if so into which type of taxation would those funds fall?
It's not the job of government to regulate negative or even hateful speech. Whether or not there is negative campaigning should not be relevant at all to this topic. We have the 1st Amendment to protect objectionable speech, not speech that everyone can agree on.
@Virginia Tech 4ever: I'm a democrat, but I found your response to the original post thoughtful, and it has provided me with a new perspective on the issue. I'm still uncomfortable with the idea of unlimited spending (though I don't go so far as the "sky is falling" folks), but I do see the intent of the decision somewhat differently. More than a democrat, or anything else though, I'm a pragmatist, and as such I would have like to see McCain/Feingold stay in place until an alternative, such as the term limits you suggest, could be enacted.
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