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Collection: What Democracy Looks Like

Want to see a post-Citizens United America? Look North

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Research by Jane Harvey

To understand how money corrupts democracy in the United States, especially in the Northwest states, look north to Canada. What you’ll see is that campaign fundraising is radically different on the two sides of the 49th parallel. It hasn’t always been, but it is now. The differences, and how they developed, reveal just how profound the impacts of US Supreme Court rulings have been on the systemic corruption of politics.

On the south side, elected officials spend their lives dialing for dollars. Citizens United and related Supreme Court cases reign: corporations are persons; money is speech; and the only kind of corruption that’s illegal is the kind that actually involves buying votes with money. Candidates spend without limits, as do “independent expenditure” (IE) campaigns such as those orchestrated by super-PACs. Individual contributions to campaigns are putatively restricted, but any fundraising chair worth her salt can find a way to launder funds through back channels. Individual and corporate contributions to IEs are utterly unrestricted, can sometimes be done anonymously, and IEs are not really independent anyway. Almost every political dollar comes from private donors, often from lobbyists; public funding is isolated in a few outposts of good-government zeal such as Connecticut and Maine. Finally, campaigns can and do run for months on end, laying siege to swing voters and blitzing them with television ads.

On the north side, politicians spend their lives talking with voters and governing. They almost never dial for dollars, er, loonies. A recent legislative leader of one of BC’s political parties reports that he focused time and energy on fundraising about twice a week when he was leader. He didn’t dial for dollars. Compare that to spending half of each day on it, as many American politicians do. Fundraising used to be even less time-consuming. A former premier of British Columbia who spent 24 years in elective office reports spending almost no time raising money; his party raised some but he wasn’t much involved. A former member of the Canadian parliament tells much the same story: a group of volunteers raised some money for his campaign, but he personally spent his campaign time, well, campaigning. One former city councilor in Vancouver remembers raising just $10,000 total (a rounding error in an American campaign) for each of his races. He says he never raised a single dollar, not one, outside of campaign season.

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Dialing for Dollars

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Would you—yes, you—run for office?

I have recently been asking friends and acquaintances that question. Of the few who say, “Yes,” most have one hesitation: fundraising. They’re right to have qualms.

The foundational trait you need to advance in US politics is not stirring oratory, telegenic charisma, policy expertise, or a grand vision. Instead, you need access to cash. Unless you have Bloomberg-like personal wealth, you have to be good at asking for money, mostly on the phone.

You have to not mind doing it, because you have to do a lot of it. It’s your main job, as a politician, and not just during your campaigns. If you’re a candidate for local office, you may get away with just an hour or two a day of fundraising calls. One candidate for state representative who faces only light opposition told me recently that she “only” has to put in six hours of call time a week. But the higher the office, the more fundraising.  The Democratic Caucus in the US House of Representatives recommends that members spend four hours a day on fundraising calls, twice as long as it recommends spending in committee meetings and on the floor of the house combined.

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Citizens Re-United?

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A demonstrator after the McCutcheon decision, Los Angeles, CA. By Public Citizen, cc.
A demonstrator after the McCutcheon decision, Los Angeles, CA. by Public Citizen used under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

When the conservative majority of the US Supreme Court this week blew up the legal caps on the contributions the richest Americans can make to political parties and federal candidates, it was Citizens United redux: champions for those richest Americans gloated in newspeak about “free speech,” political reporters predicted even more private money flooding the air waves with attack ads, and reform leaders issued outraged statements. Most people, though, just shrugged, despondent but unsurprised, rolling their eyes in a giant, collective “what did you expect?” To most people, the whole system has long seemed rigged by the rich and powerful, and hope for reform is close to nil.

The vagaries of fate are such that the Northwest, especially Oregon and Washington and even more especially Seattle, are positioned to lead the national response to this latest travesty from the bench. They could do so both symbolically and practically, at the ballot box in both cases: by voting against the court’s ruling and then by creating a whole new way of paying for campaigns.

Wrecking Crew

The McCutcheon decision extended the money-is-speech-and-speech-is-sacred logic of Citizens United, and the Court majority gave no indication it is done using that logic to demolish campaign finance regulations. Eventually, the majority may smash others too: the ban on direct gifts from corporations to candidates, for example, and the limit on how much you can give to an individual pol.

Already, the Court’s wrecking crew has made these restraints largely irrelevant. Thanks to Citizens United, anyone, including a corporation, can spend unlimited sums, anonymously, on spuriously named “independent expenditure campaigns.” McCutcheon opens the door to a scam that eviscerates the direct-gift cap: candidates can solicit multi-million dollar gifts for their “joint campaign funds,” then parcel out the proceeds to members of their caucus. Those caucus members can reciprocate, tit for tat. Presto! Each candidate ends up with as much money as she or he raised from each billionaire. (In his vehemently dissenting opinion, Justice Breyer spelled out several other ways that candidates can waltz right past the individual gift limit, thanks to the majority’s see-no-evil ruling.)

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The G-Word

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Rorschach Test Inkblot
Inkblot Rorschach Test used under CC ZERO 1.0

Here’s a Rorschach test. I’ll show you a word. You say the first thing that comes to mind.

The word is “government.”

Stop. Go down to comments and record your reaction.

Now, I’ll tell you what your answer means about you. If you’re like many of the friends I’ve asked, your answer is not typical. They said things like “protects,” “services,” “rule of law,” and “us.”

If you’re more normal, you said something less flattering. The most common answer among Americans is a derisive laugh. Yep. A laugh. The G-word qualifies as a one-word joke. Other common answers include snorts of disdain and words like “corrupt” and “waste.” One friend said “sociopaths”; another, amusingly, said “statues.”

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