The Political Money Tsunami
In my more than 50 years of working to curb the influence of big money on politics and policy, I have never heard of a case where a presidential candidate asked a group of donors to raise one billion dollars for his campaign, much less to do so in exchange for favorable government policies.
Yet that reportedly happened recently when Donald Trump solicited a group of top oil executives to raise $1 billion for his campaign, accompanying his request with what they would receive in return if Trump wins in November.
According to The Washington Post, Trump told the oil executives that if elected he would “immediately” reverse dozens of environmental rules and green energy policies adopted by President Biden. Trump said this would be a “deal” for them “because of the taxation and regulation they would avoid thanks to him.”
Trump is the person who repeatedly claimed during his 2016 campaign he would “drain the swamp” in Washington. Once elected, he did nothing.
Our campaign finance system has been labeled a system of “legalized corruption.”
Trump’s billion-dollar ask, however, might not even qualify as “legalized corruption,” since it might actually be illegal, depending on the amounts and sources of the funds he receives in response to his solicitation.
Campaign law prohibits a federal candidate from soliciting contributions in excess of the contribution limits permitted under federal law or from sources prohibited by law.
For example, if a Super PAC supporting Trump receives a contribution in response to Trump’s solicitation and that contribution exceeds the federal limits on contributions that can be made to a political committee, Trump could be considered to have made an illegal solicitation, even though the contribution would not be illegal.
A further example of how broken and obscene our campaign finance system has become, is illustrated by Rep. David Trone (D-MD) who spent more than $60 million of his own personal wealth to try to win the Democratic Senate primary in Maryland.
While Trone lost his primary election this week, other candidates have successfully bought elective office by spending their own personal wealth and drowning their opponents in self-funded incessant ads and other promotions.
The ability to use huge amounts of personal wealth to buy an election is not how our democracy should function.
In 2010, the Supreme Court unleashed a tsunami of corrupting political money with its 5–4 decision in Citizens United.
That decision overturned more than 100 years of laws and public policy and decades of Court precedent. It opened the door to unlimited and undisclosed campaign contributions pouring in to influence presidential and congressional elections and federal officeholders.
A decade ago, Richard Posner, a highly regarded conservative Court of Appeals judge said about the Citizens United decision: “Our political system is pervasively corrupt due to our Supreme Court taking away campaign-contribution restrictions on the basis of the First Amendment.”
Posner was right then and he’s right today.
Since Citizens United, Super PACs have raised billions in huge, unlimited influence contributions and dark money groups have raised and spent similar amounts in undisclosed, unlimited influence contributions.
Just 50 families already have injected more than $600 million into the 2024 election cycle in contributions to political parties, PACs, and super PACs, according to a new report from Americans for Tax Fairness.
The Citizens United majority relied on a fiction to justify their fundamentally flawed decision. According to the Court, since the unlimited political money unleashed by the Court had to be spent “independently” from the candidate being supported, it could not corrupt the candidate.
The Supreme Court majority was either naïve or they just didn’t care. They were dead wrong.
Super PACs (and many dark money groups) are anything but independent of the candidates they support. Super PACs are usually run by close associates of the candidate, spending their unlimited contributions in close alignment with the candidate.
Spending in the 2020 election totaled a record $14.4 billion, more than double the amount spent during the 2016 cycle. And 2024 will likely break that record.
Much of this money is provided by influence-seeking billionaires, millionaires, lobbyists, bundlers, Super PACs, dark money nonprofits, and special-interest PACs.
Is it any wonder that the American people think the nation’s capital is a corrupt city where monied interests and officeholders take care of each other at the expense of more than 330-million Americans?
Until a new system of small donor contributions matched by public funds is established to give federal candidates a way to compete free from influence-seeking money, Washington will remain a corrupt city where policy decisions are controlled by political money.
This was adapted from a piece that appeared in Wertheimer’s Political Report, a Democracy 21 newsletter that’s published on Thursdays. Read this week’s and recent newsletters here. And, subscribe for free here to receive your copy each week via email.
