Big Money Wins Again in a Romp - NYTimes.com - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...oney-wins-again-in-a-romp.html
rich campaign donations corruption politics free speech financing
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Two days after the midterm elections, I met up with a man named Ira Glasser, the former longtime head of the American Civil Liberties Union.
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Glasser is a First Amendment absolutist. And to him, that means that he supports the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling on Citizens United because he believes virtually all campaign finance laws violate the First Amendment.
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But what about what happens after the election? It is not the spending itself that is the problem, but rather the purpose of that spending.
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“So money equals speech?” I asked. No, he said. “But nobody speaks very effectively without money. If you limit how much you spend on speech, you are also limiting speech.”
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Big contributors want something for their money. At its most benign, they want access, the ability to have their side heard whenever there is the possibility that legislation might affect their industry. Far less benignly, they want more — they want to know that their bidding will be done.
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It can be subtle, this influence. “Maybe it’s the amendment that does not get introduced in committee because the congressman knows that it is not in sync with the desires of his money patrons,”
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it can be not so subtle, too. “On any given Wednesday night in Washington,” says Nick Penniman, the executive director of Issue One, which is dedicated to reducing the influence of money in politics, “you’ll have a member of, say, the finance committee, standing in the board room of a lobbyist’s office, surrounded by bank lobbyists. At some point, someone will hand a staffer an envelope with the checks in it, and the congressman will have raised $100,000 in 45 minutes. And they know exactly who was responsible for putting it together, and whose phone calls therefore need to be returned.”
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Penniman makes a distinction between “ideological givers” — donors like the Koch brothers, motivated by the chance to get like-minded people elected — and “transactional givers,” those who donate because they expect something concrete in return. “These are folks who give just as generously to both sides of the aisle.”
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“It’s a never-ending hustle. You get elected to this august body to fix problems, and for the privilege, you find yourself on the phone in a cubicle, dialing for dollars.”
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the constant need to raise money means that “you don’t have the time for the kind of personal relationships that so many of us built up over time.” When people don’t know each other, it is a lot easier to think the worst of them. Polarization is the result.
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Finally, there is the effect of big money on the rest of us. The public, Sarbanes believes, knows full well the insidious influence of money in politics. “The rational voter will say to himself, why should I bother voting if the person I’m voting for is a captive of special interests,
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how does Ira Glasser react to these tales of corruption? He doesn’t deny them. “Of course there is corruption,” he says. “Of course there is undue influence of money.” But he doesn’t believe that those problems are as great as they are made out to be, or that they trump his First Amendment concerns. “The question is whether the remedy does more harm than good and violates the constitution,”