The Green New Deal will be stillborn unless this impact of Citizens United is thwarted.
Only the Supreme Court can overturn the decision, but Congress can make Citizens United utterly irrelevant by slashing radically the costs of political campaigning. And it can do that by exhuming those two old laws repealed in 1971, by the passage of the Federal Election Campaign Act.
"FECA" meant well but in hindsight it committed two unforced errors, both with grievous results. It abandoned spending caps, placing limitations on campaign contributions instead. The limits were not generous, and they were to be transparent-but today they are neither. And FECA gave birth to a time bomb: it institutionalized PACs. [iv] For years organized labor had been funneling money into Democratic campaigns through the AFL-CIO's unique political action committee; Republicans found this distasteful so FECA leveled the field, authorizing corporations to create PACs as well. The law circumscribed all of them severely in how, how much, and to whom they could contribute, but soon the time bomb detonated. Amendments to FECA and new laws loosened those restrictions and then Citizens United effectively removed them-politically empowering the One Percenters and shattering democracy.
Here is what oligarchy can do for you.
Mr. Sheldon Adelson, billionaire owner of Las Vegas casinos, contributed $82,522,800 to the Republicans in the 2016 cycle and $123,234,400 more in 2018. [v] Because online gambling was emptying his brick-and-mortar resorts, he wanted to make it illegal. At his urging the Trump Department of Justice "reinterpreted" an existing regulation, and that was the end of online gambling. [vi]
But this is just pay-to-play favoritism. The true savagery of oligarchy is displayed in the Tax Cut and Jobs Act of 2017. It reduced the personal income taxes of Mr. Adelson by 6.5%, and corporate income taxes for his Las Vegas Sands Corporation by 40% (and so too for every other corporation in America). The not-so-rich paid for this, according to the Brookings Institution: "The Tax Cut and Jobs Act will, under the most plausible scenarios, end up making most households worse off than if it had not been enacted."[vii]
This could not happen in a functioning democracy.
If oligarchy's grip is powerful because campaigns need mountains of money and the One Percenters have lots of it to offer, what are the numbers? The aggregate cost of the 2016 national election was $6.5 billion. It was spent on professionalized campaign staffs, consultants, ad agencies, opposition-research shops, incessant polling, and by far the largest single item: hundreds of millions to the media conglomerates for advertising air time and print space.
To put its government in place no other democratic nation on earth spends more than a small fraction of this.
A campaign industry has emerged in the U.S., turning a serious public function into a media circus of suspenseful entertainment, a lurid spectator sport, and the presidential election process now rambles along for a year and a half, three times longer than a whole season of professional football.
The men and women of the U.S. Congress complain bitterly of spending half or more of their working hours begging for money to support the campaign industry. [viii] This means their work of governing becomes a half-time job, but they have no choice. According to OpenSecrets.org, a 2016 Senate campaign cost nearly $20 million, and a House campaign about $1.6 million.
The spectacle is wholly unnecessary. We endure a year-long barrage of kamikaze political ads, engineered imagery, ideological tantrums, subtle appeals to fear and hatred, dozens of inane "debates," and dueling platitudes from the candidates just to reach the primaries. The glittering pro forma party conventions come next and then rinse-and-repeat for the general election.
Voters need information, not extravaganza. We need to know the candidates' qualifications for office, their detailed records of public service, their unequivocal positions on the issues of the day, and their stated intentions if elected; everything else is gossip.
Providing the essential information does not require the best part of two years and $6.5 billion: Parliamentary elections in Britain cost about US$40 million. They are completed in six weeks. [ix] Canada is a bigger country: a typical national election there costs about US$75 million and is concluded in eight weeks. [x]
Laudable examples, and there are initiatives underway to reform campaign finance. Some seek to overturn Citizens United, but given the existing grip of oligarchy and Trump's Supreme Court, snowballs in hell come to mind.
The Congressional fix is eminently feasible, however. It would be a workaround, leaving the decision untouched, but Citizens United could be left stranded and harmless if Congress revitalized either of those century-old laws repealed by FECA. One of them would remove most of the money from the game, and the other could put us on par with Canada, even better.
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