While the entire GOP is still sold-out to big money interests, a solid half of the Democratic Party has now embraced progressive values and turned down most or all of the big money they're regularly offered. The Congressional Progressive Caucus is now a force to be reckoned with.
The speed with which the party has moved in this direction "- although many of their best efforts have been crushed by two sold-out Democrats in the Senate "- has been historic. The chairman of one of the Senate's most powerful committees "- the Budget Committee "- is now none other than Bernie Sanders himself.
And yet the Democratic Party hasn't yet fully and nationally committed itself to draining the swamp of corrupt politics in the nation's capitol and state houses. They must do so, both because it's the politically smart thing and because the survival of our republic is at stake.
As Americans for Financial Reform recently noted:
This anti-democratic vote buying, totaling $1.2 billion in the 2020 election cycle, has expanded greatly in recent years, almost 40 times more than the $31 million billionaires donated in 2010, when the Citizens United rules were first in effect. "
Since January 6, 2021, corporations and industry-group PACs have given more than $34 million to 144 members of Congress who voted to overturn the legitimate election of Joe Biden as President.
The PACs of seven major Fortune 500 corporations have contributed a combined $1.5 million to GOP members of Congress (and their two political campaign committees) who voted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. They are UPS, General Motors, FedEx, AT&T, ExxonMobil, Merck and Chevron. These corporations made $78 billion in profits last year and paid a combined average federal income tax rate of just 2.7%.
This is a genuine crisis for American democracy. The poison of big money is seeping through the veins of our political system in ever larger quantities. If not stopped, this process can be fatal.
No democratic republic in history has ever survived as a functioning democracy more than a few generations once political bribery is either legalized or simply becomes widespread due to weak law enforcement.
Historically we've seen this phenomenon in Third World countries with a weak rule of law, but more recently it destroyed or is eroding democracy in Russia, Hungary, The Philippines, India, Sri Lanka, Venezuela, Brazil, Peru, and South Africa (which, with the "gift" of American corporate lawyers to help write their new constitution three decades ago, institutionalized corporate personhood and the right of corporations to fund elections, as I document in Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became Persons).
The evidence of this cancer installed into our body politic by five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court is now so obvious that it is turning elections. And if we don't do something about it soon, America may well go down the authoritarian road Trump tried to pave and the countries listed above are now on.
There are multiple solutions to his crisis; all involve either changing, regulating, or working around the corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court.
Congress has the power to regulate the Court and make "exceptions" to its Justices' authority. As I lay out in detail in The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America, Congress can add or subtract Court members, term-limit members, and even define issues (like money in politics) on which it forbids the Court to rule.
Article 3, Section 2 of the Constitution is unambiguous:
"[T]he supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make."
The core of the problem for the remaining corporate-funded Democrats is that five corrupt Republican appointees on the US Supreme Court legalized political bribery in 1976 and 1978 with their Buckley and Bellotti decisions, then tripled down with their notorious Citizens United decision in 2010.
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