Suppose the federal government banned all private donations to Planned Parenthood, and decreed that for every dollar donated to the National Right to Life Committee, 80 cents of tax money would be allocation to pro-choice groups. Would that be a good idea? Would it even be constitutional?
Larry Lessig thinks it would be both constitutional and good policy to apply that concept to congressional campaigns. I strongly disagree on both counts. You should be able to spend your money to advocate any candidate you favor, and no candidate should be rewarded with a taxpayer subsidy for the strength of his opposition.
That said, I agree with Lessig’s argument that there’s too little money in politics. More money is spent educating Americans about the relative merits of various brands of fizzy sugar water than about the relative merits of the people who want to govern us. The federal goverment directs how $3 trillion in taxes and public borrowing will be collected and spent, and it regulates a $13 trillion private economy. What’s shocking isn’t that our politicians are for sale, but rather that the price is so low.
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I think your comparison is flawed, because Lessig only suggests matched funding for incumbents, not matched funding for who ever is opposed to the person you’re supporting.
That said, I still don’t really like Lessig’s idea. Your donations really become donations to funding the election in general, rather then funding a particular candidate. At that point, it seems we’d be better just mandating public financing, saying everybody gets a set sum of money, and no donations are allowed.
Maniakes,
your first paragraph strikes me as a red herring. PP and NRLC are private organizations. Candidates are essentially publicly owned by their constituents. Certainly the job they’re gunning for is public and not private in nature.
That said, I think Lessig’s proposal is absurd. Regardless of where money comes from for re-election, candidates are still going to pander to whatever constituency it takes to get elected. Public financing does not, in my opinion, make a candidate that much less beholden to special interests.
HeruFeanor, in my analogy PP is the incumbant (because Roe v. Wade and PP v. Casey are the law of the land), and NRLC is the challenger.
I also oppose public financing. I see the right to rent a forum to advocate your views and the right to not fund political views you oppose as being fundamental to the concept of free speech. I also think public financing would give too much power to whoever decides the standards for qualifying for public funds.
Zach, the right I’m arguing is being infringed is the right of the donors to donate to organizations that advocate political views they support, not necessarily the rights of the candidates. I don’t see a meaningful moral difference between giving money to the Committee to Re-elect Congressman Smith to advocate the reelection of Congressman Smith, and giving money to NRLC to advocate the election of pro-life candidates.
Maniakes,
the difference is that NRLC and PP do more than simply give money to campaigns.
While I do disagree with you on relating public financing to free speech, my point wasn’t actually that we SHOULD have mandated public financing, just that Lessig’s suggestion is essentially the same as having mandated public financing, except that the level of financing will be highly variable. This seems to add a lot of complexity to the concept of mandated public financing, without any real advantage, and still leaving the door open for the same kind of special interest donations to non-incumbents as happen now. The fact that the government will match 80% of the donation to your opponent is unlikely to make the candidate feel any less indebted to the donor.
Zach, feel free to replace NRLC and PP with organizations which do nothing but advocate the election of candidates who agree with their agenda (say, Club for Growth and whoever their counterpart might be). The point I’m trying to make still holds.
HeruFeanor, the advantage I see to Lessig’s proposal over pure public financing is that it’s a workaround to one of the major problems with public financing. In order to defeat an established incumbant, the challenger typically needs to spend more to get his word out because the incumbant has name recognition and people remember him from last election. I think Lessig is trying to find a way for the challenger to spend moderately more than the incumbant to overcome the incumbant’s built-in advantages, and to scale that to the intensity of opposition to the incumbant.
Maniakes, that did occur to me. But wouldn’t it be simpler to just say that the incumbent gets less public financing? That is, say, the incumbent gets $800,000 while the challenger gets $1,000,000 (or scale that ratio to whatever level is appropriate for this race).
(As to a counterpart for Club for Growth, maybe MoveOn.org?)
I think Lessig’s trying to do automatic scaling based not only on the size and expensiveness of the district, but on the seriousness of the challenge. For example, if in a heavily gerrymandered district there’s only a token challenger who doesn’t campaign or fundraise seriously, the challenger may raise $50,000 and the incumbant gets $40,000. But in a competetive district where opposition to the incumbant is very intense and the challenger is running a serious campaign, the challenger may raise $3 million and the incumbant would then get $2.4 million.
Okay, so the essence of your objection to Lessig is not his specific plan, but just the general idea of mandated public finance, which he approximates?
Pretty much. I think it’s a clever variant of public financing, but I see it as sharing most of the problems of pure public financing.
My preferred solution to political corruption is a combination of increased transparency so it’s harder for corrupt politicians to hide, active enforcement against out-and-out bribery (including sting operations like Abscam), and reducing the opportunity and incentives for corruption by reducing the arbitrary exercise of government power.
I’m not sure where I stand on all of this, but I will say it’s certainly refreshing to see someone point out the obvious: that we spend shockingly little on our politics, and our campaign finance laws–both before and after McCain-Feingold–are largely responsible.
Every four years we hear lamentations from the press that “more money than ever” is being spent on politics, without acknowledging that we have two factors–inflation and population growth–which makes gradual increases automatic. What we should ask is how political advertising fares next to much more trivial things, like hamburgers and soft drinks. And it turns out that we spend way more on those than on our politics, and isn’t that sick?
Abscam was a textbook case of entrapment. I’m not really how they managed to get anybody convicted in that case (though a couple of the convictions nearly didn’t get through because the entrapment defense).
So yes, I agree that there should be more active investigation against bribery, but I don’t want to see a repeat of the methods used in Abscam.
It’s not entrapment if the police merely create an opportunity to commit a crime that the target was already predisposed to commit. I don’t know enough about the details of Abscam to judge if that was the case there, but several of those convicted did raise the entrapment defense unsuccessfully.
It is important, though, that any active anticorruption enforcement not target specific individuals, parties, or viewpoints. (Using hypothetical parties for a moment) If they catch and lock up all the corrupt Whigs and ignore Tories, then we might end up with a large Tory majority heavily influenced by their still-secret corrupt members, while the public believes the Whigs to be fundmentally corrupt because so many of them have been caught taking bribes.
Dean,
the difference is that the local fizzy sugar water maker has a product which they sell, which in turn generates revenue, which they can in turn spend on advertising. A candidate has no source for advertising save political donations. Increasing the cost of running for office merely guarantees that only the independently wealthy or those willing to sell out to the highest bidder(s) are going to run.
That’s not to say that I agree with public financing, but it is a thorny issue and I don’t think ever-increasing amount of campaign spending is necessarily a good thing.
Maniakes,
I basically agree with the point you’re making, I just think PP and NRLC are poor choices for examples. Maybe it’s pedantic, I guess I’m just a pedantic kind of guy.
No worries. I’ve got a bit of a pedantic streak myself.
Zach: Not quite. Our campaign finance laws have made it to the point where only the independently wealthy can run, because it’s not possible to raise enough money through donations alone for most politicians of modest means. And that’s happened because of, not in spite of, the draconian and stupid campaign finance laws that have done so much damage to our politics over the last couple of generations. Yes, I’m including the laws that were in place before McCain-Feingold, which were atrocious. McCain-Feingold just made an already bad system much, much worse.
The only sane proposal on campaign finance would be to end completely the limits that individual donors may give, but require instant disclosure of all donations above a certain dollar amount over the internet so anyone and everyone could see who gave and how much, and decide for themselves whether the politicians are “in those donors’ pockets” or not.
Until we have that, we have a pathetic joke of a system that is an open assault on the First Amendment.
Well, from what I read of Abscam, they created a false business and had somebody acting as a fictional sheik offering bribes and other illegal deals to congress people. Whether or not they’re “predisposed” to commit a crime, this is entrapment, because it’s causing them to commit a specific crime which you can’t prove they would have done if you hadn’t specifically set up the circumstances and invited them to partake.
The more I think about it, I actually don’t object too strong to using those sorts of techniques to test our elected officials, so long as the consequences stop at kicking them out of office. Leveling criminal charges, when you can’t prove that they would have engaged in illegal activity had you not specifically created the circumstances, doesn’t seem reasonable. This is why the entrapment laws exist to begin with.
Dean,
I agree with that. I guess my point is that rather than restrict who can give what, maybe it’s wiser to restrict how much can be spent in total.
“Americans cannot be trusted with free speech because congressmen are too corrupt?”
That’s completely logical just like law abiding citizen can’t be allowed to carry guns because criminals use them to rob or kill someone.
Which is completely logical just like using extreme sarcastic hyperbole to prove a point because people are too stupid understand actually useful arguments.
(Note that I don’t really even disagree with on gun control, I just object to your presentation. To be honest, I object somewhat to the title of this article as well.)
I apologize for the hyperbole, but I get a bit grumpy about campaign finance because I really do see it as a free speech issue, and it bothers me that curtailing privately-funded political speech is the standard response to corruption of elected officials.
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