By the end of the 19thcentury, the corporate rampage of the Gilded Age had become intolerable. Anti-trust legislation was passed and monopolies broken up, but corporate interests continued to buy politicians by donating sumptuously to their campaigns. So in 1907 Congress passed the Tillman Act, prohibiting corporations from making political contributions of any sort. [xi]
A new Tillman Act today, however, would not impede our Sheldon Adelsons and it would almost certainly die at conception anyway. The six mega-corporations of the media industry would kill it to protect their great cash cow. That's what oligarchy does. But suppose it squeaked into law: Citizens United rests on the Supreme Court's surreal claims that corporations are persons and their campaign contributions are free speech; the new law would die there in a heartbeat. (Forty less demented governments around the world absolutely ban corporate political contributions. [xii])
The Federal Corrupt Practices Act of 1910 offers a template more likely to succeed, and to kneecap the Adelsons in the bargain. It said nothing at all about the campaign contributions a candidate could receive. Instead it imposed severe and inflexible limits on their campaign expenditures. Candidates could spend no more $0.03 per constituent, up to caps of $5,000 for House campaigns and $25,000 in Senate races. [xiii] Similar modest limits today (let's adjust for inflation) would liberate candidates from the burden of raising millions-you don't need what you can't spend-and no candidate could outspend another to buy an election. Effective campaigns of informing the voters would be adequately funded, but the marathons of spectacle would end.
Quick. Simple. Effective. If you want to get Big Money out of politics just make it, in a roundabout way, illegal.
Limiting candidates' expenditures is commonplace. Eighty three of the worlds's 97 democracies do so: the United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, Austria,France, Ireland, Belgium, New Zealand, Hungary, Iceland, Israel, Mexico, Bulgaria, Poland, Chile, Italy, Portugal, and 66 more. [xiv]
The spending caps inCanada and the UK have been in place for more than a century,[xv] and both countries limit expenditures by the political parties as well; US$24.9 million in Britain, in Canada US$21.0 million. Individual candidates can spend no more than US$91,700 in Canada and US$131,000 in Britain: trifles compared to the millions their American counterparts must raise. And isn't $100,000, plus-or-minus, adequate? Are these countries less well governed? Are their democracies intact?
Ours is not: it has been eroding for at least five decades. Reclaiming it seems unlikely in five more, given the status quo, except for this concept of spending caps. It is an arrow straight to oligarchy's Achilles heel.
So there you have it, beleaguered men and women of the U.S. Congress. You can emasculate Big Money by legislating spending caps. Then you'll need only enough financing to inform your voters, and you can raise this trifle during coffee breaks from shallower pockets. You are obligated now only to your constituents, freed immediately from the influence of immense wealth and the need to court it. You can govern full time.
And not the least benefit: democracy can recover as oligarchy withers.
The challenge here is not to reinstate spending limits immediately or even soon. Given Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump, snowballs come to mind again. But so does the 2020 election, and it promises to be a game changer.
No one expects the House to flip Republican again. If the Senate can be ripped from McConnell's partisan hands and the presidency from Trump's, a single-party government will be in place.
First spending limits. Then the Green New Deal.
[i] For a detailed accounting of the Koch brothers' influence, see Jane Mayer, Dark Money, New York: Doubleday, 2016.
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