If you happen to be the richest person in the world, and your name is Elon Musk, and your net worth is over $250 billion, you can use as much of your own money as you'd like to help your favorite presidential candidate win and nobody needs to know about it.
One of the little-known secrets of American politics is that in some cases there is no limit on how much any one person can spend to support their favorite presidential candidate. That's right, no limit. The Supreme Court, in their 2010 Citizens United and SpeechNow.org decisions, decided that anyone, except foreign nationals and federal contractors can, in effect, spend unlimited amounts of money to help their favorite candidates. It's actually much worse than that, as we will see shortly.
Remember the days of the McCain-Feingold Act and other attempts to limit campaign donations in order to allow average voters more influence? Those days are ancient history.
Sure, there is a nominal spending limit for giving to presidential candidates-- the Federal Election Commission this year set the individual limit at $3,300 per person. Most Americans would consider that amount to be fair and reasonable--the Supreme Court thinks otherwise.
The Supreme Court, in its ultra-conservative wisdom, ruled that there shouldn't be any spending limit at all, as long as the money goes through certain kinds of Political Action Committees (PACs) and is not directly coordinated with candidates.
In the United States, a political action committee (PAC) is a tax-exempt organization that pools campaign contributions from members and donates those funds to candidates or legislation. There are special rules and restrictions for the various kinds of PACs, which represent business, labor or ideological interests.
The most egregious of these, "Super PACs," (not considered political action committees at all), are legally known as Independent Expenditures Only Committees (IEOCs). What makes them special is they can accept unlimited contributions and spend an unlimited amount of money. What makes them especially diabolical is that Super PACs are able to use "dark," i.e. anonymous, money.
Sorry, you don't get to know who these "dark money" donors are. Super PACs are theoretically required to reveal their backers, but they can hide their true source of funding by reporting a non-disclosing nonprofit or shell company as the donor. Individuals can mask their identities and their contributions by giving funds to outside groups which then give the money to a Super PAC. Yes, it is a form of laundering money, with no donation limits and total anonymity.
The Brennon Center for Justice, a New York University of Law nonprofit law and public policy institute, alleges "big money dominates U.S. political campaigns to a degree not seen in decades" and is "drowning out the voices of ordinary Americans.
And while Super PACs are most visible in federal elections, their influence also extends to state and local races. U.S. Sen. John McCain warned in 2012: "I guarantee there will be a scandal, there is too much money washing around politics, and it's making the campaigns irrelevant."
If Elon Musk wants Donald Trump to be elected president this November, who will stop him from surreptitiously spending $50 billion or more to help make that happen? The answer: nobody. Certainly not the Supreme Court.
You see, the real "dirty little secret" of American democracy is that we don't have a democracy. Mirriam Webster defines democracy as "a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections." Some people prefer the term "republic," often described as a "representative democracy." Regardless, we are nowhere close to being a representative democracy
Americans have always believed we have elections to decide our government, because that is what democracies do. In this country the presidential candidate with the most votes should win, right? However, our constitutionally antiquated electoral system, decided otherwise in five previous American elections, including for two of our past three presidents (George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016).In those elections the winner of the Electoral College was in fact the loser of the popular vote.
What would be a better description of our political system? Plutocracy (government by the wealthy) would be one, aristocracy (government by the few) would be another.
If most Americans understood how far we are from a real democracy they would be even more upset than they are now. Fundamental, comprehensive change is in order. If we don't make significant changes that give more clout to ordinary, regular people, we will be stuck with a continuation of the dysfunctional and deteriorating political system we have now.
America's "Dirty Little Secret" needs to die off and make room for the emergence of a real democracy.
