Now Playing: alice in chains
The United States Supreme Court’s recent decision in Citizens United v FEC “struck down decades-old limits on corporate and union spending in elections (including judicial elections) and opened up our political system to a money free-for-all, according to Richard Hasen, Slate Magazine (“Money Grubbers” 21 January 2010). According to Justice Stevens, in his official “opinion”, the “real issue in the case concerns how, not if, the appellant may finance electioneering.” I was going to get into some of the specifics of this recent case (and will cover them briefly in a moment), but it seems a larger issue is at stake, something that has come up many times before (in the reversed Austin v Michigan Chamber of Commerce or the partially overruled McConnell v FEC, to name the two most obvious (and most cited) recent cases) and will come up time and time again, that of monetary involvement in the political process.
This latest decision was described by President Obama, in his State of the Union address as “opening the floodgates for special interests” to spend without limit” on political campaigns, or more specifically, on electioneering ads. But, one has to wonder if this just cuts out a single step in the process, ie the creation of a Political Action Committee (PAC). Corporations, non-profits, anybody—they could already donate money to political campaigns, just sometimes limited to indirect contribution by way of a PAC. Now, it seems, they might not have to bother with that step any longer. Citizens United put together a documentary on how Hillary Clinton would be a horrible choice for president and set out to make the documentary available free on demand on cable—this is the key point in the recent decision; it was not a question of whether or not an organization can spend millions of dollars putting together a negative portrayal of a politician, not a question of whose money gets spent, necessarily, or how it gets spent, but a question of whether on demand constituted public presentation, so to speak. In the aforementioned Slate article, Hasen suggests that the court might have been expected to go at this narrowly, covering that question and that question alone, but instead, the Roberts court, in the opinion of Hasen, was “recrafting constitutional law.” Of course, in the opinion of the President of Citizens United, David Bossie, (statement, 21 January 2010), it is “a tremendous victory, not only for Citizens United, but for every American who desires to participate in the political process,” something he goes on to call “the right of every American citizen,” as if the only way to participate in the process is to throw money at it.
Of course, money has been shaping political campaigns since the beginning. For example, in his Bank Veto Message, 10 July 1832, President Andrew Jackson said, “it is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes.” He called the existing national bank, and by all rights all of what William Jennings Bryan would call in his 1896 Presidential Campaign Cross of Gold speech, “the encroachments of organized wealth,” “subversive to the rights of the States, and dangerous to the liberties of the people… Will there not be cause to tremble for the purity of our elections?”
So, it is worth asking, what is so different now that even President Obama had to bring up the recent Supreme Court decision in his State of the Union address, if our elections have already has a certain financial impurity for, well, as long as we’ve had them? For that matter, if we are a capitalist nation—and, make no mistake, we most certainly are—why do we infringe on such spending in the first place?
Supreme Court decision(s) excepted, is… or rather, should money be a first amendment issue? Jon Meacham, in his Andrew Jackson biography, American Lion, suggest that Jackson was of the opinion that “the country was being controlled by a kind of congressional-financial-bureaucratic complex in which the needs and concerns of the unconnected were secondary to those who were on the inside.” That is, those with financial and political capital were more important, fundamentally, to the system than the common man, damn the “by the people, for the people.” It is worth mentioned that Jackson was a laissez-faire capitalist; he believed in the free market, and stood more against the National Bank specifically than against all financial institutions, but he also wished to “buttress presidential power with mass support—something never done before,” according to Robert Remini in Andrew Jackson and the Bank War. Klaus Hansen, in Mormonism and the American Experience, suggests that Jackson’s veto of the National Bank “made possible the creation of the modern American capitalist empire with its fundamental belief in religious, political, and economic pluralism.” By tearing down the National Bank and leaving the economy unregulated, Jackson made possible the Industrial Revolution in America, and the emergence of corporations and monopolies larger than the National Bank ever was. And, all this in the name of defending the “purity of our elections.” Yet, we come back to money buying ad time, money paying campaign promoters, money buying elections. As Samuel Bryan suggested, decades before Jackson’s presidency, and centuries before the Citizens United decision, “if the administrators of… government are actuated by views of private interest and ambition, how is the welfare and happiness of the community to be the result of such jarring adverse interests?” (Anti-Federalist, Centinel I, 5 October 1787).
What it comes down to, then or now, is a very simple premise: in a capitalist system, is it unexpected or unwarranted that finance will, if not already then eventually, control everything? The common man necessarily becomes a disinterested, uninvolved party, recognizing, at least unconsciously, the smallness of his part. And, he in turn, if he wants to “participate” in politics, must donate what meager cash he has to a campaign or a PAC, when larger sums are already driving the campaigns’ direction and policy. The bourgeoisie use their pocketbooks to, still, “bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes,” while the masses go out and vote, only in part, and pretend that their individual votes matter more than the millions of dollars from special interests.