Regardless of the party affiliation, no voters who cares about the future of our democracy can be complacent about the new flood of unreported, anonymous spending in the current election season triggered by the U.S. Supreme Court’s radical ruling last summer to allow corporate campaign spending.
That 5-4 ruling by conservative activist judges in the Citizens United case, so atypically pushed forward by the Court, upended decades of precedents banning corporate money in elections, and casually, almost naively, allowed corporations to spend unlimited and unreported amounts of money to influence elections. It has generated such a tidal wave of cash in this election alone that it already makes clear the pernicious threat of ascendant corporate power in federal elections for the House and Senate.
This must not be seen as a partisan issue. Rather, it is one of fundamental fairness for individual American voters about both national policies and grassroots issues.
As long as Republicans, Democrats and independents played by the same ground rules for regulated donations by individual citizens, there’s been at least a semblance of a level playing field. Voters have gotten to see the lists of heavy-hitter donors that generally suggests how the candidates they fund will vote on particular issues. They’ve been able to weigh, and track over time, the propensity of candidates to kowtow to the moneyed special interests who contribute the bulk of campaign donations.
That system was already woefully inadequate. While it allowed some transparency, it failed absolutely to stanch the ever-increasing flow of lobbyist-organized financing by big spenders, who funded not only a range of individual candidates, but also the national Republican and Democratic parties. Candidates in House races this cycle, for example, will spend 54 percent more than they did in the 2008 elections.
But there is no transparency by the independent and anonymously funded groups that are steering this election. They operate outside the rules of regulated, incremental donations by individual citizens, and the transparent accountability rules that required identification of the chief sponsors of campaign ads. And they are working in behalf of both parties.
While Democrats hold a slight overall edge in regulated campaign funding and spending in the 109 closest races for congressional seats, new Republican-oriented independent groups hold a significant edge over the Democratic-leaning outrider organizations in this election.
The Republican-oriented groups, according to figures compiled by The New York Times, have dived heavily into the campaign fray, spending more than $60 million — or 80 percent more than Democratic-leaning independent groups — on attack ads for which there is no accountability, and which often badly distort the truth about the candidates who are the subject of their attacks.
Research by National Public Radio reporters found that the most effective of these innocuously named Republican-leaning groups — i.e., Americans for Job Security, the 60-Plus Association, American Crossroads — are interconnected in several ways. Their offices are close together in Washington, D.C.; they use the same media buyers; and they loosely coordinate their advertising expenditures to avoid expensive overlap.
Among the biggest spenders is American Crossroads, set up by Karl Rove, former President George W. Bush’s chief adviser. It and a second organization it established, Crossroads GPS, have run ads targeting incumbent Democrats in at least 30 congressional races, NPR found.
Democrats can’t cry foul too loudly. They created the model with MoveOn.org in the 2008 race. But what’s happened since the Supreme Court unleashed the floodgates of anonymous corporate funding is startling. The GOP has collected nine time the money that Democratic-leaning groups have garnered.
Big money in politics is frightening enough, but this phenomena clearly raises the specter of overwhelming funding by corporations that could fundamentally alter the core agenda of Congress. It’s long been clear that corporations would relish the election of politicians who would do their bidding and shred federal regulations on pollution, banking, Wall Street manipulation, energy efficiency, health care, insurance practices, food safety, pharmaceutical companies — the list is endless.
Unless Congress musters the resolve to pass new rules requiring full transparency of campaign funding, such as proposed in the Disclose Act that Republicans defeated by filibuster before adjourning for the election season, the nightmare of secret corporate rule is now at hand.