Archive for category: The Role of Money and Special Interests in Politics

First of all, I have to say how impressed I have been about the level of discussion in these posts.

In a day when everything can be and is reduced to not only a 10-second soundbite but a 140-word tweet, which pretty much distills the most complicated issues into pure adrenaline for supporters of any position to hate the other side even more, these responses and give-and-take have been refreshing and welcome.

I am not going to even try to deal with or debate Dr. Conger based on reams of academic research because I am not qualified to do so. What I have been trying to do, and hope everyone who reads these posts will take away from it, is that actually working in the political sphere is way different than studying it from any appreciable distance either physically or professionally.

It is like the difference of having a former NFL quarterback such as Peyton Manning or a Tony Romo give his opinion during color commentary of a professional football game versus another announcer who may have covered sports for their entire career but never played an actual game as a quarterback in the Super Bowl, for example.

There is so much that is different from the actual practice of politics at its daily, granular level than from the aggregated statistics gained from academic research and surveys with 20-deep cross-tabs on every issue and vote.

I am not saying that there are not any elected representatives who can never be swayed by the allure of more campaign money coming in from one source or another. History is replete with cases where Congressmen and Senators and Presidents have taken money and then been swayed to vote in a way that was contrary to their core philosophy or goals.

However, my experience has been that with the speed of modern-day politics and the sheer amount of work that has to be done on a daily basis on Capitol Hill, since that is where my frame of reference is, the impact of campaign money on daily decisions for most elected representatives is slim to none.

For example, 14 years ago when I was chief of staff to former US Senator Elizabeth Dole, we would regularly get 5000 emails per day in her Senate office, 2500 fax messages (which are obsolete today), 1000 phone calls in the various offices from constituents and lobbyists and reporters on TOP of the 10,000 written letters, many hand-written by constituents who were concerned about everything from the Greyhound Racing Act of 2002 to the monumental issues of fighting Al Qaeda in Afghanistan to balancing the federal budget.

In addition to working on the legislative agenda for the day and answering all of these emails, faxes and letters, we just didn’t have time to wonder who had given how much money to Senator Dole’s campaign or not.
Every single one of our 49 staff people who handled casework, legislative correspondence and policy issues for the Senator had zero idea of who ever even contributed to her campaign much less in what order of magnitude.

The only people who had any real idea of who had contributed to her 2002 campaign was our campaign manager who lived in North Carolina and only occasionally visited Washington DC and myself and that was only because I was familiar with the large donors from my time with former Congressman McMillan of Charlotte from 1985-1995 and the various lobbyists with PACs who were from North Carolina or who had interests in North Carolina.

It is not a humongous pool to draw from. In fact, in many states, the pool of PACs that represent business interests in the state could be below 10 total.

When it comes to the elected official, in many cases they don’t even remember the name of the lobbyist and rely heavily on staff to tell them who they are about to meet with and why. Movies and the news tries to glamorize the cozy relationship between a shifty elected Senator and some nefarious lobbyist with a big PAC to protect big interests in their state but for the most part, that is just Hollywood fiction and story-telling.

Every elected official has their favorite friends and some of those friends might be a lobbyist with a PAC because of shared philosophy on government or perhaps a shared interest in a sports team or maybe they went to college together. Former staff do have a leg up on a relationship with an elected official they might have worked for over the years but that usually means that person has a close relationship with 1 out of 100 senators or 1 out of 435 Members of Congress which is hardly a majority of either legislative chamber.

So it would be good for any observer of money in politics to try to separate the fiction from the fact and put a couple of shakers of salt on any story they might come across in the news about some ‘undue influence’ any lobbyist might have with an elected official.

Often times, it is overblown.

Another major aspect of this equation that we might have failed to address is that very successful, accomplished people who run for public office for the right reasons, as in serving the nation and state as Thomas Jefferson, James Madison or any number of founding fathers did, seldom fall prey to the temptations of receiving more money from a PAC or a lobbyist or gaining the support of any number of independent expenditure (IE) organizations that could help their re-election in some form or another.

If being in elective office is the greatest job a person ever has and they will do anything under the sun to maintain that power and never lose, then that might be one of the weak links who can be persuaded to do something out of the ordinary for a constituent company, lobbyist or acquaintance.

People who really have not built a career outside of politics, say in business, law, medicine, architecture, computer software or education, and whose sole purpose in life is to be an elected official, those are the people whom you should worry about the most.

People who have careers outside of politics usually want to return to those professions at some point in time, simply because that is who they are at their essence and their profession is their vocational ‘reason’ to be on earth in the first place.

It also helps if that person has built up some financial assets that they can turn to while in public office and not be dependent solely on the $177,000 per year in federal salary that a US Senator or Congressman now receive.

That sounds like a lot of money to most people in the United States. However, maintaining living quarters and paying to live in the very expensive Washington DC area while maintaining a residence in their home states and districts and raising children who might be college-aged and ready to pursue a higher education somewhere makes that salary diminish somewhat quickly.

The former Congressman I worked for from 1985-1995, Alex McMillan of Charlotte (NC-9), was the CEO of Harris-Teeter Supermarkets the year before he ran for Congress in 1984. He had served on the county commission of Mecklenburg County while helping to form and finance Harris-Teeter during the 1970s so he had already experienced being a ‘citizen-politician’ or ‘citizen-legislator’ at the local level which did not require him to retire from his primary business to serve.

When he did retire at age 52, he has financially set himself up over the years to provide for his family but to also provide for their needs when he knew he wanted to run for Congress which would dictate that he give up his previous high income, stock options and benefits from the corporate world. He always had the goal of using half his life to provide for his family and the other half to serve his city, state and country as a public servant.

He came close.

This is not an easy thing for everyone to do. Not everyone can bank on a large annual salary to be set aside as a nest-egg to be used later for living expenses above and beyond what a congressional salary covers.

However, some elected officials have spouses who continue to work and provide income for the family. Others have businesses they own that they turn over to trusted managers to run in their stead during their public service. Many just adopt a lower standard of living and lifestyle than what they had been previously accustomed to while serving in the public interest.

All this being said, I saw it first-hand for a decade where people would come in to solicit the Congressman’s support of an issue or threaten him with opposition during the next campaign or withhold financial support if he didn’t vote the way they wanted him to vote.

‘Do me a favor’ he would often say. ‘Run against me in the primary or general election and defeat me fair and square. This is not the greatest job in the world to begin with. If you defeat me, I will just go back to Harris-Teeter and sell more groceries than any other congressman has in American history!’

They never did. Run against him that is.

It is far easier to stay on the sidelines and carp and moan and groan and to be honest, bitch about things than it is to hunker down, set up a campaign, raise millions of dollars and suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and barbed political attacks ads, often not true at all, while trying to do some good for the nation as an elected representative of the people.

These are the realities of serving in public office on a day-to-day basis. The impact and issue of ‘money’ on an elected representative might be 30th on the list of priorities to do every day in terms of how to vote or who to meet with, despite the fact that a lot of a congressman’s time and effort goes into raising funds on a weekly basis to begin with.

It is one of those very odd dichotomies in the world that can really only be pulled off by the most talented and successful of our citizens.

Which is why we need great new people to run for public office.

I run The Institute for the Public Trust in Raleigh, North Carolina. Our sole mission is to find, recruit and train the next Jeffersons and Madisons and Hamiltons of this generation and the next to get them to run for public office once again.

Christians need to seriously think about putting themselves on the ballot and therefore on the direct line where the rubber meets the road of representative democracy.

Think about it: Do people really remember or care what PAC or IE sponsored a particular ad for or against any elected person anywhere in time? Or do they remember the courage and foresight of their elected officials such as the ones who voted to balance the budget in 1997 which was an effort that former Congressman McMillan and I had a hand in while on the House Budget Committee in 1993 by developing a budget proposal called ‘Cutting Spending First’?

435 Members of Congress and 100 US Senators hold the voting cards in which to play to pass or oppose any piece of legislation that affects the way the rest of us 325 million people live on a daily basis. They get to be the decision-makers. Plain and simple.

Any Christian with intelligence, integrity and real-world valuable experience in any field other than politics could and should consider entering the world of elective politics. Not only would they bring their experience to bear on the big issues of the day, such as in 2010 when the ACA was passed and very few physicians or hospital administrators were in Congress at the time to guide and direct its final shape for passage, they can do so with the added spiritual knowledge and assurance that the Lord has led them to such a decision and has planned out the path for them to take before, during and after their term of duty.

The main problem we have today, not only with Christians but with men and women of all faiths who could be the next Madison or Jefferson, is that they are not even contemplating or praying about whether the Lord has any sort of public service in store for them at ANY level of government.

They have virtually all self-selected themselves out of the pool of possible candidates and therefore, have almost no say in what is passed by the people who take their place as a legislator in any capacity.

Upset about public education? Christians should learn how to run for public office and organize campaigns to get elected to school boards. A highly-qualified individual can do more to help a community while on the local school board than in almost any other elective office to be honest.

Upset about local taxes or spending? Run for the local city council or county commission. Many big city and county budgets are billions of dollars annually. Care to guess who gets to make the final decisions on how that tax money is spent every year and on what?

Those 7-to-11 local council members or commissioners. Those are all decisions being made by people who most people today would characterize as not being cut out of the same bolt of cloth as Thomas Jefferson or James Madison or even made with the same kind of thread.

State legislatures are the next step up. They ‘only’ deal with massive budgets affecting public education across-the-state’ the largest medical care program in the country; the joint federal/state matching program called Medicaid; state transportation needs and public safety.

Congress and the US Senate deal with everything under the sun. Plato wrote about ‘philosopher kings’ running the ‘ideal Republic’ which is about the opposite of any Republic most Americans would want to live in today in the sense that The Republic takes over many of the responsibilities most families assume themselves today.

But we live in a time when many elected officials and candidates for office do not read any ‘philosophy’ nor do they spend their spare time reading Christian theology or the Bible itself.

Consequently, we have elected bodies around the nation at the federal, state and local levels that are but a distant shadow of what our Founders envisioned when they met to write the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia in 1776 and then engaged in a long war of revolution against the entrenched authority of the King of England and then returned to Philadelphia to write our Constitution in 1787 that has withstood the stress of time and human foible ever since.

The way to rejuvenate our truly wonderful and marvelous system of self-governance?

Highly qualified, educated, trained and experienced Christians and non-Christians really across-the-board and the nation need to seriously consider pole-vaulting over the everyday controversies and idle discussion of the critical issues facing us and get into the arena of elective politics where they can use the terms of current campaign finance to get elected. There, they can make changes from the inside of the government, not stand or sit idly by on the sidelines watching others do what they very easily could and should be doing themselves.

Telemachus was a monk who taught younger students in Rome during the time of Caesar.  For close to 500 years, gladiatorial games were held in the Roman Empire, many at the Colosseum.

In his older years, legend has it that Telemachus entered one of the games to see for himself what was going on. To his horror, he recognized one of his former students suited up to engage in fight-to-the-death mortal combat as one of the gladiators.

He scrambled down the steps to the walls and leaped into the arena where he ran to insert himself between his former student and the adversary crying out: ‘In the name of Christ forebear!’ three distinct times.

His former student recognized his old teacher Telemachus and lowered his sword. His opponent, out of shock probably more than anything else, lowered his sword as well.

The fight to the death was averted.

However, the crowd that had gathered to watch a good fight-to-the-death gladiator contest, rose up in their seats and proceeded to stone the old man to death because he had interrupted their entertainment for the weekend.

Slowly, once they realized what they had done, they quietly exited the Colosseum. The Emperor Honorius banned the games soon thereafter, after 500 years of carnage and waste of life.

I use this story as the title of my blog where for the past 8 years, I have written about budget, tax and health care matters mostly. My point always comes to this: we are never going to solve all or even any of our problems if we all to a person remain seated and don’t ‘enter the arena’, in this case the public square arena of politics, and at least try to ‘stop the madness’.

You might get ridiculed. You might get embarrassed by some misstatement or the other. You might even lose the political contest.

So what? You will have at least ‘tried’ to make a solid difference and contribution to our collective life together.

Bring your experience, your integrity, your Christian values and faith into the public arena. Don’t run away from it with all of those valuable assets and keep them to yourself.

That is the thing I hope every reader of this chain of civil dialogue takes away from the past 3 weeks: Get Involved. As a candidate preferably. As a volunteer if you don’t run yourself.

Discussions about things such as the effect of money on politics are very interesting and they should be continued.

As Teddy Roosevelt wrote long ago, without being too schmaltzy, I hope:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

Get in the game. That is the main thing I would hope everyone would take away from this wonderful ‘Respectful Conversations’ led by Harold Heie.

Points of Agreement

There is much to agree with Kim Conger from her first post on ‘Money, Special Interests and Political Equality’.

As long as it comes from a voluntary attitude within a Christian mindset, that is, as opposed to using the coercive power and nature of our civil representative democratic form of government to force change or impinge on other people’s freedoms of expression, speech, political alignment with others and freedom of the press to express those views, we might have lots of common ground to share.

She is right to be concerned about all of our citizens being able to participate equally in our democratic republic. It is always surprising to folks outside of the government or political realm when they find out that perhaps 35% of all adults eligible to vote in any election are not registered to vote for whatever reason.

It is even more surprising to them when they find out that about 50% of all of those who are eligible to vote actually cast a vote in quadrennial presidential elections. When they find out that less than half of those who vote in a presidential year actually vote in an off-year congressional election every other year, they are even more stunned.

And when they find out that a sheer minority of voters actually show up to vote in the various primaries and then the general elections of the off-off year municipal elections in most states, they are flabbergasted and shocked.

‘Why wouldn’t anyone not want to express his or her right to vote in a free democratic republic such as ours?’ they might say.

Apathy is usually the main culprit. Lack of interest and awareness of how the people we elect affect everyone’s collective life together in this country on a daily basis is another. A third reason is usually they forgot when the elections were, especially for Mayor and town council of a larger city.

A fourth reason is that many people just do not believe their vote makes a difference.

If they only knew how much emphasis campaign managers, operatives and staff put on getting people out to vote for their candidate or incumbent official, they would vote 100%. Each vote is considered that critical to each and every candidate for public office.

It is a massive science nowadays out there but that is a subject for another time and place.

The ‘easiest’ way to achieve political equality is to find ways to get everyone to vote every time in every election in which they are eligible to vote. That would be the purest way to achieve equality and put away any notions that someone is gaining an advantage one way or the other by supporting this or that candidate with hard money, soft money or word-of-mouth campaigns.

For some reason, the utopian goal of very high voter turnout has eluded observers and experts of the American political scene for decades now. Voter turnout spiked somewhat in the two Barack Obama election cycles, especially among younger voters and African-Americans but both fell back to historic norms in 2016 for whatever reason.

People are just as ‘free’ to vote as they are to ‘not vote’ in the same way they are free to believe in whatever God or religion they choose or don’t choose to believe in at all.

We can’t ‘force’ anyone to vote in America because we want everyone to do so in the name of ‘equality’. Just as we can’t, and shouldn’t, use the coercive force of government to suppress anyone’s freedom of expression, speech, political assembly or ways to communicate with the electorate, especially those whom the candidate wants to encourage to vote for them, through electronic or written media including social media and the myriad of ways a candidate can now connect with voters.

All of which is not free and costs money.

We should never try to be suppressing that freedom to communicate with the voting electorate. If anything, we should be working on ways to expand that voting electorate which would force candidates and campaign managers and operatives to figure out how to communicate with the new voters and gain their trust and their vote.

I also agree with her statement that ‘literal corruption is actually a relatively minor threat to our democratic (republican) system’. I always add that distinction because try as some people may, we simply do not live in a ‘pure’ democratic system such as what we know about the operations of ancient Athens when the men, and the free men only, went to the Stoa every day to vote on matters of public policy themselves. Not through duly-elected representatives such as we have in America.

The very few times that I heard about any ‘literal corruption’ in Congress usually had to do with a representative from 1) Louisiana; 2) New Jersey and/or 3) Chicago with all due apologies to anyone from those states who might be reading this post.

Congressman Billy Tauzin of Louisiana might have been joshing when he said the following, but it rings so true that many believe it about such politicians from Louisiana:

‘My vote can’t be bought….but it can be rented for a little while!’

Points of Disagreement

There are several points of disagreement which might result more from my 22 years of working on Capitol Hill, 12 years as a chief of staff to a Congressman and US Senator and 10 as a lobbyist myself, plus the past 4 years here in North Carolina working with the state legislature and Governor’s office.

1) Minority rights in our Constitution are protected and cherished jewels we should all protect. Our Founders were geniuses if nothing else when it came to understanding the human spirit and our basic capacity to be greedy, selfish, power-mad and essentially evil when we think it serves our best purpose and goals.

Minority rights are not just protected through civil liberties and the courts as Ms. Conger asserts. One of the reason why our Founders made it so difficult to get legislation done was to protect the rights of the minority in Congress and the US Senate, not primarily to frustrate their political objectives.

Anyone who served in the minority for even a second would fully understand and appreciate this fact of life up there. I worked with a Congressman for a decade who was routinely 85+ seats in the minority from 1985-1994 as a Republican. There were many times we were just praying that the 60-vote margin to close debate in the Senate would not be met and therefore some piece of legislation we thought was dangerous would die in the process.

Just as we hoped Presidents Reagan and Bush 41 would veto any bill that somehow made its way to the White House that we thought was ill-advised as well.

Keeping the Senate filibuster right where it is at today and limiting the use of executive powers in the White House are two critical things people who truly support the rights of the minority should contemplate seriously.

2) It is simply untrue to assume that the only people any representative meets with are his/her supporters or financial contributors.

We used to estimate that 2/3rds of the meeting times allocated to the Congressman I worked for was dedicated to meeting with people who held opposing views to his.

Why? For one thing, people who agree with a Congressman on an issue typically don’t waste their time talking to them. They spend their time talking to people who might be on the fence and might be persuaded to vote in the direction they would like to see them vote.

For another thing, once a person is elected, they become ‘public servants’ of all of their constituents, not just the people who elect them. Liberals and minorities had problems with Social Security checks not being sent to them just as conservatives and more wealthy white folk in Charlotte did who may have supported Congressman McMillan in the last election.

80%+ of the issues faced by any elected representative at any level are inherently non-partisan and therefore, to be a true public servant of the people, each and every elected representative should be meeting with people of all races, all incomes and all strata of life no matter who they are.

Or at least they should be.

3) There seems to be a disconnect when it comes to understanding ‘Citizens United’ in its entirety. Many feel as if a ‘corporation’ is a lifeless, bloodless monster that represents everything that is evil especially when it comes to participating in public life.

What is a ‘labor union’ then if it is not some similar affiliation of people associated for the same purpose, as guaranteed in the First Amendment, just like people who work for Apple, GM or Coca-Cola? They might not be part of a labor union per se but they have as much right to express their opinions through collective political involvement as members of a labor union, don’t they?

Why should a person working at Coca-Cola in the middle-to-lower echelon of management making $40,000/year be precluded from contributing to a PAC or being associated with a 527 sponsored by Coca-Cola when a line worker at GM could be part of a labor union making $100,000 and contributing to political activities on their behalf sponsored by the AFL-CIO?

It is a distinction without a difference really. People who work for any organization are still ‘people’ too. They are all guaranteed the right to assemble and that right to assembly means coming together to work for political goals in their common interest.

They should not be excluded from the public square of debate and dialogue just because they happen to work for a corporation and are not part of a labor union.

The other somewhat fine philosophical and metaphysical point comes when anyone tries to define precisely when a ‘small company’ of, say, 3 hard-working visionaries such as Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and one other partner who cashed out early for $800 (big mistake) working in a dingy garage making the first Apple Computer all of a sudden becomes a ‘big bad corporation’ with hundreds of thousands of workers directly employed and indirectly employed through supply chains and distribution channels.

Is it at 10 employees? 25? 100? 1000? 10,000?

At what point precisely does that small company with 3 people whom no one would dispute having the right to participate in the political process make the metaphysical leap to being a ‘corporation’ that some people want to preclude from participating in the political process?

It seems as if through basic logical deduction that the people who had those political rights as a small company should be able to retain those same rights if they are so fortunate as to have a great business success as Apple has achieved.

Insights Gleaned from Ms. Conger’s Initial Post

The thing I think was the most impactful from the initial post of Ms. Conger was the concept of pulling in the Christian concept of ‘loving your neighbor’ as a tool for effective politics.

I am not sure that I have ever heard anyone over the past 38 years of being in and out of and around politics and government make that specific connection. Politics is often seen as a ‘I win/you lose’ game and occasionally a ‘win-win-win’ proposition but seldom as a ‘love thy neighbor’ mission.

Aristotle said that the purpose of politics was to help make each person virtuous and that any piece of legislation should have that as its main purpose and goal. Anything short of the goal which fails to make everyone ‘virtuous’ should be rejected by the legislative body in question says he.

American history is rife with examples of religiously-led and inspired people who have entered the public square and achieved great things for their ‘fellow neighbor’ whom they probably have never met in many cases but have loved nonetheless.

The Transcendentals prior to the Civil War brought their righteous sense of the injustice of slavery to bear through political activism but also through literature such as ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ and in the newspapers across the North.

Southern African-American civil rights leaders formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference behind the brave actions and words of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King in the 60s to force the issue of granting justice and equality for millions of black citizens across the nation which went far beyond the needed changes in the South.

Men and women of faith have always been at the forefront of some of the greatest advancements to civilized society since the time of Christ 2000 years ago. They were not looking for political advantage or success to begin with; they were seeking to put their Christian faith into productive action and follow the precepts of Christ who told his disciples to ‘feed His Sheep’ and ‘take care of the widow and orphans’ among us.

Many millions of Americans here in this country and perhaps billions worldwide are disenfranchised in some way, shape or form be it in terms of hunger, lack of resources or education or not being able to live in a decent form of housing or have access to adequate health services anywhere nearby.

Christians should ‘love their neighbor’ as themselves and try to help those who are not as fortunate as we are.

That can and should include forming political action committees for the poor, the homeless, the destitute and the disadvantaged. Or by being involved in social media; in the entertainment or sports world or perhaps even by running for office.

‘Loving thy neighbor’ in the political sense would be as radical and disruptive as any political campaign in American history.

However, there is almost no case I can think of where this can not be better achieved by Christian men and women of deep convicted faith acting out their faith in a productive manner instead of trying to place artificial restrictions on the rights and freedoms of others in the political marketplace by trying to find the ‘perfect’ piece of legislation such as ‘Citizens United Part 2’ designed to reverse the decision of the Supreme Court in Citizens United Part 1.

The democratization of the political world has tracked the deconstruction of virtually every other field since the introduction of the personal computer that has radically changed the landscapes of journalism, industry, marketing and other industries where individuals now rule the roost instead of big concentrations of power as in the Robber Baron days of old.

Individuals now hold the power in the political marketplace, not the political parties. With the advent of Citizens United, the amount of political power that has flowed out away from the Democratic and Republican National Committees in Washington has been enormous. Close to 70% of all the consulting and polling work during any campaign seasons is now done for 527s or 501c4s and other political organizations for better or for worse.

But that same political power is available to men and women of Christian faith if they choose to use it. It takes a lot of work, time, energy, effort and expertise to use it correctly to achieve the end results they would like to see on any particular issue.

It is far too easy to sit on the sidelines and complain about politics and point fingers from afar at big corporations and wealthy individuals for spending their money on political speech.

It is an entirely different thing to make the conscious decision to organize thousands of people for a common purpose to effect change in the public square.

That is what the committed Christian can and should do in our modern American democratic republic.

Matthew 10:16 says it perfectly for Christians entering the rough-and-tumble of the political world: “I am sending you out like sheep among wolves. Therefore be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves”

We live in what is essentially a secular civil government where freedom, liberty and justice are enshrined in our core document of governance, the US Constitution.

Christians have to learn how to play by the rules of the game as they exist today, not as they wish they would be if all they had to do was wave a magic wand and transform the United States into the ‘City on The Hill’ overnight.

In golf, it is called the ‘rub of the green’. You play by the rules of the game and take the lie where your ball is as it is as bad as it might seem at the time.

People may think there is too much money or too much power for certain individuals or companies in politics today to make too much of a difference if they got involved and tried to change things.

Christians have so many examples to choose from the Old and New Testament to use as inspiration for such big dreams and efforts. David would use the stones of Citizens United to topple Goliath if they ran against each other today in a political campaign, not try to get the Philistines to nominate another smaller foe without any armor on.

Any willing faith-walker is welcome to try.

Concern over the role of special interests in the American democratic system are as old as the Republic.  My colleagues who discussed party politics in an earlier conversation topic have already cited James Madison’s concerns about the problems of factions in Federalist 10.  Many of the bad implications of factions cited by Madison are as evident in the politics of interests – special or otherwise – as they are in political parties in the United States.  The core of the problem has largely remained intact since Madison’s day.  It is still difficult to balance the need to pursue one’s own interest without creating permanent monopolies.  It is the scope and depth of the problem has increased dramatically and my overall assessment is that the impact of money and special interests on American politics is wide-ranging and pernicious.

My main concern is not, however, with the potential for political corruption that exists in the pursuit of donors and supporters.  While this corruption happens, and people are currently in jail for trading votes and other decisions for money or favors, this is only the most visible challenge presented by the role of money and special interests in our system.  And I believe literal corruption is actually a relatively minor threat to our democratic system.

Political Equality

My primary concern is about something more subtle and wide-ranging. One of the foundational commitments of democratic systems is political equality.  This is the idea that within the political system, each person has an equal stake, made practical in terms of voicing one’s opinions, voting, and access to governmental authority.  It is the foundation of popular sovereignty; the basic premise of authority and rule within democratic systems.  If citizens are not largely equal in their ability to help rule themselves, then tyranny is a likely outcome, whether in the form of a king, an aristocracy, or simply a long-term concentration of power in just a few individuals or groups.  The institutions of our political and governmental system are largely designed with this requirement in mind.  Majority rules in the legislative branch while minority rights are protected through civil liberties and the courts.  A citizen’s issue position may not win the day, but the system protects the right to come back and try again tomorrow.  Majority voices cannot rule minority voices out of being.  This fundamental principle is embedded in the pervasive checks and balances and separation of powers in our system.  One of the reasons it is so hard to create change of policy or institutions is that our political system is designed to be slow and deliberative, and to ensure the equal participation of citizens and their representatives.

In the United States, our vision of what political equality means, or more specifically who it pertains to, has expanded over the life of the Republic.  The Civil War Amendments (13th, 14th & 15th), expand both the definition of who deserves political equality and the responsibilities of governmental institutions in extending equal protection of the law to all citizens.  The 19^th amendment extends to rights of equal citizenship and political equality to women and the laws passed in the Civil Rights era again expanded government’s responsibility to protect that equality.  Political equality is so important that Americans are constantly re-evaluating the principal and how well the political culture enables it.

 One of the key Supreme court decisions that gave context to the abstract idea of political equality was Baker vs. Carr in 1964.  It is from this decision that we get the idea of “one person, one vote.” Several states had not redistricted since the 1920s.  This meant that there were some congressional districts with than 400,000 people and others in the same state with over 1 million people. The court ruled that states must redistrict after every census because in not doing so, those voters in less populated districts had a vote that meant more than a person in a more populated district.  This is a clear violation of political equality and its remedy was an important step in making that equality more concrete.

Why is it important for the populations of congressional districts to be roughly equal?  And how does that principle inform our evaluation of the role of special interests and money in politics?  Because each citizen should have equal access to representation in the Congress.  No one person should have more impact on their member of Congress than any other person.  Now, any observant person will point out that there are many ways for a citizen to increase their representation.  A citizen can call or write their member of congress or can campaign for them when they run for re-election.  This activity will increase their impact on the representative’s thinking and decision-making. 

But the activities and strategies used by interest groups and lobbyists go far beyond these traditional forms of political participation.  They focus on the two types of currency most important for a decision-maker to stay in office, money and information.  In fact, while political scientists have not been able to establish a link between donating money to a campaign and specific policy choices of elected officials, there is a significant amount of evidence that campaign money buys access: a member’s time and attention.  So, the information, the opinions, and the policy preferences of these interests gets much more airtime on the decision-maker’s schedule than the needs of others in their constituencies. This cannot help but impact the decision of the officials and their staff. 

Representation Multipliers

So what this tells us is that it is not just money that is the issue, but all the factors that can help an individual, group, or business gain a bigger share of representation through dominating the attention of a decision-maker.  I call all of these things representational multipliers.  While many special interests also provide money to campaigns in some way, in many cases their primary multiplier is in the network of information they can provide to a decision-maker.  This is why the most successful lobbyists are those who have served in the positions of the people they later lobby.  These lobbyists better understand not only what information is relevant and persuasive, but can use their existing networks to provide information on other important player’s preferences.  For example, a former member of Congress that becomes an important lobbyist is successful not simply because they can steer campaign donations to a sitting member of Congress, but also because they understand the constraints a member of congress operates under and can advise the member about their options and the perspectives of others in their networks.  Money seems to be important to get a decision-makers attention, but keeping their attention requires a long term beneficial relationship based on other representational multipliers.

Representational Multipliers are not necessarily problematic on their own.  Decision-makers are finite beings who genuinely need expert help to manage all the disparate information required to make good decisions on policies.  Members of Congress cannot be experts in all the areas about which they are asked to make decisions. And it is perfectly rational for most people to spend little time thinking about politics as they carry out the other important tasks and roles they have as humans.  So we can expect that there will always be some disconnect between a representative and their constituents.  The concern I have is when these disconnects threaten fundamental political equality.

Political equality is threatened when citizens who desire to make their voice heard in government cannot because they have been crowded out by organizations and businesses whose resources so dwarf the average voter as to make them invisible. Having resources that allow you to catch decision-makers attention is not necessarily bad; using those resources to make sure that no one else gets heard is.

Citizens United, Speech Now, and Political Inequalities

These challenges to political equality are my primary concern with court decisions like Citizens United and its companion federal appeals court case Speech Now.  These cases set the groundwork for SuperPACs (a misnomer because of their exclusive function in independent rather than campaign expenditures).  They allow for an enormous amount of money to enter the political system, with very few safeguards on the impact or focus of their attempts to influence.  Perhaps more concerning is these cases’ precedent building treatment of both money and of business activity in elections.  While the court has historically ruled that money is equivalent to speech in terms of people’s ability to use it to make political statements, there are serious questions raised when money given to others to spend is treated in the same way.  Further, by expanding the idea of the corporate “person” to include civil liberties and free speech rights, it alters the playing field of political equality, giving collective actors rights beyond the individuals who make them up.  This is particularly problematic in the context of the need for political equality. The notion that a corporation, with resources far beyond the means of any individual, should be treated on the same level as an individual citizen goes against the core constitutional principal that gave citizens, not institutions or groups, the right to vote and choose representatives.  Even the original method of selecting Senators through each state’s legislature was abolished in the early 20^th century in favor of popular voting for the office, removing one of the few representations of corporate actors, in this case the states, in our national political system.

So, what should our response be?  This is a long standing problem of incredible complexity.  Reversing the Citizen’s United decision, imposing more wide-ranging campaign finance legislation for both disclosure and spending limits, and creating more explicit conflict of interest laws are a good place to start.  These are concrete ways to limit the resource multipliers available to only a select group of people and organizations.  But people with resources will always seek a new way to use them to their advantage.

And it is not necessarily problematic to pursue one’s interest in democratic politics.  But there is an important tension at the heart of the democratic project, the interaction between individual citizens’ freedom and the necessity of citizens’ equality before the law and in political terms. Many of the deepest disagreements in our political system spring from the place where freedom and equality meet.  How much liberty are we willing to give up to ensure equality and how unequal are we willing to be in order to protect individual liberty? Americans generally recognize that, practically speaking, some individual liberty must be curtailed for the benefit of the whole, and that overall people are not equal in their capacities and resources. But there are contexts where this conflict comes into high relief, where providing for one expressly limits the other. This suggests that our solution should likely be one of balance, not of control.  A wise man once said that “money always finds a way.”  But popular sovereignty is not just rich people arguing with one another.

The other wicked challenge for political equality is the power of the status quo.  Our constitution purposely sets up a system that changes slowly.  Policy change is hard to come by and has to be agreed to by large proportions of decision makers.  This kind of change is especially hard when the policies affect very few people who already hold much of the power.  People and organizations who hold power behind the scenes based on their access to representational multipliers are not going to give up those advantages without a fight.  Overall, the predicament is complex and wide-ranging and the challenge of special interests in a democracy has plagued us from the beginning.  I do not hold out much hope for lobbying reform, let alone a comprehensive campaign finance solution.

Politics is a tool for loving our neighbors

So, how should a Christian respond inside a system that is not only broken, but seems unlikely to change? I think the most important thing we can do is to remember what politics is for.  It is a tool we can use to love our neighbor.  In this case, I think loving our neighbor combines both using our own representational multipliers in the service of people who do not have any and working to increase the resources of time, networks, education, and money available to those without these multipliers.  Political equality can be had by suppressing the excesses at the top of the ladder, but it can be achieved more holistically by helping to bring those with few resources up to a level playing field. This strategy requires an enormous amount of humility on our parts; we have to use our resources to let others’ voices be heard, not to convince them to echo our own preferences.  There is a great temptation to see our own political work as helping the least without actually taking the time to find out what it is these citizens need and want.  But approaching helping our neighbors in terms of political equality, and finding ways in which we can increase its practice, can help remind us that our neighbors are not simply instruments in helping us to create a good society; their participation on equal terms is what pushes toward a good society.

One challenge here is the pervasiveness of rights in our political thinking and rhetoric.  It is difficult for any American, I think, to sacrifice our individual freedoms for the sake of others’ freedom. It runs counter to not only our socialization but also our individual experience in an individualistic system.  Recall, however, Paul’s instructions on how to use our “rights.”  We are not to use our rights and freedoms as followers of Jesus to cause problems or destroy the consciences of other believers.  Namely, we are to love them by giving up our rights so they can enjoy the same freedom in Christ that we do.  I find that to be a powerful model of how Christians might use their own individual political rights in a democratic system.  We are not responsible for others freedom, but we are responsible for our own actions in promoting and protecting that freedom.  That sounds like a pretty good basis for creating pervasive political equality.

It is also important to recognize that this response is more than just an individual change.  Too many times, calls to religiously motivated political activity focus only on individual rather than systemic change.  Particularly in the context of reform within a democracy, it makes sense to look both at the individual and at how an individual can impact the larger system. There is plenty of historical evidence that suggests that this kind of engagement with our neighbors and those who are less politically equal is a way to create sustained systemic change.  Social movements across the political spectrum, most committed to expanding political rights and liberties of an under-resourced group, have been the great engine of increased political equality.  Abolitionists, women’s suffragists, and African-American civil rights activists all successfully broadened our definition of who deserves political equality in our system and what it should look like.  In many cases, these were people with representation multipliers of time, energy, networks, civic skills, and money, who chose to use those resources in the service of their under-represented neighbors, not for their own enrichment.  We have a similar opportunity to use our representation multipliers in service to building a more just political community.