For most people, I think, the unremitting news about how the richest 0.01 percent own American politics is like a doctor who tells you you have a terrible disease — and when you ask what the treatment is, says I have absolutely no idea.
Then the doctor starts calling you up first thing every morning at 8 a.m. to say I just want to remind you that you have a terrible disease. Around the 10th call you stop answering the phone, no matter how awful you feel.
That’s especially so ever since the Supreme Court declared even the flimsy restrictions on money in politics put in place since the 1970s to be unconstitutional. If our only hope is to amend the Constitution — which requires first a two-thirds vote in both the House and Senate and then approval from three-fourths of the 50 state legislatures — then it feels like we’re doomed.
But what if there were a way to approach this hellish problem from the opposite direction? If we’re forbidden by the Supreme Court from limiting money coming from the 0.01 percent, what about amplifying money from the bottom 99.99 percent?
That’s the basis for the Government by the People Act, introduced last year by Rep. John Sarbanes, a Democrat from Maryland’s 3rd District. (If the name sounds familiar, that’s probably because his father, Paul, was a five-term senator from Maryland.)
Sarbanes has quietly garnered 160 co-sponsors for the bill and support from House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, and a companion bill in the Senate introduced by Dick Durbin (D–Ill.) has 19 co-sponsors.
The bill has three main parts:
- Everyone gets $25 to donate to candidates
All voters receive $25 per year to give to political campaigns, provided in the form of a refundable tax credit equal to half of donations up to $50. (For instance, if you donate $30 to a candidate, you get $15 of that back; to get the full $25 you have to donate $50.)
- 6 to 1 matching funds (at least) for small donors
Donations up to $150 to qualifying House and Senate candidates are matched 6 to 1 with public money. In other words, if your next door neighbor is running for Congress and you give her $50, she’ll get another $300, making $350 total.
And donations are matched 9 to 1 for candidates who completely renounce big money and take only donations of $150 or less. So if your neighbor is willing to do that, your $50 donation would turn into $500 total for her. (Moreover, if you use your $25 tax credit, that $500 she received would only cost you $25 total.)
- Help for candidates facing an onslaught of SuperPAC money, dark money, etc.
Candidates would be eligible for enhanced matching funds in the last 60 days before an election, with incentives so they would only access the funds if it’s a particularly high-cost race.
• • •
I recently spoke with Rep. Sarbanes in depth about the Government by the People Act. In the first part of the interview he explains the rationale for his bill, how it would change politicians’ behavior and how similar systems are already having an impact on a state and local level. In part two Sarbanes describes how he markets this idea, why it could not just change campaign financing but plausibly diminish the impact of big-money lobbying, and how it would keep incumbents like himself on their toes.
(This post is from our blog: Unofficial Sources.)
Photo: Timothy Jacobsen/AP
Why don’t we work to get “MANDATORY Public Funding of all Federal Elections” in our Constitution followed by laws passed in Congress to identify by name and amount money spent by outsiders in favor of a candidate within 12 hours of money spent – if not, the person will be fined the exact amount spent.
Money isn’t the main problem. Blackmail is the problem. Whether it’s called Oppo Research or plain old Extortion, no candidate can reach a major office without being completely controlled. Given that as the starting point, flows of money aren’t going to make a major difference. I suppose money could lead a politician to favor one corporate monopoly over another, but money will NOT lead a politician to repeal a bad law or delete a bad agency. Those decisions are literally unthinkable. They do not happen.
Would love to see this tried compared to just leaving things to the status quo – which is getting rapidly worse. That said, it would be a threat to the status quo (lobbyists and representatives) with the associated consequences for getting it passed.
The point of all this money is to Track/Spy/Advertise and let’s be honest–advertise means manipulate.
Instead of coming up with a system that not only relies on tracking/spying/advertising, but supports the system itself–why not just teach people about adblock, and how to avoid tracking/spying/advertising?
This idea really makes no sense unless you are going to try and maximize tracking/spying/advertising effects over the population. Why spend all this money if everyone is using adblock, right?
The less tracking/spying/advertising works, the stupider this idea becomes, so it would seem proponents of this idea are not very keen on teaching people how to avoid, mitigate and minimize tracking/spying/advertising.
I guess all this depends on whether the goal is to free the people, or dream of enough money to rent the microphone and make them dance.
I don’t know. Allowing politicians to decide these matters for themselves is kind of like letting the Heritage Foundation write legislation for senators and representatives. Pretty iffy at the least.
For reasons that have been exhaustively discussed in the previous “gee-whiz!” articles in which Schwartz has been promoting this idea as some kind-of paradigm shifter, this wouldn’t work. First of which is that, if we accept that concentrated and coordinated spending influences votes, why would we not accept that concentrated and coordinated spending influences donations? If $5 million from XYZ interest group can influence the votes of 5 million Americans, could it not also influence the direction of giving of the disparate $200 “allowances” of the same 5 million Americans? Of course it would; this is agenda-setting theory 101.
When I brought this up in one of Schwartz’s previous articles on this subject, his rebuttal was to start firing-off quotes by John Adams (seriously).
la la la la – nothing to see here
very interesting.
look forward to the interview!
How does this not just create inflation in campaign spending?
because something something “amplifying” something something [insert link to author’s personal website] something something [insert inspirational quote]
I like this idea. Politicians don’t want to shrink their war chests, the average person doesn’t have the money to compete with mega donors. If people were actually pro-active with donating to candidates, this could work.
There are too many asumptions made in this bill to garner any praise or hope. The main one is how can this bill have any chance of being passed, through both houses, when it has such potential for disruption of the status quo, presently dominated by corporate money? Another has been posed by other comments, where do the matching funds come from? It becoms a regessive tax on the 99.9%. Wishful thinking! It’s mildly heartening to learn there are some people who stll believe our politically corrupt system is salvageable, but how many generations must be sacrificed on the altar of corporate capitalism before we admit to its failure? Every few years we have a recession or depression, bringing ruination on millions of people’s lives, and we put band-aids on the system and cower in fear of the next one. This is lunacy incarnate. For those who might ask “Do you have a better plan?”, the anwer’s no. If the crash of 2008 where hundreds of billions of dollars were showered on the very entities who caused the crash wasn’t enough to wake up the masses, maybe the next one will. I’m an old fart who’s witnessed countless recessions so forgive the following adage please. You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.
“You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.”
As I said below, I believe in “expanding the floor of the cage”: http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/199704–.htm
Sorry, Jon, but article is missing in link. I will look for it by searching article #.
Found the article. Even Chomsky infers that the US’s social discourse is structured in a way to make “expanding the floor of the cage” very difficult at best. We have been indoctrinated to accept our cage as it is and then backed that up with layers of laws to keep things as they are. He also laid out how the situation in East Asia is different than here partly because they control their wealthy, thus keeping the inequalities to a more acceptable level. With TPP on the verge of being shoved down their throats and ours, I can’t see how expanding the floor will have much effect, other than to have more superfluous people in a much larger cage. The cage has to go, not in some fantasy generational struggle that my great-great grandchildren might, just maybe, possibly, good chance of, live to enjoy, but soon, before we devastate the planet any further. I appreciate your reply and your optimism. Being the old obstreperous fart I can be at times has left me with no desire to dance to their tune anymore. Been to too many dances. We outnumber them to the nth degree yet we allow the very few to hold enormous sway over our lives. Hell, we even pay ’em to do it. The sow’s ear comment stands.
Jon, thank you for bringing attention to ” Government by the People Act”. So much activity ( or NONE ) goes on in the congress with all kinds of amendments sneaked into important bills, it is impossible to know what our elected officials are really up to. I did not know about this particular bill.
Looking forward to your interview with Rep Sarbanes……
*thumbs up*
Has this guy stopped to consider that big money makes its way to politicians for a reason? That is to buy influence. Money will find a way to the politicians as long as influence is up for sale.
All this will do is allow billionaires to set up front organizations which will donate $150 to a candidate 100,000 times. Worse yet, the public matching nonsense will mean that it will cost the billionaire only $1.25 million, and the taxpayer up to $13.5 million.
The public matching makes this a really terrible idea – it essentially pretends to conjure money from nowhere, but in reality it’s just another tax.
“All this will do is allow billionaires to set up front organizations which will donate $150 to a candidate 100,000 times.”
What exactly do you mean by this? That billionaires will set up 99,999 fake identities?
“Or, we could, I don’t know, round up all of the billionaires and have them drawn and quartered on Pay Per View TV.”
More likely, all the critics of the billionaires before a crack squad of military hero snipers, as the bosses exhort amplified over the TV Colosseum, sound system, ‘You’re Fired!'”
The licensing and endorsement deals would be so astronomical as to rewrite all the books on free market Capitalism. Everybody wins.
“More likely, all the critics of the billionaires before a crack squad of military hero snipers, as the bosses exhort amplified over the TV Colosseum, sound system, ‘You’re Fired!’””
Yes, we’re headed much more in that direction. Plus even if we could kill the boss it’s irrelevant if we don’t kill the boss without ourselves:
http://www.tinyrevolution.com/mt/archives/003385.html
Good link, which, by the way gives credence to my sow’s ear comment. The system needs change. WE have a minimum wage(such as it is), how ’bout a maximum wage? My God, how much money should one person be allowed to suck out of the rest of us? We go way beyond allowing that to happen, we celebrate it.
So many journalists and commutators seem to think that the existing political/economic/legal system is some how not really so bad that it can’t be fixed with some laws using the corrupted legal system. Very sad.
FDR is a great example, what he did had only marginal success and marginal help for the under classes, FDR was the original Merkel kick the can politician, throw on some band aids and move on. Because FDR left the great fortunes in tact they simply went about bribing their way back to where they were and now have captured far more wealth than before FDR. This process only tood about 50-60 years the blink of an eye. Until the great fortunes are dismantled nothing will change very much or for very long.
“Until the great fortunes are dismantled nothing will change very much or for very long.”
I believe in “expanding the floor of the cage”: http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/199704–.htm
Or, we could, I don’t know, round up all of the billionaires and have them drawn and quartered on Pay Per View TV.
I’ve considered this solution and am skeptical though not yet ready to reject it outright:
http://www.tinyrevolution.com/mt/archives/003385.html
Why wouldn’t this Campaign Finance law blow up over the same money-is-speech First Amendment objection the Supreme Court used to bring down McCain/Feingold? To favor some donors over others with government support seems unequal. Still, it’s the best thing I’ve heard since totally public-funded elections, including jail terms for Bribery for anybody who skirts the rules.
“Why wouldn’t this Campaign Finance law blow up over the same money-is-speech First Amendment objection the Supreme Court used to bring down McCain/Feingold?”
The Supreme Court decisions have said that it’s unconstitutional to limit “speech” (ie, money) to certain amounts. But it hasn’t said anything about amplifying smaller amounts of “speech.” And to the degree I understand this issue, it appears almost everyone agrees this would be constitutional.
That’s not to say it wouldn’t eventually be challenged — it almost certainly would be, given how much it would threaten powerful interests. But it would probably be much harder for them to make the case.
I think a lot of us could take your voluminous articles on this topic more seriously if they presented even a modicum of journalistic skepticism on the subject, which might be evidenced by not using marketing catchphrases like “amplifying.” Your replies in this thread read like they’re being lifted off the Q&A produced by whatever PR/PA firm is working on this bill.
I would be surprised if this scheme survived a Scotus challenge. When money is speech, and a candidate can receive $475 in taxpayer money for a $25 donation, then the $475 are essentially compelled speech by those taxpayers who had to contribute to the fund but DON’T support that candidate. There might be a way around that, if taxpayers can elect to not contribute to this fund (similar to how you can today elect to have $3 of your federal income taxes to either go to the Presidential campaign fund, or into the general fund). However, that may leave the system underfunded.
I like the idea, and I like that some politicians are getting creative about solving the problem, but this may not be the silver bullet.