Dollarocracy (14 page)

                
And they have enough dough to keep betting until they eventually win. That's what it means to be a billionaire political investor: You're able to keep playing the odds until you get the golden ring.
¹¹⁸

Reich is essentially correct. We would quibble with him only on the question of whether there is a “golden ring” at the end of the calculus or something greater. Our sense is that what took shape in 2012, from the lowliest city council races to the lofty presidential competition, was not so much about grabbing for a precious jewel as it was about creating a monopoly politics where those who own the golden rings will never have to worry about losing them—in the way that a working family might lose a home—because questions about their dominant position will forever be settled.

Of course, this reshaping of the political process to a “heads I win, tails you lose” duopoly requires the same constant commitment that McDonald's brings to hamburger sales, that Starbucks brings to coffee peddling, that Wal-Mart brings to the unloading of cheap goods. No one in business questions
the wisdom of taking steps to corner the market. That's how to understand what we saw in 2012. It was not a transitory explosion of spending. It was a new model for how those who already possessed immense wealth and power will corner the market unless they are stopped by political challenges and then laws. They will do so by continually engaging in variations on what
Politico
described in an article on the 2012 electoral machinations of Charles and David Koch: an “ambitious expansion of the billionaire brothers' political operation that includes the recruitment of new donors and fundraisers into their network by a development team.”
¹¹⁹

This “ambitious expansion,” with its “recruitments” and its “development teams,” is not beginning. It is well under way. And it has as its goal not a thing but a definition.

If our politics is always about money, as it was in 2012, it will always default to a position—not an ideal but a rather lowly and easily manipulated position—that will make sense for Sheldon Adelson and David Koch. If all that is needed is a little more money, or a smarter investment strategy, then they have that. And they can adjust until our politics, our very governance, adjusts to them. This is, as Donald Trump explained it, the art of the deal.

That's what $10 billion bought in 2012: a politics that makes sense to the folks who have $10 billion and are willing to spend it to achieve their ends. We didn't get a Donald Trump as a president or even as a nominee. But we got a Mitt Romney. Money, not merit, bought the Republican presidential nomination in 2012. Republicans did not want Romney as their nominee; they were so desperate that they entertained the notion of nominating the likes of Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Santorum before finally accepting—thanks to the dramatic spending advantages of the Romney campaign and the pro-Romney Restore Our Future super-PAC—that this was not a free market of ideas or a meritocracy. This was a Dollarocracy.

Once Romney secured the nomination, Barack Obama's supporters used early financial advantages and skillful messaging to define their opponent as the doltish plutocrat that his own errors confirmed. And they closed the campaign with a final flurry of spending that equaled that of their foes. Yes, Romney and the Republicans spent a little more. But when both major candidates for president and their backers are mounting billion-dollar campaigns, the price of admission has been redefined. This is Dollarocracy.

When a veteran attorney general whose only “crime” is his determination to defend the rights of consumers is defeated by a challenger who got his license to practice law in the state four days before launching a campaign that flooded the airwaves with out-of-state money, this is Dollarocracy.

When the race for a city council is so “awash in money” that supposedly independent business interests are paying $20 a vote to secure a win that will allow them to take away the pensions of public employees, this is Dollarocracy.

When a billionaire can “invest” $2 million in the causes close to his heart and gain the “return” of diminished rights for workers and a discourse where the voice of organized labor is weakened, this is not democracy. This is Dollarocracy.

Political systems do not arrive fully formed. They take shape over time, defined by structural changes and interventions, pressured and influenced by powerful forces. America is not a complete Dollarocracy. But it is Dollarocracy in the making. Democracy did not fall in 2012; it held its own in some places against the withering assault of a $10 billion campaign. But the billionaires who paid for that campaign—to a far greater extent than our media revealed—have established their beachheads. And they are on the march.

Elections are not to turn on the difference in the amounts of money that candidates have to spend. This seems an acceptable purpose and the means chosen a common sense way to achieve it. The Court nevertheless holds that a candidate has a constitutional right to spend unlimited amounts of money, mostly that of other people, in order to be elected. The holding perhaps is not that federal candidates have the constitutional right to purchase their election, but many will so interpret the Court's conclusion in this case. I cannot join the Court in this respect.

JUSTICE BYRON WHITE, DISSENT FROM
THE SUPREME COURT'S
BUCKLEY V. VALEO
DECISION, 1976

I
n 1973, when the U.S. Senate voted to amend the Federal Election Campaign Act not only to address the obvious abuses of the Watergate moment but also to stall the slide toward Dollarocracy, the
New York Times
celebrated the establishment of “the first effective curbs in American political history on the influence of the rich in government.”
¹
A year later, over the veto of President Gerald Ford, the amended law was put into place. For a brief shining moment, it looked as if the United States might actually mark its bicentennial by finally realizing Thomas Jefferson's last hope for the republic: “that the mass of
mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.”
²

Unfortunately, the U.S. Supreme Court, as it has so frequently throughout its history, rode in, “booted and spurred,” to defend the Money Power. Before the bicentennial of 1976 and, more ominously, before the first presidential or congressional primary contest of that definitional political year, the court's landmark decision in the case of
Buckley v. Valeo
—which rejected federal limitations on campaign expenditures, on expenditures by a candidate from personal funds, and on independent expenditures by individuals and special-interest groups—began a dismantling of the law.
³
Over the next thirty-five years, at every critical turn, the Court would reverse and undermine effective curbs on the influence of the rich on the government of the United States.

How has money prevailed upon the electoral process? How has the United States ended up with what can only be described as a corrupt and corrupting election system? The answers to these questions are almost as depressing as the nature of the money-and-media election complex itself. The dramatic changes in the election system over the past forty years, which accelerated by 2012, did not result from the will of the people expressed through deliberation and debate by their elected representatives. Instead, the decisions were made by a sectlike group of highly partisan, unelected, and unaccountable judges. They declared bluntly and with relish that Americans do not have a constitutionally defined or protected right to vote. They routinely overthrew laws established by elected bodies to promote fair elections; in doing so, the Supreme Court singlehandedly rewrote election law in what is arguably the most overt, opportunistic, and brazen example of judicial activism in American history. We tell the story of democracy not just denied but assaulted in this chapter.

It is the nature of explorations of political patterns to look for recent developments to explain a bad turn; as such, much attention has been and will be paid to the Supreme Court's dramatic decision in the 2010 case of
Citizens United v. FEC
. To be sure, the
Citizens United
case is a big deal, and we focus on it. But an honest examination of the current crisis must run deeper, to the
late 1960s and early 1970s, when it seemed that a reform moment was at hand. And to the
Buckley v. Valeo
decision, which interrupted that moment. With its majority opinion gutting key elements of the Federal Election Campaign Act, the Supreme Court did not merely reject recently enacted limits on campaign contributions and expenditures. It asserted the fantasy that money is speech, declaring:

           
The Act's contribution and expenditure limits operate in an area of the most fundamental First Amendment activities. Discussion of public issues and debate on the qualifications of candidates are integral to the operation of the system of government established by our Constitution. The First Amendment affords the broadest possible protection to such political expression in order to assure unfettered exchange of ideas for the bringing about of political and social changes desired by the people.
⁴

Back in 1976, the Court offered a (soon-to-disappear) measure of deference to the view that First Amendment freedoms might be preserved in tandem with limits on individual contributions to political campaigns and candidates. After all, if the First Amendment could survive restriction against someone yelling “Fire” in a crowded theater, then it could survive with campaign rules and regulations that were broadly viewed as necessary to maintain the “integrity of our system of representative democracy.” But the Court's interpretation of that word “integrity” was excruciatingly narrow. The Court did not recognize that removing all limits on campaign spending by the wealthy tipped the balance so that future election results could be bought, rather than won in contests of ideologies and partisanships. Rather, the “integrity” on which the majority was focused consisted merely of preventing the unscrupulous practice of wealthy donors delivering contributions in suitcases full of cash—rather than in envelopes containing checks.
⁵

The Court was made up of veteran political players, such as William Rehnquist, an Arizona Republican Party operative who had served as a legal advisor and speechwriter for Barry Goldwater's 1964 Republican presidential campaign. Rehnquist's résumé included a controversial turn with the right-wing Operation Eagle Eye project, which set up “voter harassment teams” in the mid-1960s to challenge the citizenship, literacy, and ability of African American voters to interpret the U.S. Constitution. Rehnquist was a jurist who calculated not for the maintenance of representative democracy but for political advantage.
⁶

This was what his political benefactors in the Nixon administration intended when they vetted him politically before his appointment to the High Court.
⁷
In 1971, when Rehnquist was being considered as a replacement for Justice John Marshall Harlan II, Henry Kissinger, Nixon's national security advisor, raised the issue. “Rehnquist is pretty far right, isn't he?” asked Kissinger. White House chief of staff H. R. Haldeman, whose crude political gaming earned him the moniker “the president's son-of-a-bitch,” responded, “Oh, Christ! He's way to the right of Buchanan”—a reference to the most rigidly right-wing of Nixon's aides, Patrick J. Buchanan.
⁸

Jurists often evolve during their tenures. This was the case with Rehnquist, who over time would grow increasingly ill at ease with the extremism favored by the corporate elite. In 1976, however, the Nixon appointee was determined to halt the tide of reform that had swept his benefactor from office—and that seemed in the aftermath of the Democratic sweep of 1974 congressional elections to be shifting the United States dramatically to the left.
⁹

In the intense behind-the-scenes wrangling on the High Court over the
Buckley
case, Rehnquist argued with considerable success for the rejection of restrictions on “independent expenditures” on behalf of candidates and parties, of the limitation on expenditures by candidates from their own personal or family resources, and of the limitation on total campaign expenditures. The theory, pushed by Rehnquist, was that, even though individual contributions to candidates might foster corruption, free spending by the wealthy was protected speech. While others on the High Court were more cautious, Rehnquist threw down the money-is-speech gauntlet, arguing, “A restriction on the amount of money a person or group can spend on political communication during a campaign necessarily reduces the quantity of expression by restricting the number of issues discussed, the depth of their exploration, and the size of the audience reached.”
¹⁰

Even that was not enough for Chief Justice Warren Burger, who was so determined to overturn the entire campaign-finance reform enterprise that he dissented from the Court's decision, arguing that
any
limit on contributions—even those going directly to candidates—was at odds with the First Amendment.
¹¹
Burger's extreme view, later adopted by future justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, was mainstreamed in the years following the
Buckley v. Valeo
decision by Court rulings such as the 1978
First National Bank of
Boston v. Bellotti
decision. Ruling in a case that arose after Massachusetts attempted to limit corporate campaign contributions, the Court's 5–4 decision in
Bellotti
effectively extended the money-is-speech protection to corporations, declaring that campaign spending could not be limited “simply because its source is a corporation.”