Dollarocracy (48 page)

Thomas Jefferson, writing not from some higher theoretic plain but in response to the news of an armed insurrection against economic injustice led by Daniel Shays, counseled that Americans should welcome the tension that ushers in fundamental change.
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Addressing James Madison from Paris in 1787, the principal author of the Declaration of Independence explained that “a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.”
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A few months later, in a note to William Stephens Smith, Jefferson extended this point, arguing, “God forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion. . . . If [the people] remain quiet under such misconceptions it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty.”
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This talk of “storms” and “rebellions” reflects the reality that reform moments are times of upheaval. But it is a necessary upheaval, a crisis point where the failed policies of the past must give way to a new order, either through a peaceful process of political transformation (e.g. gay rights) or, if reforms are deferred too long, through more turbulent routes of civil conflict.

After the long campaign of 2012 finished with the long lines of Election Day—demanding six, seven, eight, even nine hours from the lives of those seeking a moment at the polling place—Barack Obama claimed his second term with an offhand reference to the most easily observed evidence of our democracy's dysfunction. Said the president, “I want to thank every American who participated in this election, whether you voted for the very first time or waited in line for a very long time.”

Obama paused. “By the way, we have to fix that.”
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We do have to fix that. And just about everything else. One reform won't do it. The time has come for all the reforms. This is why it is wise to seek not a particular “fix” but rather a reform moment—every bit as bold, every bit as expansive as the Progressive Era, the New Deal era, the Great Society, and the upheavals of the 1960s.

The Progressives of a century ago launched their movements with the promise of “a genuine and permanent moral awakening, without which no wisdom of legislation or administration really means anything.”
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We the people of
this century should aspire to nothing less. No small measures. No half steps. Not mere reform. But a new age of reform.

The American people recognize that their country's political system is in deep disrepair. A February 2010 CNN survey found that 86 percent of Americans said the system of government was broken.
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By January 2013 Gallup found that frustration with “government dysfunction” had—by a wide margin—displaced concerns about unemployment and taxes at the top of the list of what troubles Americans.
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Presidential candidates, members of the Senate and House, interest-group leaders, activists, and grassroots citizens we interviewed in preparing this book all came to the same conclusion. But frustration in and of itself does not make a reform moment. There has to be some sign that the people are prepared not just to be angry but also to believe that their anger can and should be addressed. Our read of the survey research says that the faith is there. In the same CNN poll that found 86 percent acceptance of the notion that America's system of government is broken, there was another dramatic number. Of the disappointed 86 percent, fully 81 percent expressed faith that it could be fixed. Only 5 percent said the American experiment was “beyond repair.”
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We are with the majority on this one. But ours is not an optimism of the will. Rather, it is grounded in the cold hard facts of what is happening. As in previous reform moments in American history, the current crisis has caused patterns of upheaval—from Tea Party protests on the right (often managed by corporate interests but still sufficiently substantial and sincere enough to merit attention) to the much larger prolabor and antiausterity protests that swept state capitals from Madison, Wisconsin, to Columbus, Ohio, to Lansing, Michigan, in 2011 and 2012, and that paralleled the rise of the Occupy Wall Street movement.
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The upheaval is broad based and volatile, and there is clear evidence to suggest that mounting frustration has inspired a determination to cure what ails the politics of America.

With regard to elections, the days of imagining that it is possible to tinker around the edges of America's historically dysfunctional system for funding campaigns with private dollars are over. There is no small reform, no “bright
idea,” no quick fix that will begin to control against what former U.S. senator Russ Feingold identified as “legalized bribery.”
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And that's made even winners under the current system, led by President Obama, recognize that it must change. And to make that change, proposals once dismissed as too idealist, too bold, or too radical will have to be entertained. Obama has responded to the Supreme Court's 2010 obliteration of limits on corporate interventions in elections with an aggressiveness that may on the surface seem uncharacteristic: After calling out the Court in a State of the Union address in 2010, he acknowledged in 2012, “I think we need to seriously consider mobilizing a constitutional amendment process to overturn
Citizens United
(assuming the Supreme Court doesn't revisit it). Even if the amendment process falls short, it can shine a spotlight of the super-PAC phenomenon and help apply pressure for change.”
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Obama's evolution toward an embrace of the constitutional remedy that was once considered extreme mirrors a dawning recognition that the work of campaign-finance reformers in America is no longer just about the simple “good-government” project of old. Now it's about building a movement that goes to the heart of the matter of corporate control of elections and governance. That's a significant transformation. And a popular one. In 2010 after the
Citizens United
ruling came down, veteran reformer John Bonifaz cofounded the Free Speech for People movement for a twenty-eighth amendment to the Constitution to address the ruling. “At the time, there were plenty of skeptics who thought an amendment movement would not have any staying power, could not be built and that people around the country would not get engaged with pushing for what is an ambitious goal,” he admitted. “But I think what we've found over the past three years is those skeptics have been quieted.”
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Campaign-finance reform movements have been around for more than a century in varying forms. They have always had popular support, and America has come close at various points over the past half century to implementing broad public financing of campaigns and replacing the slurry of thirty-second attack ads with the fair, equal, and substantially more responsible “free-airtime” models employed in most developed democracies. But never before
have campaign-finance reformers produced the level of specific and sustained popular engagement that is now on display.

According to Free Speech for People, “America is now one quarter of the way to amending the Constitution to overturn
Citizens United
.”
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That's a generous interpretation—as befits movement building—but it points to the popularity of the effort. Three-quarters of the states must approve an amendment before it can be attached to the Constitution; that's thirty-eight states. By the end of 2012, eleven states had moved in the legislature or at the polls to call for an amendment, and the District of Columbia joined the list early in 2013. On November 6, 2012, Colorado (an Obama state) and Montana (a Romney state) both voted by roughly 75–25 margins for proposals urging their congressional delegations to propose and support an amendment to allow Congress and the states to limit campaign contributions and spending.

On the same day, more than 150 communities across the country weighed voter-initiated questions on the issue. Every single referendum won, and won big. We can find no other issue in our nation's history that has had such an outpouring of support, without a single defeat or even any credible popular opposition, in so many initiatives.

In San Francisco 80 percent of the voters backed a Common Cause–endorsed proposal to overturn
Citizens United
. But so, too, did 65 percent of the voters in conservative Pueblo, Colorado. Despite editorial opposition to the resolution by the local newspaper, voters told their congressional representatives not just to back an amendment that declares, “Money is not speech and, therefore, limiting political contributions and spending is not equivalent to limiting political speech,” but also to recognize that “the inherent rights of mankind recognized under the United States Constitution belong to natural human beings only, and not to legally created entities, such as corporations.”
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“In each community where Americans have had the opportunity to call for a constitutional amendment to outlaw corporate personhood, they have seized it and voted yes overwhelmingly,” noted Move to Amend activist Kaitlin Sopoci-Belknap. “Americans are fed up with large corporations wielding undue influence over our elections and our legal system.
Citizens United
is not the cause, it is a symptom and Americans want to see that case overturned not by simply going back to the politics of 2009 before the case, but rather by removing big money and special interests from the process entirely.”
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The grassroots movement for constitutional change that has developed since the Supreme Court's
Citizens United
ruling is real, and it crosses partisan, ideological, and regional lines “This is happening because the people want it to happen,” said Marge Baker of People for the American Way, one of a number of reform groups that backed “Money Out–Voters In” actions nationwide, held on or around the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday to launch a 2013 round of local and state initiatives. The movement has not yet reached critical mass, but the growing number of states backing an amendment of some sort—many different proposals have been advanced by groups and by elected leaders such as Senator Bernie Sanders (Vermont) and Congresswoman Donna Edwards (Maryland)—is highly significant from both a practical and a political standpoint.

Public Citizen president Robert Weissman, a veteran of many social change movements and an organizer of the ambitious “Democracy Is for People” campaign, explained to us early in 2013 that if the number of states backing an amendment via legislative action or voter initiative doubles in 2013 and 2014—as Weissman argued is entirely possible—then prospects for meaningful reforms that do not require constitutional interventions increase.
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That's the vital point Obama was getting at when he said, “Even if the amendment process falls short, it can shine a spotlight of the super-PAC phenomenon and help apply pressure for change.” Demands for a constitutional response—not “just band-aids,” said Sopoci-Belknap, but “a true and lasting solution”—make space for officials to act at the local, state, and national levels to address immediate challenges. And a growing number of elected leaders and grassroots activists are recognizing that what is needed is a reform moment in which every option is taken, every avenue explored.
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This is an important piece of the puzzle. Everyone knows constitutional amendments face daunting barriers: in a time of deep partisan and ideological divisions, it's hard to imagine getting the U.S. House and Senate to approve anything by a two-thirds' supermajority, let alone getting three-quarters of the states to embrace the change. But if we have learned anything from conservative movements for a “balanced-budget amendment” or a “right-to-life amendment,” or from progressive campaigning on behalf of an “equal rights amendment,” it is that the organizing that goes into amending the Constitution gives impetus to presidents, regulators, and legislators to act. “If we are to
build a movement big enough to win a constitutional amendment, we are going to need near-term democracy victories that make a difference in people's lives to sustain and expand that movement,” said Nick Nyhart, an experienced reform activist who serves as president of Public Campaign.
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The role of a powerful executive, a president with a vision and a will to carry it forward, could be definitional. The question is whether the executive is willing to spend political capital. Public Citizen campaigned in 2011 and 2012 to get President Obama to sign an executive order requiring government contractors to reveal political spending. The administration reportedly drafted an order that would have gone a long way toward revealing otherwise unreported “dark money” contributions by corporations. But by the estimates of DC observers, the initiative was “all but abandoned” by Obama and his aides during a 2012 campaign season that saw the president and his supporters raise and spend $1.1 billion, as compared to $1.2 billion in spending by Republican Mitt Romney and his backers.
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Obama talks a good line. But, clearly, in his second term, he needs to feel more pressure to act, not just by issuing a long-delayed executive order but also by encouraging regulatory agencies such as the Federal Election Commission to use their authority to crack down on corporate campaign abuses.

There is also much that could be done in the near term to address the collapse of responsible media. Noting the 2012 Free Press study,
Left in the Dark: Local Election Coverage in the Age of Big-Money Politics
, which revealed how broadcast and cable outlets make a fortune from campaign commercials but rarely inform voters about who pays for them, former Federal Communications Commission member Michael Copps urged that the agency aggressively enforce Section 317 of the Federal Communications Act. That section requires on-air identification of the sponsors of political ads in a manner that will “fully and fairly disclose the true identity of the person or persons, or corporation, committee, association or other unincorporated group, or other entity.”
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