This past January, in the wake of Texas Republican and former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay's resignation amid allegations of money-laundering as well as the recent Abramoff scandal, Republicans with an eye on mid-term elections touted the need for serious campaign and ethics reform.
Such efforts started, sputtered and shuddered to a near halt. Last week, they died in committee.
Throughout the reform debate last month, the biggest issues legislators on both sides of the aisle seemed willing to tackle were squabbles over whether to halt privately funded trips or impose tighter limits on lobbyist meals. As they quibbled over whether a ban on former government employees returning to Capitol Hill to lobby should be one or two years in length, more substantive reforms never even made it onto the table.
The measures that came out of the Senate Rules Committee last week, including a ban on certain gifts and increased disclosure of lobbyist contacts, are little more than what Tom Coburn, R-Okla., dismissed them as: window-dressing.
Committee Chairman Trent Lott, R-Miss., has emphasized increased disclosure, which at its core is a basic and necessary part of reform. But the problem of money in U.S. politics goes much deeper than anything disclosure alone can offset. The more fundamental issue is that in the United States, unlike in the majority of democracies abroad, public officials remain dependent on private money for their election.
Running for federal office is expensive - 43 percent of U.S. Senators are millionaires. A winning campaign in the House of Representatives costs nearly $1 million, and a winning campaign for the seat in the Senate costs over $5 million. That money has to come from somewhere, and that 'somewhere' isn't the average American's checkbook. Out of the roughly $400 million from 527s that inundated the 2004 election, over $126 million came from just 25 individuals. Most Americans don't contribute to political candidates at all - in 2002, less than 2 percent of the population made contributions of over $200 to political campaigns. Public Campaign reports that of such contributors, some 86 percent earn above $100,000, and 96 percent are white. This narrow class of donors is hardly representative of American society. What it reveals, however, is who truly holds political power in the United States.
The principle of 'one man, one vote' is being supplanted by the reality of 'one dollar, one vote.' While money may not directly buy influence, it does buy access and set the agenda. And as political campaigns are increasingly driven by expensive TV issue ads, money also fuels election outcomes - over 94 percent of the time, the candidate who spends the most wins. With politicians thus reliant on an elite base of donors and private-interest PACs for their re-election, it's not surprising that when it comes to crafting public policy, conflicts of interest abound.
Critics of reform argue that "money is the mother's milk of politics," and that it's impossible to eliminate. This may be so. In this case, the question to ask is where public officials should be getting their money in the first place.
While federal officials continue to vacillate about reform, citizens across the country are enacting an alternative to privately funded campaigns on a local level: full public financing of elections, a system also known as "Clean Elections." Under Clean Elections, candidates who collect enough signatures and discrete $5 contributions to demonstrate their grassroots support receive a full grant to run for office. If Clean Elections candidates are outspent by privately financed opponents, they are also eligible to receive additional matching funds. The trend started in Maine and Arizona, two states in which citizens successfully passed ballot initiatives in the late 1990s establishing Clean Elections for statewide office. In recent years, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, New Mexico, North Carolina, Portland, Ore. and Albuquerque, N.M. have all passed Clean Elections for some level of office as well. Today, students from the Brown and Providence College advocacy group Democracy Matters will testify in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee on behalf of the Rhode Island Clean Elections Act, introduced this spring by District 3 State Rep. Edith Ajello and District 3 State Sen. Rhoda Perry, both Democrats from Providence.
Although Clean Elections has been passed by voter initiative, legislators have come to embrace the system as well. Today, 83 percent of Maine state senators were elected without spending private funds. As Arizona Rep. Martha Garcia says, "It's win-win all around - for voters and for candidates."
Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court began re-visiting the arguments of the landmark 1976 case Buckley v. Valeo, which struck down candidate spending limits and has shaped - some would argue, stymied - reform efforts ever since. The re-evaluation of the case presents a very real opportunity to reignite the national debate around campaign finance reform.
The solutions are out there. The states are the laboratories of democracy, and they are leading the way. If only our federal officials would catch up.
Te-Ping Chen '07 is a member of Democracy Matters.
