One step campaign finance reform
[Originally published at the now defunct group blog explananda.com]
I’ve always wondered why this wouldn’t work. Can someone explain to me why it wouldn’t?
The one step in my One Step Campaign Finance Reform plan is simply to create a rule that says that a politician can’t vote on any measure if they have a conflict of interest in it. They have a conflict of interest in a measure if their campaign has received money from a (corporate) party affected by the measure within the last, say, 5 years. In this way, lawmakers would be adhering to the same code of conduct to which judges are already expected to adhere. A judge recuses herself if she is asked to hear a case involving an issue in which she has a financial stake (say, a company in which she owns stock). Why shouldn’t politicians be expected to do the same?
OK, I lied. It’s not one step. You’d have to fiddle a lot with the details. For example, you need to explain “affected.”
And you’d need to set up a much more robust system of public financing to address the sharp drop in political campaign funds available to politicians. (That could and should be done in part simply by forcing broadcasters to give sharply discounted air time to political campaigns. The government regulates this area, and the public in theory owns it. So fuck ’em if they don’t like it.)
And you would need to worry about independent groups and their semi-formal role in campaigns, especially because diverting money from political campaigns would make this an even more pressing issue. So you’d need a few supplemental rules governing the degree of coordination permitted between independent groups and political campaigns, which would reduce their usefulness to campaigns (which by the nature require tight message control and coordination).
And of course, this proposal also fails to solve the problem of bribes paid in advance. If I’m facing an expensive reelection campaign, I might vote on a measure designed to help a party that I suspect (perhaps after heavy hinting) will reward me later.
Another worry: two politicians working together might be able to get around the restrictions by agreeing to help each other’s donors.
And one more worry, just for safe measure: You’d need to address the fact that political donations sometimes go to organizations like the parties’ national campaigns, which don’t directly vote on issues. This proposal would be a disaster if it funneled a lot of money to, say, the Republican National Committee, which then had discretion over which political campaigns to divert the funds to. The result would be even more supine politicians taking their marching orders from a centralized source of funding whose intermediate role in accepting funds would be to sanitize the funds coming in to the party. So to be effective, this proposal would need to address that in some way. (Perhaps you’d add this rule: Political campaigns themselves can only receive money from “ultimate” donors. They can’t get money from “intermediate” donors, such as the party’s national organizations.)
Still, this one step would accomplish a lot, no? All the ways around the rule seem like a pain in the ass, which would, at worst, introduce a lot more friction and complication into what is currently a simple system of reciprocal back-scratching between political donors and the politicians who love them.
The beauty of this idea is that it entirely avoids the First Amendment issues that have plagued campaign finance reform in the past. Any corporation would be able to give as much money to any politician it wanted. And any politician could accept it. It’s just that that money would then disqualify the politician from benefiting the corporation. Corporations might still donate to political campaigns out of pure idealism, but . . . joking! Anyway, this proposal seems to me Supreme Court proof, which is a point strongly in its favour.
Would this work?
Comments
Author: upyernoz
Date: 2008-10-18
well, the biggest problem with the proposal is that it would never pass congress.
putting that aside, another problem would be that challengers wouldn’t be as affected as incumbents. challengers don’t have a vote yet. they would have a lot easier time getting money. even though accepting the cash might limit their ability to vote in the future assuming they win the election, during the election campaign most politicians wouldn’t care about that yet. they just would want to get into office. of course, the question is: which corporations would bother throwing money at a challenger if the challenger couldn’t vote for its interest?
but there is an answer to that. under your system, if a corporation didn’t like the way a member of congress was voting, it could fund the campaign of a challenger just to punish the incumbent. the corporation would figure a member of congress who recuses himself from voting on a critical issue is better than a vote directly against their interest. and so the incumbent would be wildly outspent–with big corporate money on the challenger’s side, and no such money on his side.
so then maybe the incumbent would then seek out his own corporate sponsor, maybe telling the corp. that if they funded him he would have to sit out of some critical upcoming votes, votes in which voting for the corporate interest would be so unpopular in his district that he would be forced to vote against the corp. the incumbent could dangle the prospect of recusing himself from the vote in exchange for a generous donation.
in the end, aren’t we just back to having corporate influence? maybe it would lessen the amount of influence a bit, but there still would be a lot of it there.
Author: Chris
Date: 2008-10-18
Hmmmmm. Perhaps they really should just ban donations from corporations. I was trying to get around that, but it’s really hard otherwise to avoid the rot.
Author: DC
Date: 2008-10-19
Even if you ban corporate donations, what’s the difference whether you get the donation from Microsoft or from Bill Gates? Are unions’ donations affected?
Author: peter
Date: 2008-10-19
Maybe it would be easier to just cut to the chase and radically redistribute wealth in the country so that corporations wouldn’t have so much financial clout.
There is a professor of economics in, I believe, Massachusetts who is arguing for worker-led boards of directors as a starting point. As I understand it, the argument is that this would lead to a better division of profits and more humane society but perhaps it would simultaneously make companies more like to lobby in favour of issues of democratic interest rather than narrow elite interests. If you have directors who are all corrupt multimillionare types then you except, for example, anti-environmental lobbying. Whereas worker boards might represent rank and file interests better and since your average worker can’t expect to sit out polar-ice-cap-melting in a mountain resort guarded by armed cyborgs, one might hope for more reasonable lobbying.
A bitter utopian perhaps but, as the same economist, argues, regulation can never work because as long as the corrupt interests remain rich they will always have both a colossal advantage and a motivation to work around new regulations. It took them 30-40 years to gut the New Deal but they’re a lot more savvy at what they do now and have significantly more financial clout than in the past.
Author: peter
Date: 2008-10-19
“expect” instead of “except” in middle of second paragraph. But it might make sense with “accept” as well.
Author: Chris
Date: 2008-10-19
DC, I was under the impression that individual donations have some sort of cap. But perhaps I’m wrong about that.
Peter, yeah, I’d prefer all kinds of things along those lines. But I was also looking for a solution that would be a) possible to at least imagine selling to people (though it would be difficult, “Stop conflicts of interest” is pretty clear and catchy“); b) an extension of an idea already out there (judges already have such guidelines); c) Supreme Court-proof; d) something that could lead to radical changes in the political culture without requiring them in the first place.
Author: DC
Date: 2008-10-19
“…individual donations have some sort of cap” - you may be right, but in that case what would be the added value in your scheme as opposed to simply extending that cap to corporations?
As Chris’s d) suggests, there are some cart and horse issues with Peter’s suggestion - the kind of radical changes you mention seem unlikely to emerge from a political system owned by the rich.
Author: upyernoz
Date: 2008-10-20
individual donations do have a cap (i think it’s $4,600), people get around it by giving in the name of their spouse or kids, but even with those work-arounds there is a limit.
Author: Chris
Date: 2008-10-20
OK, so admit that my proposal wouldn’t solve the problem. Still, it seems crazy to me that politicians aren’t expected to recuse themselves from decisions in which they have a conflict of interest.
Author: upyernoz
Date: 2008-10-20
Still, it seems crazy to me that politicians aren’t expected to recuse themselves from decisions in which they have a conflict of interest.
to some extent it’s because politicians deal with issues that affect everyone, not just individual litigants in a court case. for example, members of congress write and vote on laws concerning tax rates, and yet all of them also pay taxes. i guess we could exempt them from paying taxes, but they also pass laws regulating health care providers, does that mean they shouldn’t get health care?
