Last summer I met with a brilliant young woman who was highly educated, had done international work in Eastern Europe, and then came home to work for a nonprofit foundation in Michigan. She was married and had a toddler, but wanted to do more to make this a better world, and someone suggested she run for the legislature.
She wanted to ask my advice. But she was stunned when I told her not to even think about it, unless she had at least a quarter of a million dollars to burn.
Welcome to our world of pay-to-play politics. That amount, by the way, is nothing compared to what it costs to win a seat in Congress. Some hotly contested races this year, like the one in which Elissa Slotkin is challenging Congressman Mike Bishop, may cost each candidate close to $10 million dollars.
That’s what it will take to win a job that pays $174,000 a year and lasts two years. Then, you’ll have to spend more millions to win it again. Nobody really has that kind of money, so they get a little of it from individuals and the rest from special interest groups. It is, of course, illegal to give someone a bribe to vote a certain way; you and the office holder could both wind up in jail.
But if you are getting hundreds of thousands of dollars from Planned Parenthood or the National Rifle Association, you don’t have to be psychic to know how they expect you to vote on their issues. You also know that if you don’t, the money will not only disappear in the next election cycle, they will spend it to try to defeat you.
The U.S. Supreme Court says this is “free speech.” I call it democracy controlled by special interests. And it is getting progressively worse.
Michigan, by the way, is even worse than most states because of our horrible laws that allow shadowy campaign committees to conceal the source of their donations – so-called Dark Money. Such groups can’t directly endorse a candidate, but they can run commercials attacking one. When Bridget McCormack ran for the Michigan Supreme Court six years ago, one such group ran ads implying she supported terrorists. There wasn’t a shred of truth to this, except that she did her ethical duty as an attorney and volunteered to represent an inmate at Guantanamo if needed.
Among other things, I am sure this sorry state of affairs dissuades many good people who happen to be sane from running for office. This wasn’t always the case; David Bonior, the former House Majority Whip, told me that when he was first elected to Congress in 1976, it cost him $36,000, or about $150,000 in today’s money.
He thought that was too much, even then. But given the Citizens vs United decision, is there anything we can do to get our democracy back?
I think there is. We can push the next legislature to stop allowing the sources of dark money to be concealed. My second proposal is more radical:
Most of the huge sums spent to influence elections go for broadcast campaign commercials. Any network or station broadcasting over the air is subject to regulation by the Federal Communications Commission, the FCC. That’s because the airwaves are public property. The commissioners could issue new rules severely limiting how much time any candidate could buy, and requiring all candidates to have equal time.
That would require a new president and new commissioners. But it just might end our system of having the most expensive unrepresentative government money can buy.
