Big money wins again in a romp

By Joe Nocera

Monday, Nov. 17, 2014 | 2:03 a.m.

The day after the midterm elections, I met up with a man named Ira Glasser, the former longtime head of the American Civil Liberties Union. For days, the media had been full of news about the enormous sums of money likely to be spent by special-interest groups and others to influence the outcome of Senate races, House races, gubernatorial races — even judicial races. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, which issued a report just days before the midterms, nearly $4 billion was expected to be spent, in toto, on the midterms. Glasser had no problem with any of this.

As you would expect of someone who once ran the ACLU — he retired in 2001 — Glasser is a First Amendment absolutist. And to him, that means he supports the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling on Citizens United because he believes virtually all campaign finance laws violate the First Amendment.

“So money equals speech?” I asked. No, he said. “But nobody speaks very effectively without money. If you limit how much you spend on speech, you are also limiting speech.”

As Glasser talked, I kept finding myself circling back to the same question: But what about what happens after the election? It is not the spending itself that is the problem, but rather the purpose of that spending.

Big contributors want something for their money. At its most benign, they want access, the ability to have their side heard whenever there is the possibility that legislation might affect their industry. Far less benignly, they want more — they want to know that their bidding will be done.

It can be subtle, this influence. “Maybe it’s the amendment that does not get introduced in committee because the congressman knows that it is not in sync with the desires of his money patrons,” said Rep. John Sarbanes, D-Md., who has focused much of his legislative effort on campaign finance reform. “The donation is lingering somewhere in the atmosphere. It’s human nature.”

Of course it can be not so subtle, too. “On any given Wednesday night in Washington,” says Nick Penniman, the executive director of Issue One, which is dedicated to reducing the influence of money in politics, “you’ll have a member of, say, the finance committee standing in the board room of a lobbyist’s office, surrounded by bank lobbyists. At some point, someone will hand a staffer an envelope with the checks in it, and the congressman will have raised $100,000 in 45 minutes. And they know exactly who was responsible for putting it together, and whose phone calls therefore need to be returned.”

Penniman makes a distinction between “ideological givers” — donors like the Koch brothers, motivated by the chance to get like-minded people elected — and “transactional givers,” those who donate because they expect something concrete in return. “These are folks who give just as generously to both sides of the aisle.”

Sarbanes agreed: “Big money wins regardless of which party wins the election.”

“In fact,” he added, “the more money that is spent, the greater the dependence that is created.”

There are two other reasons big money is corrosive to our politics. One is that the need to raise money has become close to all-consuming. The current issue of Esquire magazine — which has a nifty package of articles about what is wrong with Congress and some suggestions for how various problems might be fixed — quotes Rep. Donna Edwards, D-Md.: “It’s a never-ending hustle. You get elected to this august body to fix problems, and for the privilege, you find yourself on the phone in a cubicle, dialing for dollars.”

The retiring Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, has said he believes the constant need to raise money means that “you don’t have the time for the kind of personal relationships that so many of us built up over time.”

When people don’t know each other, it is a lot easier to think the worst of them. Polarization is the result.

Finally, there is the effect of big money on the rest of us. The public, Sarbanes believes, knows full well the insidious influence of money in politics. “The rational voter will say to himself, why should I bother voting if the person I’m voting for is a captive of special interests,” he said. “As a result, people are staying at home.”

And how does Glasser react to these tales of corruption? He doesn’t deny them. “Of course there is corruption,” he says. “Of course there is undue influence of money.” But he doesn’t believe those problems are as great as they are made out to be, or that they trump his First Amendment concerns.

“The question is whether the remedy does more harm than good and violates the constitution,” he says.

Me, I’m not convinced. Are you?

Joe Nocera is a columnist for The New York Times.