The Great Debate

Lately, Mitt Romney has been so consumed with fundraising that his aides have had to defend his absence from the stump. Like his foe, the Republican nominee is in the midst of a frenzied financial arms race. But one hugely wealthy individual has not yet been persuaded to part with much cash to support the Republican cause: Mitt Romney himself.

Mitt Romney is hardly the first wealthy individual to seek the White House. John F. Kennedy once quipped he had received a telegram from his father: “Don’t buy another vote. I won’t pay for a landslide.” But Romney, for whatever reason, has failed to use his personal wealth to pay his campaign’s bills. His refusal to self-finance is one of the mysteries of this campaign.

After all, if Romney were to help fund his own bid, he would have ample company. In 1976, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that it would violate the First Amendment to limit what candidates can spend on their own behalf. Ever since, wealthy office-seekers commonly have ponied up. John Kerry lent more than $6 million to fund his Iowa caucus drive in 2003. Hillary Clinton lent her campaign over $11 million four years later. Steve Forbes gave his 1996 campaign $32 million, and spent nearly $37 million four years after that. Ross Perot spent $63 million to finish strongly in 1992, back when that was real money.

In fact, four years ago the former governor gave his own campaign nearly $45 million. He even donated a Winnebago trailer.  “I’m not beholden to any particular group for getting me into this race or for getting me elected,” ABC News quoted him as saying. “My family, that’s the only one I’m really beholden to — they’re the ones who let their inheritance slip away, dollar by dollar.”

The Romney boys can sleep easy: Their dad’s assets are worth nearly $250 million, according to financial disclosure forms. But he has put only $150,000 into this year’s run, through a joint gift with his wife Ann to a Republican committee last spring.

Two Supreme Court decisions (Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission and, later, American Tradition Partnership v. State of Montana) and an appellate court decision (SpeechNow v. Federal Election Commission) are fundamentally transforming our political system and our democracy to a degree we may not grasp until the results of this year’s elections become clear. Never has our electoral process been more captive to vast – and mostly anonymous – sums of money from a handful of large corporations and wealthy individuals.

For all the scorn rightfully heaped on Citizens United, however, it’s actually SpeechNow v. Federal Election Commission that has been most destructive. SpeechNow allows not-for-profit organizations to accept unlimited contributions from individuals for independent expenditures, and this decision birthed both “super PACs,” which can accept unlimited contributions but must disclose donors, and “tax-exempt organizations” which are not subject to the disclosure requirements that apply to candidates, parties, PACs and super PACs.

Under these recent court decisions, a handful of immensely wealthy individuals and CEOs and boards of directors of large corporations now legally direct tens of millions of dollars to funding an overwhelming stream of political ads on behalf of candidates from whom they obviously expect some sort of fealty once the candidates are in office.

It was said of Andrew Carnegie that he gave money away as quietly as a waiter falling down a steel staircase carrying a tray of tall-stemmed glasses. Not so the sotto voce superrich donors who are spending so much to keep Mitt Romney from declaring himself the winner of the Republican nomination.

With their chosen candidates out front, swinging at each other as they glad-hand from state to state, the multimillionaires and billionaires – a mere million is nowhere near enough to join this exclusive club – keep themselves out of sight, sitting around in a smoke-filled back room playing high-stakes hold ’em for the soul of the GOP. Not literally, of course, though many of them made their fortunes gambling everything on their hunches.

It is the common view, heard nightly around dinner tables of liberal-leaning citizens, that democracy is being bought and sold in front of our noses and that the Founding Fathers – most of whom, by the way, were comfortably well off and happily paid their way into politics – would be spinning in their mausoleums if they knew how the monarchy they defied has been replaced in the brave republic they founded by an aristocracy of the super-wealthy they never could have imagined.

By Zephyr Teachout
The views expressed are her own.

In the mid-1990s, Arizona voters faced a pretty normal problem: their government was corrupt. Legislators were thinking about wealthy donors, not their constituents. Some of those donors were giving money legally (through campaign contributions), and some illegally (through bribes—think AZScam). But whether illegal or legal, the problem was the same: the elected officials had their minds on the sources of cash, instead of the problems of the state. It wasn’t good for democracy, since candidates without a lot of wealthy friends just weren’t going to run for office.

Arizona voters decided to push for public financing of elections. But they worried that candidates might not use the public financing because the amounts provided—for example, around $15,000 for legislature races—could come up short. Would it be enough if a self-financed candidate spent all his money, or the Chamber of Commerce unleashed a flood of attack ads? Candidates might get cold feet; instead of opting into public funding, they’d choose to raise money the old fashioned way, calling rich people who knew lots of other rich people, and telling them whatever they needed to hear.

So Arizona had two choices. It could pass a law to give the hypothetical nervous candidate a high default lump sum of public funding for her campaign, insurance against a big money dump. Or it could pass a law that gave the nervous candidate extra funding if the feared event happened: if the rich candidate or the Chamber of Commerce spent over a certain set amount she’d get an equal amount to be able to fight back. Arizona chose the second option—why use state money when it wasn’t needed? After a threshold, a publicly funded candidate was automatically given an additional $1 for every $1 spent by the self-financed candidate or attacking outside groups. The law didn’t prohibit anyone from spending money. And it was automatic, so it didn’t discriminate on the basis of any ideology.