A funny thing happened after Citizens United, the 2010 Supreme Court ruling that threw out decades-old campaign finance laws and allowed corporations, unions and so-called black money groups to spend unlimited sums on the American elections.
Democrats, who had warned the decision would unleash a torrent of undisclosed cash in favor of Republicans, have come to love it.
As my colleagues Kenneth P. Vogel and Shane Goldmacher have reported, “donors and operatives allied to the Democratic Party embraced black money with newfound zeal” in the 2020 election, “equalizing and, in some ways, overtaking the Republicans.
According to OpenSecrets, a group that tracks money in politics, “outside groups” – that is, organizations independent of official party committees and campaigns – spent $4.5 billion during the decade following the Citizens United decision, compared to $750 million in the previous two years. decades.
Much of this money came from wealthy individuals. The top 10 donors and their spouses spent $1.2 billion on federal elections during the same period. In 2018 alone, this same group was responsible for 7% of all election-related donations, up from 1% in 2008.
Democrats, while embracing campaign finance reform, have often said they won’t “unilaterally disarm” in the face of big-money Republican groups. In Senate races like Rep. Martha McSally’s 2020 special election in Arizona — which she lost to former astronaut Mark Kelly — they buried their opponents with black-money-funded TV ads. . And even where Democrats have failed, as they did in a nationwide effort by liberal donors to oust Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, party-aligned super PACs have been in hotly contested races.
Karl Evers-Hillstrom, a researcher at OpenSecrets, noted in a 2020 report that 2018 was “the first election cycle since Citizens United where non-party liberal outside groups outspent their conservative counterparts.”
So while Democrats have embraced the world of black money, some Republicans have begun to take a second look at Citizens United.
Make no mistake: “campaign finance reform” is still a Democratic project.
A House bill calling for a constitutional amendment to repeal Citizens United’s ruling and allow states to regulate money in elections as they see fit has only one GOP co-sponsor: the Representative John Katko of New York, who is retiring at the end of his term this year. Katko backed the impeachment of President Donald Trump after taking the Capitol on January 6, 2021, so he’s not exactly an indicator of Republican sentiment in Congress.
But this week, while following members of American Promise, a nonpartisan group promoting a 28th Amendment to the Constitution that would closely follow Katko’s bill, I found faint signs that the winds veered to the right.
American Promise recently hired a new executive director, Bill Cortese, who has risen through the ranks of the Republican operational class. A former campaign aide to former Rep. Chris Shays, a Connecticut Republican who sponsored what became known as the McCain-Feingold Act in 2002, Cortese has worked for Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey and for Mercury Strategies , a government affairs firm that works with Democrats and Republicans.
Cortese helps the group hone its pitch to Republicans — for example, talking about common concerns about the role of Silicon Valley billionaires in the election, and finding business allies who can relate to lawmakers conservatives who distrust anything that smacks of liberalism. gooderism.
A surprising supporter of the group’s proposed amendment is Doug Mastriano, the right-wing Republican senator from Pennsylvania who is now running for governor. On Sept. 21, Mastriano, who is heavily outmatched by his Democratic opponent, introduced a resolution with five other Republicans expressing support for the idea.
A few local chambers of commerce, normally bastions of Republican Party support, have also signed on. David Black, former aide to Governor Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania and former Harrisburg Regional Chamber Speaker active in American Promise, is a champion of the concept. Rick Bennett, a Republican senator and former majority leader from Oxford, Maine, spoke at the American Promise conference this week in Washington.
In Maine, a group called Protect Maine Elections touted the proposed amendment as a way to regulate foreign money that has flooded the state amid a fierce political battle over power lines promoted by powerhouses. Canadian and Spanish companies.
The US subsidiary of a Canadian utility, Hydro-Quebec, “has assembled an army of foreign agents in the run-up to the November 2 referendum,” reported Anna Massoglia of OpenSecrets. “These foreign agents have reported more than $2.5 million in influence operation payments since 2020.”
The hard part
The bar for passing a constitutional amendment is purposely raised. It takes two-thirds of the votes of the House and the Senate to propose one, or a convention requested by two-thirds of the 50 states. Then three out of four state legislatures — a total of 38 — must ratify it for it to become law.
That is why we only have 27 amendments so far. The latest, which bars Congress from raising its own salaries — increases can only take effect after an interim election — was passed in 1992 after a decade of concerted lobbying.
Persuading Republican senators to sign would be extremely difficult.
On Wednesday, American Promise board member actress Debra Winger prepped the group’s activists before they headed to Capitol Hill on Thursday, lulled by a piper, for brief meetings with the aides to Senators Collins, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Marco Rubio. and Rick Scott of Florida, along with Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania and a few other Republican House members.
They came away encouraged to have found an audience, but received no firm commitment of support.
“I applaud what they are doing. This is important work, and we need these conversations. But in Washington, Republicans haven’t gotten better on this,” said Adam Bozzi, vice president of communications at End Citizens United, a left-leaning group that supports revamping campaign finance laws. “And the Supreme Court is getting worse.”
Last week, Republican senators blocked a vote on a Democratic-sponsored bill to require any organization spending money in a federal election to disclose donors of $10,000 or more. News outlets, expecting the bill to fail, barely covered it.
Collins, for his part, was a co-sponsor of McCain-Feingold and criticized the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United. But she has dithered over new disclosure laws, backing a proposal years ago by Senators Angus King of Maine and Jon Tester of Montana while opposing others.
Sen. Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia, said campaign spending restrictions were off limits for Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate Minority Leader.
At the state level, the picture is mixed. In several states, including Missouri and South Dakota, voters passed ballot initiatives to restore some controls on campaign finance. In 2012, a Republican legislature in Montana passed legislation to regulate black money, but it was thrown out in federal court.
Since then, Montana seems to have taken the opposite path. In February, State Sen. Steve Fitzpatrick, a Republican, introduced a bill that would relax some disclosure rules, which he said was aimed at eliminating “picky things we’ve all learned to hate in our system of disclosure.” campaign financing.
Gov. Greg Gianforte, accused of breaking campaign finance laws, signed a version of the bill into law in May.
What voters think
If there’s any hope for the long-term draft of the 28th Amendment, it’s this: Polls show widespread public dissatisfaction with the role of money in American politics.
A 2018 poll by the Center for Public Integrity, for example, found that 66% of Republicans supported a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United.
In a CBS News poll in August, 86% of all voters cited “the influence of money in politics” as one of the top threats to democracy – above “potential for political violence” or ” attempts to cancel the elections”.
A private poll by Global Strategy Group and Impact Research, which work primarily for Democrats, found that 92% of voters in battleground states agreed with the statement “End black money by making all transparent political contributions”.
These kinds of numbers suggest, at a minimum, that Republican Party leaders are at odds with their constituents when it comes to money in politics, at least giving groups like American Promise an opening.
“Republican voters,” Bozzi said, “don’t like it.”
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Thank you for reading On Politics and for subscribing to The New York Times. — Blake
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