Let's face it, asking Congress to reform the way it funds its own political campaigns is like asking drug addicts to "Just Say No," and we all know effective that campaign was. It's an impossible request because we are asking mere mortals who benefit most of all from the status quo to voluntarily terminate what gives them life, liberty, and the pursuit of electoral happiness. Let us not be surprised that campaign finance reform is once again indecently interred.
More disturbing than the reneged New Hampshire Clinton-Gingrich handshake, though, is the role the Supreme Court has played in removing for politicians any inhibitions they might have harbored about being totally bought and paid for. The most recent bit of unshackling came in Federal Election Commission v. Colorado Republican Federal Campaign Committee, but it began much earlier, over a century ago, when the Supreme Court declared that a corporation had all the rights of a "natural person," thereby gradually ceding to non-human agglomerations the same rights guaranteed to fleshy human beings.
In that particular 1886 case, the Supreme Court mistook a simile for reality. They were impressed by the way corporations acted like people: they could own property, acquire wealth, make contracts, even possess an apparent immortality since shareholders could pass away but the corporation would remain. So instead of following the traditional conception of corporations as artificial entities, created at the pleasure of the state, they believed their own analogy and said that the corporations were not only like a person, they were a person. This gave the corporations the right to seek protection under the Constitution and exercise all the rights that supposedly were reserved for biological people.
Thus began the modern tradition of corporatizing individual rights, with the inevitable result, in a strongly capitalist economy like ours, of making money the engine that drives the expression of those rights. The Supreme Court abetted this distortion in its 1976 decision, Buckley v. Valeo, which equated free speech and spending in political campaigns, and most recently in the FEC case, which found that political parties have the right to spend as much as they want on congressional campaigns as long as they spend the money independently of the candidates. The Court believed that any restrictions like this infringed on the free-speech rights of the political parties to spend as much as they pleased.
Do you see the equation: spending money=free speech. Corollary: if you don't have the money, you don't have the speech. Marx was right: under a capitalist system, everything eventually becomes commodified, and we can now have the dubious pleasure of watching most of us become alienated from our inalienable rights.
This twisted logic, where corporate entities become people and only those with deep pockets have the protection of the First Amendment, must be resisted. But how? Begin with the usual avenues of limited citizen participation: letters to the editor, letters to representatives, support of organizations like Common Cause, whose organizational existence is dedicated to freeing the system from the genetic mutations caused by gobs of free-floating money. For those slightly more audacious, support Ralph Nader's presidential campaign under the Green Party or even Perot's Reform Party; both Perot and Lamm have talked about the need to bleed the system of the distortionate influence of special interest money.
But the real solution to this mess, both in the financing of political elections and in the emasculation of our Constitutional rights, is completely taxpayer-funded campaigns, with limited time spans (as they do in other countries) and free media access for candidates. There is a simple logic to this: if politicians answer to the people who buy them, then let's buy them so that they will answer to us and only to us. Imagine a world where lobbyists of all stripes have nothing to do; office space in Washington D.C. stands empty; our presidential campaigns don't last for two or more years; and our representatives are free to act democratically and in response to the needs of the nation. Just savor vision that for a moment.
Of course, redeeming our political system is only the first step. Once we disconnect the corporations from political control, we can begin to reform the corporations themselves to transform them from feudal monarchies to entities worthy of serving a great democracy. Only then will we have the kind of nation we promised ourselves 200 years ago, one far greater than the mean-spirited, niggardly, payola government we have now.
(August 1996)