REMEMBER CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM?
President Harry S. Truman, launching his 1948 election campaign on Labor Day in Detroit’s Cadillac Square, had to cut an important part of his speech because his campaign did not have money to pay for enough minutes of national radio time. Two days before the election, Eleanor Roosevelt was able to broadcast a six-minute endorsement of Truman on ABC radio nationally only because a Democratic operative produced a shopping bag stuffed with $25,721 (ABC’s price) in cash.
These historical tidbits (from David L. Roll’s “Ascent to Power,” about the transition from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency to Truman’s) are discordant with a familiar progressive lament: “There is too much money in politics.” Has the supposed problem of “too much” political speech ever actually existed?
All campaign spending finances, directly or indirectly, the dissemination of political speech. So, government limits on political giving and spending are attempts (written by incumbent legislators) to limit political speech to amounts that the government (including those legislators, with their myriad advantages of incumbency) deem proper.
Because the Supreme Court has largely agreed that campaign finance restrictions can violate free-speech guarantees, in 2014, not a single Democratic senator opposed amending the First Amendment to empower Congress to regulate the quantity, content and timing of campaign speech. That is, speech about the composition of Congress and the rest of the government. Campaign “reforms” were harbingers of progressives’ subsequent embrace of restrictions on many forms of speech, especially but not only on campuses.
The apogee of interest in campaign finance coincided with the supposed peak importance of political ads on broadcast television. Then came the migration of audiences to cable and the shift of cord-cutting viewers to streaming services (Netflix, etc.). This means many viewers this year will see few, if any, political ads on television. Among the almost one-fifth of the national population (61.4 million) who live in the seven swing states (Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin), those in the reduced TV audience will be bombarded with so many that the ads will be like their living-room wallpaper — always there, barely noticed.
Anyway, there might be more people undecided about whether to vote at all than are undecided about choosing between President Biden and Donald Trump. With both candidates painfully familiar to voters, no broadcast ad campaign will move many voters to reconsider their current allocations of their disapproval.
Restricting the amounts that can be given directly to candidates and their campaigns has diverted the flow of money to independent groups and super PACs. This has diminished the hollowed-out parties’ relevance, making them ripe for piratical capture by boarding parties obedient to successive presidential nominees. This, too, weakens political mobilizations.
The Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision ignited perhaps the final flaring of the progressive impulse to strengthen the government’s ability to control the quantity of speech about the government. The court held that Americans do not forfeit their free-speech rights when they band together in corporate form to magnify their political advocacy. And that government cannot restrict spending on independent (not coordinated with candidates’ campaigns) political advocacy.
Although this decision was almost entirely relevant to incorporated nonprofit advocacy groups (e.g., the NAACP, the Sierra Club, Planned Parenthood) and unions, hysterics erupted. The New York Times: The court had “thrust politics back to the robber-baron era of the 19th century” and “paved the way for corporations to use their vast treasuries to overwhelm elections.” In the next four election cycles, political spending by for-profit corporations averaged about 1% of spending from all sources.
As an unsuccessful candidate for her party’s nomination in 2008, and accepting her party’s nomination in 2016, Hillary Clinton wanted to “get money out of politics.” But also in 2016 she overcame her aversion to money and outspent Trump 3 to 1. The progressive aspiration is to remove private money from politics.
This would extend government’s domination of society to politics — to the debate about the composition of government. The maximum progressive aim is to remove voluntary political contributions from politics and restrict candidates to spending money that government extracts from voters by taxation. The overwhelming majority of voters — this we know — will not voluntarily pay for politics.
Every year, Americans can check a box on their tax returns, thereby giving $3 (without increasing their tax liabilities) to fund the presidential campaigns of nominees who agree not to accept other money. In 2023, only 3.35% of tax filers checked the box.