On Super Pacs and campaign financing
From The Wall Street Journal:
Jeb Bush’s beleaguered campaign is a definitive rebuttal to the Bernie Sanders-Donald Trump claim that money controls politics. So it was cognitive dissonance to hear the man who has raised more dollars than anyone except for Hillary Clinton call for new campaignfinance limits on Monday.
“If I could do it all again I’d eliminate the Supreme Court ruling,” the former Florida Governor told CNN’s Dana Bash, referring to 2010’s Citizens United ruling that the government cannot regulate the political speech of corporations and unions when they support candidates or causes. “This is a ridiculous system,” he said, in which candidates “can’t be held accountable for the spending of the Super Pac that’s their affiliate.”
This is not a new theme for Mr. Bush. At a town hall last week in Henniker, New Hampshire, he said:
“Look, I don’t like the idea of not being personally responsible for the money that’s being raised on my behalf. I don’t like that. I’d rather have it come right to me. In a perfect world, you would have a libertarian deal where the money comes in, you accept, in 48 hours it’s disclosed, there’s no dark money, it’s all there for everybody to see, everything that’s done you’re held to account on. But that’s going to require an amendment to the Constitution, apparently.”
Well, no. The reason so much campaign spending is routed through Super Pacs is that Congress continues to maintain limits on how much individuals can give to candidates. This means billionaires like Mr. Trump can self-fund their campaigns, but the committees of non-rich candidates can’t raise more than $2,700 from any single donor. So the candidates set up Super Pacs to which billionaires can donate and which operate independent of the candidates.
It’s a loopy system, as Mr. Bush says, and he’s right to want to have control over all the money donated to elect him. But there’s no need to rewrite the First Amendment to make this possible. Congress could fix the mess by repealing the 2002 McCain-Feingold law, lifting all donation limits and letting candidates collect the cash they need from any American donors in any amounts.
Then Mr. Bush and the other non-wealthy candidates wouldn’t need Super Pacs and could control all of their own political advertising. This would help political accountability, and it would also make it easier for non-wealthy candidates to compete against billionaire self-funders like Mr. Trump.
Until that day, Super Pacs are a net plus for democracy by increasing political competition and educating the public about the candidates. Mr. Bush shouldn’t feel guilty that his Super Pac exists, only that it doesn’t seem to be helping his candidacy. As for Mr. Trump, his gripes about Super Pacs are nothing more than an attempt to hamstring his competitors.