BENNAIM: On the need for campaign finance reform

If you have been following the 2016 U.S. presidential debates, you may have heard the phrase “campaign finance reform.” This type of reform comes up pretty often and is part of the demagoguery meant to entice voters. In reality, campaign finance reform is a vague concept, like comprehensive immigration reform or the promise to rebuild the tax system. So what is campaign finance reform, and why are so many people talking about it as election season starts getting more intense?

Politicians have to finance their campaigns. The ways in which they finance these campaigns is controversial because people worry that contributions might influence the decisions of our public servants. The Federal Election Commission and the U.S. Congress had limited the amount of money that corporations could donate to candidates until 2010. In that year, the U.S. Supreme Court decided a case in favor of a group called Citizens United.

Citizens United is a conservative political group that sued the FEC over campaign finance laws. Once the case made it all the way up to the Supreme Court, the court used its constitutionally-implied power of judicial review to study the legality of the McCain-Feingold Act, also known as the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, which regulated campaign finance at the time. In the court’s opinion, putting limits on the amount of money that a corporation could donate was unconstitutional.

The logic behind the decision was relatively simple. If you have ever heard the phrase “money talks,” you understand the court’s point of view. They say that money is a form of speech, and corporations are groups of individuals. Therefore, limiting a corporation from donating to campaigns is limiting their free speech.

Since 2010, corporations have been allowed to create large political action committees, or PACs, and provide them with a lot of funding. The idea of the PAC has been around since before the Citizens United case, but now they have become super-PACs that hold much more influence. These PACs focus on specific issues such as immigration or abortion. They fund the campaigns of politicians that support the same views.

You might be thinking that this is no different than lobbying, but in reality it is much worse for the political freedom of the American people. The problem is that corporations have a lot more money than people, and they are well organized. Over the course of the first six months of this 2016 election cycle, more than half of all the money that candidates have raised came from 358 families and the corporations they control. These people’s voices are disproportionately loud.

I’m a capitalist who believes in free markets, but I am not naive enough to think that large corporations always act in the interest of the public good. Giving unlimited financial power to coal companies, for example, leads to politicians that are unwilling to regulate the safety of mines and the communities around them. And these super-PACs don’t just support presidential candidates and senators — they also funnel money into local elections, which is where the politicians make many of these decisions.

We have allowed our politicians to sell out. I find it hard to believe that a candidate who received a large chunk of his campaign cash from an oil company will do much to limit carbon dioxide emissions. When something like this happens, we all lose. It is silly for us to think that massive and successful companies will allow politics to threaten their survival when they can invest in some political capital.

The crazy thing about campaign finance is that it is widely supported by the American people. Republican politicians receive a lot of money from the energy sector, which is why they haven’t made too much noise about reform.

But the American people are not vague about their feelings on this issue. Seventy-eight percent of us support campaign finance reform — including the vast majority of Republicans — and McCain-Feingold is even named after one Republican and one Democrat. The fact that 78 percent of the American people are against something politicians are unwilling to change just shows how much power these super-rich organizations have in our republic.