Episode 6 - Dependency Corruption & Why We Need a Constitutional Amendment
Full Transcript and Sources:
Dependency Corruption - what it is:
Welcome back to Toil, Episode Six. I realize it’s been quite awhile since my last episode. I’ve been thinking a lot about how we got here. How we have a President and a Congress doing so much that most Americans don’t want. A President and a Congress causing so much harm and not solving problems they promised to solve, if elected. How could those who are meant to represent us, fail so miserably to actually do that? In trying to make sense of this, I have found my way to a term I recently learned to describe something we all know to be true: “dependency corruption”. A famous democracy scholar, Lawrence Lessig, coined this term. It's not outright and direct bribery (though of course we know this is also happening). It's something more subtle and harder to fix. And it’s been our political reality long before President Trump and the cowardly Congress we now have.
And the root of this problem? Money. Surprise surprise, right? For a long time, we have not truly had a representative democracy, because our representatives have to spend the majority of their time raising money from a tiny slice of wealthy Americans just to stay in office. It costs a lot of money to run for office and most voters don’t have a lot of money, so representatives and candidates depend on this small group of wealthy Americans, and their corporations, to fund their campaigns. And when a representative’s political survival depends on this small wealthy group, that group starts to shape how they think: what problems seem solvable, whose concerns feel urgent, what fights feel worth having. That's not democracy. That's a system where the wealthy basically get two votes: one at the ballot box, and one with their checkbook. And the checkbook vote counts more. And this was true before Trump, across both parties. And until we fix it, nothing else we care about - fair wages, education, healthcare, housing, prices, clean air - none of it gets fixed either.
Now, our system has always, of course, been influenced by the wealthy of this country to some degree. The founding fathers themselves were very wealthy, many owned slaves. For the first few decades of our nation, only white male landowners could even vote. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, we were dominated by monopolies that controlled our government, which I talk about in my last episode.
Dependency Corruption - how we got here:
But this “dependency corruption” has exploded in more recent history because the courts have ruled that essentially any restrictions on political donations from the wealthy and corporate class are unconstitutional - as long as they don’t go directly to a candidate. This is how we now have SuperPACs, which are massive political fundraising and spending operations that can support or oppose candidates as long as they don’t coordinate with the candidate (but it’s a well known fact that of course they do). It’s worth knowing the three key court decisions that brought us to this place:
Buckley v. Valeo (1976): This was a Supreme Court decision that established the foundational principle that spending money on political campaigns is a form of protected free speech under the First Amendment. And it struck down any limits on how much an individual could spend on a campaign, again, as long as that spending did not go directly TO a candidate - called an “independent expenditure” - as it’s independent of the candidate (in theory). The second case is the one that most folks have heard of:
Citizens United v. FEC (2010): This was also a Supreme Court decision and extended this unlimited "independent expenditure” logic from individuals, to also corporations, ruling that the government cannot restrict their independent political expenditures, opening the door to unlimited corporate spending in elections. Now, the third and final case is sometimes forgotten but crucial:
SpeechNow.org v. FEC (also in 2010, just a few months after Citizens United): This was a D.C. Circuit Court decision that has not yet gone to the Supreme Court. It took the Citizens United's reasoning one step further, ruling that if independent expenditures (also known as spending) cannot be limited, then contributions to the groups doing that spending can also not be limited. This is the decision that directly created super PACs as we know them today. If you can spend and give as much as you want, you can make a massive pool of money.
All of this spending from wealthy individuals and corporations on political campaigns is how our “dependency corruption” has gotten so much worse. Politicians now rely on these big spenders to fund their campaigns; not the voters. So they’re both more beholden to these donors and getting all their policy ideas and problems (i.e. my corporate taxes are too high) from these donors. I mentioned earlier that it costs a lot of money to run for office. That’s not a coincidence: it's a direct consequence of allowing unlimited money into the system. When one candidate can raise $20 million, their opponent has to raise $20 million just to stay competitive. Everyone races to the top together, and the cost of running keeps climbing. It's an arms race, and like all arms races, everyone would be better off if nobody had the weapons in the first place. The money doesn't make campaigns more competitive: it makes them more expensive, which makes politicians more dependent on the donors who can write the biggest checks, which is exactly the problem we started with.
Our key barrier to solving this is that not enough elected leaders are committed to solving it; which is, of course a byproduct of the problem; the people they’re getting their campaign money from don’t want them to solve it as that would erode their power.
I’ve been inspired lately by reading Thomas Paine’s Common Sense from 1776. Many of us likely read this in high school and long forgot. Much of it is relevant to our crisis of democracy today. At the time, George Washington was actually having trouble recruiting men to fight in the revolutionary war against the British, Paine’s Common Sense was an attempt to convince the people of the merits of a representative democracy, where the people could choose and be represented by their own leaders, instead of being ruled by a king who did not care what they, the people wanted.
He wrote that our representatives are those “who are supposed to have the same concerns at stake which those have, who appointed them, and who will act in the same manner as the whole body would, were it present” and that “the elected might never form to themselves an interest separate from the electors,” (chapter 1).
Does anyone actually think this is still true today? That those we have elected are acting as we all would, were we present? That they haven’t formed interests separate from the rest of us? About a decade ago professors at Princeton and Northwestern looked at 20 years of data, across nearly 2000 public opinion surveys and compared it to policies that ended up becoming law. They found that the opinions of 90% of Americans had essentially no impact at all on what became law. I link in the notes to the study.
Dependency Corruption - how to end it:
This “dependency corruption” is eating away at our representative democracy. But the courts say our Constitution doesn’t allow us to prohibit it. Okay, well, whether or not we agree with that assessment, we can’t rely on a future court overturning those decisions (and even if they did, it would take decades and it would still be subject to another future court overturning it again), so we must amend the Constitution to explicitly allow us to prohibit this money and influence in our elections. Our fellow Americans have already amended the constitutions 27 times to make us better. We can do it a 28th time.
So, first things first, how do we pass a constitutional amendment - logistically. We can’t fight for what we don’t understand. So let’s go back to some high school basics - as outlined in the Constitution’s Article V.
There are two steps to pass a constitutional amendment:
First a it must be proposed, which can be done in two ways, by either:
(1) both the House and Senate passing the proposal with 2/3rd majority in each Chamber. Some good news here; it does not require the President's signature, and members of Congress have actually been introducing joint resolutions proposing this amendment every year since Citizens United and SpeechNow were decided in 2010. Of course getting the 2/3rd majority in each chamber has been the key obstacle. But we have a second way to propose a constitutional amendment:
(2) two-thirds of the state legislatures (currently 34 out of 50) submit applications to Congress calling for a national convention for proposing amendments. Now, this method has never successfully been used, but it has come very close to working. As recently as the 1980s in fact, 32 states submitted applications for a balanced budget amendment; only 2 shy of the required 34 needed.
Second, the proposal needs to be ratified. We also have two options for this, that Congress gets to choose:
(1) 38/50 of state legislatures must vote for it, or
(2) states form ratification conventions where representatives, different than the ones that are currently in the state legislatures, different representatives are elected for the sole purpose of voting on the amendment, and then you need 38/50 of state conventions to approve the proposal. This may be our best shot as politicians at the state-level, in both parties, have also fallen victim to dependency corruption. The method was used to pass the 21st amendment which overturned the 18th prohibition against alcohol amendment. This method was used then as the existing legislatures were captured by the strong prohibition lobby.
And that’s how we get a constitutional amendment. We propose it, and then we ratify it. Of course it will be difficult and take years, and many organizations have been working on it already. But, I think we as a nation need to believe we can do big things again. I think despair has led us to throw up our hands or hide inside and not even attempt the greatest solutions. But this nation has passed a constitutional amendment 27 times in our short history and I bet you every time there were powerful forces fighting against those amendments. We can absolutely defeat those forces again, but not if we don’t even believe in trying.
And we know Americans want this. In survey after survey after survey - which I link to in the notes, Americans say they want money out of politics. I also link in the notes to a tracker of 23 states that have gone on the record in support of an “amendment to the United States Constitution that would restore our power to decide whether and how to regulate the influence of money in politics”. We have momentum on our side and I think the current political reality is showing to more and more folks, that our government is not beholden to us.
Now there are organizations doing the strategizing, what we all need to do is elect politicians, at every level, who promise to support this Constitutional Amendment; who promise to get big money out of our elections. We can go to campaign events for candidates running at the state and federal levels and raise this as an issue, and demand they promise to support this constitutional amendment if they want your vote. And we can call and email our current representatives and demand they support this amendment.
As we do this, we can also support smaller, but helpful wins. I link in the notes to a long list put out by Senator Elizabeth Warren when she was running for President in 2019, there’s a lot of great stuff in there. We can also pass the Disclose Act, which has been introduced in Congress for years and would require that donors at least disclose who they’re giving to so we can see which representatives are clearly being influenced and by whom. AND we can get creative; there are two very promising efforts on this front - a ballot measure in Montana and a legal challenge to a successful ballot measure in Maine. I link to both in the notes.
Montana’s ballot measure to be voted on this November - would prohibit any corporations chartered or operating in Montana from spending in Montana’s elections - local, state, and federal. If this passes and survives a court challenge, every state can copy it.
In Maine, nearly 75% of voters passed a ballot measure to cap the amount that donors can give to Super PACs at $5,000. The measure has been challenged, but if the federal courts uphold it, it’s a game changer, and every state can copy it. Importantly though, this success would only apply to state-level races; not federal. So again, we need a constitutional amendment.
And we can only succeed in this if we fight together across parties. This must be an everyone fight, or we’ll all lose. The wealthy benefit when we can’t work together, despite our fierce disagreements, and I have many, that I believe deep in my bones. But take any issue and it doesn’t matter what I believe is justice, I won’t achieve it if my elected representatives don’t answer to me.
In that spirit, I’ll end with how Thomas Paine ends Common Sense, 250 years ago, with a plea to those considering whether or not to join the fight against the British:
“Wherefore, instead of gazing at each other, with suspicious or doubtful curiosity, let each of us hold out to his neighbor the hearty hand of friendship, and unite in drawing a line, which, like an act of oblivion, shall bury in forgetfulness every former dissension. Let the names of whig and tory [or republican and democrat] be extinct; and let none other be heard among us, than those of a good citizen; an open and resolute friend; and a virtuous supporter of the rights of mankind, and of the free and independent states of America.” (appendix)