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Excerpted from "Nation on the Take: How Big Money Corrupts Our Democracy and What We Can Do About It"

D.C.’s Sweatshops

Not too far from the Capitol Hill townhouses are the call centers that both Democrats and Republicans use to dial for dollars. Endlessly.

This is how Senator Dick Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, described it: “We sit at these desks with stacks of names in front of us and short bios and histories of giving . . . and we make calls to our faithful friends and ask them to give money or host a fundraiser.”

National Public Radio tried to get access to the call centers for a story on fundraising in 2012 but got no further than a description of them from members of Congress.

Former representative Dennis Cardoza, a California Democrat, compared his party’s call center to a sweatshop with thirty-inch-wide cubicles set up for the sole purpose of begging for money. He said the need for constant fundraising helped push him into retirement.

Peter DeFazio, a Democrat from Oregon, told NPR, “If you walked in there, you would say, ‘Boy, this is about the worst looking, most abusive looking call center situation I’ve seen in my life.’ These people don’t have any workspace, the other person is virtually touching them.”

Members of both parties say the time they have to spend in the cramped call centers is humiliating. Representative John Larson, Democrat of Connecticut, likened it to “putting bamboo shoots under my fingernails.” One female member of the House told us that, probably because she’s a woman, when she makes her fundraising phone calls the donors are much more casual with her than she would expect—or hope. She recounted a call she made to a Hollywood mogul’s home. The wife answered the phone. After the congresswoman introduced herself, “The wife launched into a tirade about some new curtains that had just arrived at her house, which were the wrong color of yellow. I had to sit and politely, sympathetically, listen to her so that I could get to the point of asking her for a twenty-five-hundred-dollar contribution to my campaign.”

How much time do our elected representatives spend trying to collect money from wealthy people? Roughly 50 percent. One former congressman, Tom Perriello (D-VA), told reporter Ryan Grim at the Huffington Post that even that may be “low-balling the figure so as not to scare the new members too much.”

This feverish fundraising begins even before a freshman gets sworn in. After former representative Walt Minnick, a conservative Democrat from Iowa, won his first election to Congress in 2008, he took just five days off before heading back to the phones. He needed to raise $10,000 to $15,000 a day because his district is considered competitive and he 0x knew he would face a tough reelection. Many freshman members get right to the townhouse circuit before they even move into a Washington apartment.

The constant need for campaign cash not only greases the wheels in Congress for the well-financed special interests but also reduces the amount of time our legislators spend considering or crafting legislation.

Dan Glickman (D-KS) has seen it all, from all angles. He served in the House for eighteen years, representing the people of Wichita, Kansas, then headed the Department of Agriculture for six years, during Bill Clinton’s presidency, then became head of the Motion Picture Association of America, Hollywood’s lobbying and advocacy arm in D.C. According to Glickman,

The sad truth is that given the frenetic search for money in federal congressional elections,

there simply isn’t enough time in the day to stay competitive in campaign finance and do the actual job of policy making . . . I remember when I was first elected to Congress, I and many other House members would often go down to the floor of the House of Representatives and just listen to the debate. I may not have had an amendment to the bill or a particular interest in the issue but I always felt that watching policy discussions and witnessing the crafting of laws was an important part of my day. It gave me the chance to educate myself and interact with members of Congress on both sides of the aisle. Today most lawmakers would tell you that any free moment not used raising dollars is time wasted.

This theme of members of Congress not being able to commit time to doing the increasingly complicated job of examining and deeply understanding legislation comes up over and over again. It’s not just driving them nuts, it’s also driving many of them out of office, and it’s deterring good people from even thinking about running.

Senator George Voinovich, an Ohio Republican, left the U.S. Senate in 2010. At the press conference announcing his retirement, he said that it would be impossible to be an effective legislator while also meeting the fundraising demands of running for another term. “You can’t do both of them,” he said. “You’re either going to do the job or you’re going to be out there raising money.”

Of course, not all the fundraising occurs in dreary call center cubicles and trade-association-owned townhouses in D.C. As the New York Times investigative reporter Eric Lipton chronicled in 2014, “destination events” have become all the rage. Republicans join lobbyists and business executives for spa weekends in Las Vegas and ski trips at the Four Seasons resort in Vail. Democrats join lobbyists and business executives on the Ritz-Carlton’s private beach in Puerto Rico and on quail hunts in Georgia.

Such trips are often sponsored by political campaigns or political action committees, which are funded, in part, by . . . you guessed it: the lobbyists and corporate executives who are attending the festivities, and who have business interests they think the members of Congress might be able to help them with.

As Lipton reported, among those attending a Vail event in January of 2014 were:

Representative Edward Whitfield, Republican of Kentucky, and Katie Ott, a lobbyist for PPL Corporation, the single biggest contributor to Mr. Whitfield.

Mr. Whitfield is chairman of the Energy and Commerce subcommittee that regulates energy utilities, making him one of the most important players in Congress for the industry. Only days after the Vail trip, he introduced legislation that would allow utilities like PPL to build new coal-burning power plants, overriding environmental restrictions recently imposed by the Obama administration.

Super PAC Attack

Much of this type of activity—the endless fundraising phone calls, the in-person fundraising, the resort retreats—has been intensifying for years. Newer to the scene, though, are super PACs, which, as we discussed in the last chapter, are the progeny of Citizens United. One of the many things the five Supreme Court justices failed to envision was how closely super PACs would align with candidates’ campaigns—how these allegedly “independent expenditure” entities are not really independent from the candidates at all. Through skilled lawyers, operating in the dim light of an under-resourced and dysfunctional FEC, the candidates have, for all practical purposes, been able to treat these “independent” groups as extensions of their own campaigns.

Presciently, Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig, in a September 2010 commentary for the Boston Review, wrote, “No doubt, as corporations exercise this new right, candidates will become skilled in the dance necessary to get enormous corporate wealth spent for their political benefit.”

It was widely reported in the spring and summer of 2015 that former Florida governorJeb Bush was working closely with Right to Rise, a super PAC backing his bid for the 2016 Republican nomination. The group, with Bush’s direct help, raised $114 million in the first six months of its existence. Bush was able to coordinate with the group because he had not yet officially declared his candidacy. The rationale is laughably adolescent: if Jeb hasn’t officially filed paperwork for his campaign, then he’s not a candidate for office, so there’s no question that Right to Rise is “independent” of his campaign, because there’s no campaign to speak of. Kind of like a junior in high school saying to his parents, “I wasn’t in Jimmy’s basement when the cops broke up the party down there—I was in the kitchen.”

Watchdog groups led by the Campaign Legal Center and Democracy 21 filed complaints with the FEC, calling out not only Bush but also fellow Republicans Scott Walker and Rick Santorum and Democrat Martin O’Malley for flouting the law. “These 2016 presidential contenders must take the American people for fools—flying repeatedly to Iowa and New Hampshire to meet with party leaders and voters, hiring campaign staff, and raising millions of dollars from deep-pocketed mega donors, all the while denying that they are even ‘testing the waters’ of a presidential campaign,” said Paul S. Ryan, senior counsel for the Campaign Legal Center, adding that all four “appear to be violating federal law.”

In the spring of 2015, Bush’s team was reportedly hatching a plan to use his super PAC in an unprecedented way. It would take on tasks that a more accountable, traditional campaign would normally handle: setting up and running phone banks, arranging television advertising, and managing get-out-the-vote operations.

Richard L. Hasen, professor of law and political science at the University of California, Irvine, School of Law and author of Plutocrats United: Campaign Money, the Supreme Court, and the Distortion of American Elections, wrote for Slate, “By signaling that Right to Rise is his campaign arm, Jeb Bush has broken down the wall between his super PAC and his campaign committee in the eyes of donors.”

Outside spending on congressional races doubled from 2010 to 2014, when it reached a staggering $486 million, much of which went undisclosed. In 2004, the Center for Responsive Politics estimated about $5.8 million in dark money (undisclosed) spending. That’s a hundredfold increase over the course of ten years.

Money Goes Dark

Super PAC money is disclosed. So when journalists and political pundits talk about “dark money,” don’t think of super PACs. Think of 501(c)(4) organizations, many of which appear to be set up principally to engage in politics.

Dubbed “social welfare organizations” by the IRS,501(c)(4)s are tax-exempt groups that aren’t required to disclose where their money comes from—a significant fact when you consider that some of the more powerful groups spend tens of millions of dollars each election cycle to advance a single issue or candidate.

In 1956, Alabama Attorney General John Patterson tried to compel the NAACP to disclose the names and addresses of its members in a blatant intimidation effort that would essentially shut down the organization’s income. When the NAACP refused, the issue went all the way to the Supreme Court, which unanimously ruled that the organization did not have to disclose the names of its donors, arguing that “compelled disclosure of affiliation with groups engaged in advocacy” could lead to an effective “restraint on freedom” in the form of persecution or retaliation.

In recent years, political operatives have taken advantage of this exemption from disclosure—combined with inaction on regulating 501(c)(4)s by the FEC and IRS—to turn the groups into stealth political bombers. As Matea Gold reported in the Washington Post in the summer of 2015, “These tax-exempt groups—which can keep their donors secret even as they sponsor hard-hitting ads—are being increasingly embraced by campaign operatives looking for new ways to influence the political environment.”

Groups like Priorities USA, founded by former Barack Obama staffers, and Americans for Prosperity, begun by the Koch brothers, have firmly taken root. The Republican political operative Karl Rove has run tens of millions of dollars through his (c)(4), called Crossroads GPS. New ones, with unmemorable names, are positioning themselves to play significant roles in 2016.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, “spending by organizations that do not disclose their donors has increased from less than $5.2 million in 2006 to well over $300 million in the 2012 presidential cycle and more than $174 million in the 2014 midterms.” The New York Times editorial page noted, mournfully, that the 2014 midterm elections were affected by “the greatest wave of secret, special-interest money ever raised in a congressional election.

http://www.salon.com/2016/03/20/the_system_is_just_this_rigged_dark_money_citizens_united_and_the_secret_story_of_how_big_money_stole_our_democracy/

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http://cruzcat.ucsc.edu/search/t?SEARCH=dark+money&searchby=3&submit=Search

ebook

Author

Smith, Melissa M., 1963-

Publisher

Lanham, MD : Lexington Books, 2014.

== Dark side : the inside story of how the war on terror turned into a war on American ideals Mayer, Jane. New York : Doubleday, [2008] Rating: View online content More...

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