LETTER TO THE EDITOR: Time to Choose; Democracy or Oligarchy?

To the editor: Today is the eighth anniversary of the US Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v FEC, in which a narrow majority struck down portions of a bi-partisan campaign finance law, the McCain-Feingold Act. The Court ruled that corporations have Constitutional rights to free speech in the form of election spending. Dissenting Justice Stevens protested this radical departure from a century of settled law and asserted:

Our lawmakers have a compelling constitutional basis, if not also a democratic duty, to take measures designed to guard against the potentially deleterious effects of corporate spending in local and national races.

Citizens United was followed by a federal appeals court ruling in SpeechNow.org v FEC which allowed super PACs to raise and spend unlimited amounts of money on electioneering. The 2014 Supreme Court ruling in McCutcheon v. FEC struck down the aggregate limit for individual contributions.

By 2016, electoral spending by super PACs, nonprofits, unions and political organizations exceeded $1.6 billion, up from $286 million in 2006, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. At least $183.5 million of that was dark money, where the names of the donors are not disclosed; by comparison, in 2006 dark money spending was just over $5 million. In 2006 big donors, with contributions over $100,000, accounted for just 4% of total campaign contributions. Ten years later their share of the total had risen to more than 36%.

These trends are drowning democracy. According to research by Issue One, members of Congress now spend an average of 20-to-30 hours per week fundraising. Another study found campaign donors are more likely than regular constituents to get meetings with lawmakers or high-ranking officials. Other research shows that congress people more often vote lobbyists’ preferences than their constituents’ preferences.

Thanks to journalist Jane Mayer (Dark Money) and historian Nancy McLean (Democracy in Chains) we now know the backstory to these watershed decisions. They are the fruit of a 40-year campaign by radical libertarian billionaires to limit the democratic rights of the vast majority in order to expand the economic and political power of the economic elites. Billions of dollars of strategic political spending by Charles and David Koch and others in their cabal--including Richard Mellon Scaife, John Olin, Harry and Lynde Bradley, and the DeVos family, Richard Sr, Richard Jr and Betsy--funded not only electoral campaigns, but also libertarian think tanks and academic programs, phony grass roots groups, all-expense-paid seminars at fancy resorts to indoctrinate judges in the libertarian view of law and property rights, and a stairway of fabricated cases to systematically create a chain of decisions and body of law serving corporate interests.

Citizens United is a political action committee organized in 1988 and funded by the Koch brothers to promote corporate interests, socially conservative causes and candidates who advance their goals. In 2007 CU crafted a political attack video called Hillary—the Movie and sought to broadcast ads for it in the weeks before the 2008 primary, in a deliberate challenge to provisions of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 prohibiting any corporation or labor union from making an "electioneering communication" within 30 days of a primary. When the FEC disallowed it, James Bopp Jr, a lawyer who has made it his life’s work to dismantle campaign finance law and advance conservative Republican principles, took the case to court. The district court ruled in favor of the FEC, but the Supremes overturned the lower court decision.

We are now well down the road to oligarchy. The only recourse we have to restore democracy of, by and for the people is to collectively stand up and exercise our sovereignty. We have the power to overturn these Supreme Court decisions with a Constitutional Amendment stating that corporations are not people, money is not speech, and our elected representatives DO have the authority to regulate campaign finances; moreover, it is their responsibility to ensure that the voices of ordinary citizens—not the biggest donors—will be heard. Nineteen states—half the number required to ratify—have already gone on record supporting such an amendment.

The amendment should be followed with model legislation in all fifty states setting out in the corporate code the legal rights and privileges we grant them under the law, as part of their corporate charter. Clearly, we will want them to have a right to due process, the right to hold property and enter contracts, standing to sue and be sued, and other perquisites of orderly legal process. What political privileges corporations should have is a matter for deliberation by our elected representatives, not a question for activist courts to legislate.

— Sharman Haley

Anchorage