When SCOTUS landed us with Citizens United, giving corporations and oligarchs untrammeled access to political campaigns and politicians, my initial reaction was, of course, fury. Just like most of us.
But then I thought about it. It’s remarkable what serious consideration can do to mitigate fury. Oh no, don’t think I’d developed sympathy for struggling corporate billionaires who had been suffering from a dearth of political clout. But since the McCain-Feingold Act seriously limited campaign contributions in 2002, we ordinary voters did not have to pay too much attention to the opinions of filthy rich people or their tweets. (There weren’t any tweets way back then.)
But, post-Citizens United, there I was thinking, what are they going to buy with all their money? A lot of money should buy them something other than real estate and space rockets. I presumed they wanted to buy elections.
I’ve been curious about the results every since.
When I started to write this post, I had a notion I’d written about buying elections, blah blah blah before today. And, yes, I had, in October 2022: “Where is the proof that money can buy elections?”
Not only had I written about it, I’d done research on it. (I was sort of surprised. Hey, good for me!) In general, the researched answer was, No, money can’t buy elections.
Quite recently, thanks to great investigative journalism at ProPublica and elsewhere, we’ve all learned that Supreme Court justices can be bought but if you’re intending to purchase a justice, you’d better make sure you get a two-or-three for the price of one deal because a dissent isn’t going to get you what you want from a nine-person SCOTUS.
Although the outrage and condemnation over the SCOTUS Six has not dissipated — and won’t — I still have to remind people that Supreme Court decisions are not immutable. Especially not the ones this current bunch has been issuing (they are so disorderly, so poorly written and haphazardly reasoned, they make not a lot of sense even to those of us without law degrees). In fact, SCOTUS can be over-written, in effect, by the highly intelligent and knowledgeable constitutional scholars in Congress, two of whom are Sheldon Whitehouse and Jamie Raskin.
So for all the outrage, the purchase of Supreme Court Justices is akin to hiring a temp for your office.
So who else on a federal level can be bought? $$$money can and is poured into congressional races but all that money can do is attempt to influence voters. I’m aware of the reporting which credits Peter Thiel’s $$$$ for making J.D. Vance a senator but where’s the hard evidence how Ohio voters, who also vote for Sherrod Brown, were influenced by $$$$$ to vote for Vance? I think there’s a rhetorical term for that, involving causation: just because someone got a result he paid for doesn’t mean his money caused the result. And what has the fully-owned Vance done for Thiel? It’s all very iffy, this business of money in elections.
What we do see, though, is all the PACs and No Think Tanks amply financed by big money. When I see lists of them, I wonder what the founders — the Koch machine, for a big one — believe they’re accomplishing with all that money, with that spider’s web of “organizations.”
I’ve worked for a short list of very rich business people and aside from the original idea that got them rich, I have never seen any broad intelligence in them. So their grand idea of buying elections and diminishing our democracy may not exactly be a sign of brilliance. It may simply indicate that people who have obscene amounts of money are obsessed with buying power outside of their businesses, certain they’re smart enough to dominate the world.
Somebody should inform these rich guys that a 240-year-long democratic republic — “a divinely inspired gift from our forefathers,” as Rachel Maddow has said — maybe isn’t a fertile field for their Project 2025 style ambitions; they might do better in a monarchy, or dictatorship. Or on Mars.
Moreover, if you count up the money the obscenely rich are spending in politics and then compare the MAGA voter base in 2020 to the base today…well, what has all that money accomplished? Has it broadened what is called “the base”?
The only base I’ve noticed expanding is the vast majority of us.
To wit, “The Harris campaign received $200 million in donations after Biden’s endorsement, two-thirds of which came from first-time donors; 100,000 people signed up to volunteer and 2,000 applied for campaign jobs.” (The quotes are because I read it somewhere; forgot where; maybe the Times.)
When I see the numbers of individual, small-money donations, I read them as better than polls. I read them as fierce excitement and enthusiasm from regular voters like me. As a sort of pre-voting vote.
Last night, President Biden said, “There are a thousand billionaires in America.” All in all, it’s good to remember that no matter how much money those thousand oligarchists pour into our elections, each of them has…one vote. Per person, not per dollar.
Every one of the rest of us has one vote, too. And there are many more than a thousand of us. We are multi-millions.