Biden endorses bill to disclose Super PAC donors

532

 

How do you figure? 435 in the HoR and 100 in the Senate.

 

Nah, it’s mostly the conservative court and of course the corrupt republicans in congress.

We had campaign finance rules. A conservative special interest group sued and the conservatives on the court sided with Citizens United. Essentially declaring corporate $$$ as speech. Good luck putting that genie back in the bottle! Aside from the fact corrupt Republicans will obviously never sign back on to campaign finance rules, the current court is far right of the conservative majority that decided Citizens United vs. FEC. Even if the law passed, this is one area it’s almost certain John Roberts would lead the 6-3 majority to strike down the law.

 

So again, only one side is at fault ... More than a bit short sighted

 

When “one side” sues to overturn decades of precedent, “one side” of the court finds that argument compelling enough to invalidate good law, and when “one side” of the Congress votes to block laws that would fundamentally try to get $$$ out of politics. One side owns it. Yeah, that’s pretty much how that works.

 

Sorry, this is where I get off the discussion. Not interested in "debating" with someone who only sees one side as the villain in this broken system. All that does is perpetuate partisan outrage. A waste of my time

 

You proposed an idea that I imagine most, if not all, Democrats would support. But it's also an idea that the Republicans on the Supreme "Court" made clear is unconstitutional. And they achieved that result by reversing precedents written by liberal justices like Thurgood Marshall. So yes, there is a clear villain here who broke the system and won't let us fix it.

 

Sorry I meant to say 533. Bernie Sanders has always been against them and has spoken publicly about it

 

As long as the law is what it is in the post Citizens United world, of course the dems aren’t going to tie one hand behind their back.

What is telling is which party raises the issue of campaign finance reform and who votes which way on the issue. It’s not a mystery and it’s not a “both sides” thing. It’s clear what each “side” stands for based on the completely partisan split. What Republican since John McCain has even entertained campaign finance reform? @DesertGator; I’ll wait.

 

I don’t know about Biden’s idea of barring anonymity, but I actually agree with the courts that your idea seems unconstitutional. While attractive sounding, I don’t see how we can state a private enterprise shouldn’t be able to donate money to who it wants to.

A possible, though clearly unlikely, alternate option would be to reduce the power of the individuals in government. Then the returns on investment would be lowered, making huge donations less attractive. Of course I don’t see either side going for this.

 

The problem though is that it's created a system where (almost always), candidates win on how much they spend instead of on the merits of their platform. In truth, years ago I advocated the idea Biden mentioned about to make elections publicly funded at a set amount. Suspend "private" donations entirely and "level the playing field". While I disagree with a lot he says and does, this is one of those areas he and I line up.

 

The big upset was the primary win for sure (wouldn't have mattered in that district who was running in the other party ticket). With her race I think it was much more about the timing of voting incumbents out vs the message, but she caught lightning in a bottle for sure.

Either way, that's much more the outlier than the rule as far as campaigns are concerned.

 

No doubt she was able to do something most Democrats couldn't and that was bring out the younger vote. That said, I wouldn't have voted for her but I respect the work she put in to get there.

 

Oh I agree on the problem. I’m just trying to see a safe and constitutional solution. Even if we somehow got a law passed like the one you describe, we have to grapple with the fact that PACs often don’t have direct contact to candidates. Like the current NIL system in college, these monetary entities are *supposedly* isolated from direction from the candidates/universities.

Political speech must be free, and I am having a hard time envisioning an objective criteria by which the government can determine what kind of speech is to be barred. The last thing we want to do is to give a partisan DOJ the power to quell opposing speech.

 

Frame it as an accounting exercise to keep additional money out of it. Think "Brewster Millions". Receipts needed for everything. Anyone found to have pulled money that wasn't authorized is disqualified. It'll only happen once if the rules are that draconian.

 

Most research suggests that money doesn't win federal elections. It correlates with winning, because successful candidates are able to pull in more donations, but it doesn't do much to cause the win in the first place.

How Money Affects Elections

Money is certainly strongly associated with political success. But, “I think where you have to change your thinking is that money causes winning,” said Richard Lau, professor of political science at Rutgers. “I think it’s more that winning attracts money.”

That’s not to say money is irrelevant to winning, said Adam Bonica, a professor of political science at Stanford who also manages the Database on Ideology, Money in Politics, and Elections. But decades of research suggest that money probably isn’t the deciding factor in who wins a general election, and especially not for incumbents. Most of the research on this was done in the last century, Bonica told me, and it generally found that spending didn’t affect wins for incumbents and that the impact for challengers was unclear. Even the studies that showed spending having the biggest effect, like one that found a more than 6 percent increase in vote share for incumbents, didn’t demonstrate that money causes wins. In fact, Bonica said, those gains from spending likely translate to less of an advantage today, in a time period where voters are more stridently partisan. There are probably fewer and fewer people who are going to vote a split ticket because they liked your ad.

Instead, he and Lau agreed, the strong raw association between raising the most cash and winning probably has more to do with big donors who can tell (based on polls or knowledge of the district or just gut-feeling woo-woo magic) that one candidate is more likely to win — and then they give that person all their money.

***

Take, for example, the study that is probably the nation’s only truly real-world political advertising field experiment. During Rick Perry’s 2006 re-election campaign for Texas governor, a team of researchers convinced Perry’s campaign to run ads in randomly assigned markets and then tracked the effect of those ads over time using surveys. Advertising did produce a pro-Perry response in the markets that received the treatment. But that bump fizzled fast. Within a week after ads stopped running, it was like no one had ever seen them.​

 

Hard to believe but at one time conservatives actually supported the disclosure of donors to political campaigns and candidates. They argued that caps on contributions should be eliminated as long as the identities of contributors was disclosed.
This is directly from the 2000 Republican Party platform:

The principal cure for the ills of democracy is greater participation in the political process by more citizens. To that end, we have one guiding principle in the development of laws to regulate campaigns: Will any particular proposal encourage or restrict the energetic engagement of Americans in elections? Governor Bush's agenda for more honest and more open politics meets that standard. It will:

Require full and timely disclosure on the Internet of all campaign contributions — so the media and the public can immediately know who is giving how much to whom.​

2000 Republican Party Platform | The American Presidency Project

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