The Victoria (Texas) Advocate is not usually considered one of the nation’s leading or most influential newspapers. Which is why it is such a perfect example for today’s post.
Increasingly, average citizens recognize that our experiment with campaign finance “reform” has been a failure. Advocates of regulation have responded not by reconsidering their premises and assumptions, but by plumping for “public” funding of campaigns, by which they mean government funding. If efforts to regulate private money have failed to clean up our politics, if it is true that money will find a way around limits, then the only alternative, they argue (sometimes with a feigned attitude of deep consternation that it has come to this last resort), is “full” public funding of campaigns. The argument has a superficial appeal, and that brings us back to the Victoria Advocate, which published this week an editorial emblematic of how reformers would like Americans to think about government funding of campaigns – as a simple, easily invoked solution to the obviously nefarious influence of “big money” in politics.
The Advocate, a McClatchy paper, expresses concern that a Florida doctor has made $150,000 in independent expenditures to support the reelection of Republican congressman Ron Paul. As the Advocate describes it:
“The McCain-Feingold Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 left a major loophole that both major political parties and countless deep-pocket special interests, both individuals and groups, are exploiting. If they have no official connections to the campaigns, these people and organizations can spend as much unregulated “soft money” as they want to affect the outcome of those races.”
This is, readers are told, “an example of what is wrong with campaigns for federal office and how they are financed.” But what to do? The editorial admits that placing more requirements on independent expenditures and “527” groups will merely lead the money to reappear elsewhere in the system. Thus, it demonstrates a proper skepticism that more regulation can eliminate this influence, assuming we would want to. So far, so good. Read the editorial and you will, I think, agree that the quality of this little Texas paper puts the New York Times’ superficial sloganeering to shame. And then things go off the rails. The Advocate’s solution?
“[P]ublic financing of federal campaigns. That is the only way to remove – largely, perhaps entirely – deep-pocket special interests such as Ron Paul’s wealthy Florida sugar daddy from the political process. That is the only way to return elections to the control of the vast majority of Americans of only average means… .”
Well, let’s assume that in fact the “vast majority of Americans” do not control elections (although it appears to be the rule that the person with the most votes is declared the winner). How will public financing change that? If you cannot, as the Advocate recognizes, keep large spenders out of campaigns by regulation now, because money will find other ways to get into races, how does having the government provide campaign funding change the equation? It only changes the equation if we ban the exact type of independent spending that the Advocate doesn’t like, but which the Advocate has just admitted cannot be effectively banned (and which, the Advocate fails to note, the Supreme Court has held cannot be ineffectively banned without violating the Constitution). Ron Paul had spent well over $1 million by mid-October. Presumably, his Florida supporter felt that wasn’t enough. Why would that change if Paul’s $1.4 million came from government taxes, rather than from voluntary contributions? And how would having the government give Congressman Paul his campaign funds “return elections to the control of the vast majority of Americans of only average means?” Would they be invited to run the campaign? Or would each American be given $150,000 to use for independent expenditures? Would even that solve the issue, if Congressman Paul’s physician supporter still decided to spend an additional $150,000?
It is particularly odd that this should come up in the context of Congressman Paul, a libertarian who is widely recognized as perhaps the single most ideological voter now serving in Congress. The idea that Paul is influenced by campaign contributions is laughable. Agree or disagree with his principles, it’s pretty tough to argue that he blows with the wind. After more than 16 years in Congress, we would hope that his constituents have a pretty good idea of what Ron Paul thinks.
All this is why I sometimes call the argument for government financed campaigns (or “public” financing, or “Clean Elections”) a “fraud.” It is a false promise. Since the Supreme Court’s 1976 decision in Buckley v. Valeo, the hottest campaign finance “scandals” and most controversial restrictions have not concerned direct contributions to candidates, but independent expenditures, especially when those expenditures do not specifically support the candidate’s election or defeat, but rather discuss issues associated with the candidate. “Clean elections,” or “public financing,” really has no answer to this problem. The same issues of circumvention, and alleged influence and inequality, exist with or without the government paying the candidate’s own bills. Government financing of campaigns addresses neither the equality concerns nor the influence/corruption concerns of the reformers who argue for it.
In that respect, it is a fraud on the voters.
