Congressional Fair Elections Act 2009

Last month, Arlen Specter and Dick Durban in the Senate, and John Larson and Walter Jones in the House of Representatives introduced the Bi-Partisan Fair Elections Now Act (Fair Elections), a bill that would for the first time provide public funding for Congressional candidates. Welcoming its introduction, Nick Nyhart and David Donnelly, long time reform advocates, wrote that with its passage voters of average means would no longer "worry that their elected officials are indebted to deep-pocket funders with interests entirely separate from their own."[1]

Obviously this legislation will not be adopted without a hard fight. The special interests who benefit from the "pay to play" political system will not willingly concede defeat. A wide array of defenses will be mounted in support of the private funding system, including of course the argument that at a time of economic collapse, the last thing we should do is spend public money on politicians. Yet none of these arguments successfully counters the reality that today's system of private funding privileges the wealthy and thereby subverts democracy.

In fact the present economic crisis is largely the result of the political power Wall Street accumulated as a result of its massive political contributions. If Fair Elections were passed, the banks, hedge funds, insurance companies and all those who gamble in financial markets would find their power greatly curtailed and we would be all the better for it.

The Fair Elections Act is a hybrid plan. Like the "clean elections" systems present in Arizona, Maine, Connecticut, and elsewhere, it provides public funds to qualified office-seekers who volunteer to participate in the system. But unlike the full public funding systems present in those states, the Congressional bill permits an individual to contribute a donation of $100 or less during each of three separate stages of the electoral process (qualifying for participation in the system; running in a primary election; and competing in the general election). In the latter two stages candidates will receive four public dollars for every dollar raised from in-state contributors.

Fair Elections reduces the total amount of money any private contributor can give to candidates during an election cycle from $2,300 to $300. In exchange it provides a substantial grant of public funds and allows a candidate to accumulate private money in small donations.

Small donors are part of all systems of public funding.

These contributions are used as a means of testing the seriousness and viability of candidates. It is important to protect the public funding system against cranks with no real basis of political support. But in the state "clean elections" systems those qualifying donations do not go directly to the candidates. In contrast, with Fair Elections small donations play a dual role. They are used both to qualify for participation in the system and to accumulate campaign funds.

No violence to democratic norms would be involved with such a system if in fact small donors were representative of the American electorate. Their voluntary participation in the funding process would merely reflect the greater willingness of some citizens compared to others to participate in politics by making financial contributions. Unfortunately, however, the limited data that we have on the subject suggests that even small donors represent a relatively privileged stratum of the population.

In a 2006 survey of donors in five states, the Campaign Finance Institute compared the income levels of donors who made no political contributions with those who gave under $100 and with those who donated between $100 and $500. The differences were substantial. Even donors of $100 or less were notably more affluent than non-donors. While almost half (48.3 percent) of non-donors earned less than $40,000, only 11.2 percent fell into that income category among $100 or less donors. The gap is even greater in the study's medium donor category. The data are not cut off at the $300 level used by Fair Elections, but among the people who gave between $100 and $500, only 4.9 percent earned less than $40,000. And four-fifths of these donors earned at least $75,000.[2]

There is of course no danger that small donors - even assuming that they contribute the maximum $300 allowed - will play the same role in the Fair Elections system that big donors do at present. Nevertheless the four to one match does mean that private donations will remain important. Because that is so and because small donors tend to be relatively high income earners, Fair Elections will allow wealthy people to exercise more political influence than the rest of the population.

The fight for Congressional public financing will be protracted. Congressional hearings have not yet even been scheduled. The content of the Fair Elections bills therefore can and should be subjected to intense debate. That debate should emanate not only from the side that opposes egalitarian funding. There should as well be vigorous intervention from those who think that the retreat from the more democratic funding of "clean elections" models is undesirable. Fair Elections should be modified to more closely resemble the "clean elections" systems that at the state level have proved to be both effective and popular.
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[1] Nick Nyhart and David Donnelly, "Fair Elections Now!" The Nation, March 26, 2009.
[2] These data are taken from Wesley Y. Joe, Michael J. Malbin, Clyde Wilcox, Peter W. Brusoe and Jamie P. Pimlott, "Do Small Donors Improve Representation? Some Answers from Recent Gubernatorial and State Legislative Elections," (Washington DC: Campaign Finance Institute, 2008) Table 1.

Comments

[seanparnell]

The "fair elections" proposal is simply welfare for politicians, giving them handouts to finance their political campaigns.

Although a popular myth, there's little reality behind the charge that "the present economic crisis is largely the result of the political power Wall Street accumulated as a result of its massive political contributions." It may perplex and even enrage many that Congress deregated or failed to regulate certain parts of the financial system, but their actions (or lack thereoff) have nothing to do with campaign contributions.

You may recall that in 1994 a Republican majority was elected to Congress, saying things like "deregulation is good" and "leave the markets alone" and similar things? And there was a president making noises about being a "New Democrat" and "the era of big government is over" and such?

Contributions didn't sway them to pursue the policies they did, because they already believed in those policies. It's like accusing Carl Levin of doing the bidding of the UAW because of campaign contributions, ignoring the obvious fact that a sizeable chunk of his voters are UAW members and he undoubtedly believes that their priorities and interests are the same as his.

Yet you are surprised that a Congress and a President elected to do such things did them, and can only point to campaign contributions to explain it? Please.

Sean Parnell
President
Center for Competitive Politics
http://www.campaignfreedom.org
sparnell@c­ampaignfre­edom.org

[jaymandle]

My article contained an error concerning contributions limits. Under current law an individual may contribute $2,400 in the primary and $2,400 in the general election for each election cycle.

Jay Mandle

[seanparnell]

I'd say the article contained a lot more errors than that. ;->

You're right about the likelihood of who will be contributing to these "fair election" candidates. My organization did a study of who gave to New Jersey's "clean elections" experiment in '07, we found it was pretty much the same folks as who would have otherwise given - business people, professionals, education professionals. More details here:
http://www.campaignfreedom.org/research/detail/special-report-no-1-special-interests-partisan-pouts-and-the-usual-suspects

Also, to the extent that this bill is being sold as a way to somehow get "special interests" out of politics, it's not going to happen. As our research (above) and reports from Arizona confirm, candidates can just outsource their fundraising to organized interest groups, letting them raise the needed small contributions that. Hard to believe a politician who's supposedly indebted to an interest group for their PAC contribution is somehow going to forget who it was who went out and collected money for them.

Also, pretty much only incumbents, celebrity candidates, and those backed by the party establishment or well-organized interest groups are going to be able to qualify. I don't think this squares with the idea that taxpayer-financed political campaigns are going to somehow change who is elected to office. Tell me, how is an "outsider" Congressional candidate going to collect 1,500 contributions totaling $50,000?

Sean Parnell
President
Center for Competitive Politics
http://www.campaignfreedom.org
sparnell@c­ampaignfre­edom.org

[LeftRight]

One minor point. You misspelled my Senator's name. It's Dick Durbin, not Dick Durban.