Democracy for a few

The US Supreme Court continues to replace the maxim “one man, one vote” with “one man, one wallet.”

Last week, in a 5-4 decision, our highest court removed another barrier to campaign spending by eliminating the aggregate limit on campaign contributions.

In order to understand what that means, we need a crash course in campaign finance.

In 1974, Congress placed significant limits on how much individuals, PACs and political parties could contribute to campaigns.
In 1976, the Supreme Court issued a ruling, Buckley v. Valeo, that split campaign spending into two camps.

According to the ruling, political contributions are funds given to a particular candidate, while expenditures are funds spent in an election but not on behalf of a particular candidate — political party or PAC spending, for instance.

Under that decision, contributions could be regulated out of an interest in preventing corruption or the appearance of corruption, but expenditures were a form of expression protected by the First Amendment.

As a result, the court upheld the limits on contributions and aggregate spending but removed the limit on independent expenditures.

Before last week you could donate $2,600 to individual federal candidates — up to an aggregate limit of $48,600 — and $5,000 to any committee — up to an aggregate limit of $74,600.

Those aggregate limits are no more.

Now the average American finally has something to do with that extra $100,000 sitting in the bank.

Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the majority opinion, argued that the government’s interest in preventing corruption or its appearance was absent in these aggregate limits by presenting a definition of corruption so absurdly narrow it might as well not exist at all.

“Government regulation may not target the general gratitude a candidate may feel toward those who support him or his allies, or the political access such support may afford,” wrote Roberts.

Under his definition, the literal purchase of political influence is not corruption, but “a central feature of democracy.”

Only in America could a provision specifically designed to limit the influence of an elite few be called undemocratic. The expansion of influence for an already-enfranchised elite cannot be a central feature of a system predicated on equality before government.

Theorists have attempted to define democracy for hundreds of years.
Some call it the rule of the majority, some political equality. Alexis de Tocqueville, describing the nascent United States, called it the equality of conditions — an holistic, egalitarian state-of-being that expanded beyond just the political sphere into the social and cultural realm as well.

Roberts’ “central feature of democracy” is clearly abhorrent to all these definitions. It is obviously not the rule of the majority, directly in conflict with the creation of political equality, and clearly even further from some pervasive equality of condition.

I can think of only one idea of democracy consistent with Roberts’. Joseph Schumpeter argued in 1942 that democracy means you and I have virtually no influence on our democratic politics, that our opinions are essentially determined for us by an elite who compete amongst themselves for our support.

If that idea doesn’t bother you, perhaps Roberts’ argument isn’t so bad after all.

­dlreed@indiana.edu