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By Root 962 0

’t mean free to do whatever it wanted. Instead, as I described in chapter 10, an “independent Congress” was to be one that was properly “dependent upon the People alone.”16 That dependency was to be enforced by rapid and regular elections (every two years for the House). It was to be protected, for example, by blocking the executive from making appointments to Congress, and blocking foreign princes from giving gifts to Congress. And more. The Constitution is filled with devices designed to ensure that Congress track the truth a democracy intends it to track: the people. An “independent Congress” is thus a representative body that remains dependent “upon the People alone.”

That independence gets corrupted when a conflicting dependency develops within Congress. A dependency that draws Congress away from the dependence that was intended. A dependency that makes Congress less responsive to the people, because more responsive to it. In this second sense of corruption, it is not individuals who are corrupted within a well-functioning institution. It is instead an institution that has been corrupted, because the pattern of influence operating upon individuals within that institution draws them away from the influence intended.17

But aren’t you just talking about a fancier version of quid pro quo corruption? you ask. Or, put better: If we eliminated all quid pro quo corruption, wouldn’t we also eliminate all dependence corruption?

No. Dependence corruption is not the aggregate of many smaller cases of quid pro quo corruption. The two may overlap, but they are not coextensive. To solve the one is not to solve the other. To regulate one is certainly not to regulate the other.

To see this critical point (critical to the argument of this book at least), consider just one example:

Imagine that a company, call it Bexxon, let it be known that it intended to spend $1 million in any congressional district to defeat any representative who believed that the federal government should enact climate change legislation. This spending would be independent of any candidate’s campaign. As the Supreme Court has defined it, because it occurs in “the absence of prearrangement and coordination,”18 it would not fall within the range of speech properly regulable as campaign contributions. It is an “independent expenditure.”

If a representative learned of that intent, and decided to shape-shift and adjust her view about the need for climate change legislation—for example, by dropping a pledge to support climate change legislation from her website, or removing her sponsorship on a prominent bill—there’d be little doubt that that change was because of Bexxon’s expressed intent. But there’d also be little doubt that that change was not an instance of quid pro quo corruption. There’s no agreement. There’s no act to carry out an agreement. There’s simply an expressed intent, and an action in response to that intent that preserves the political position of a politically vulnerable representative.

Similarly, it’s obvious the motive of this representative in adjusting her view is not the motive of Randy “Duke” Cunningham or William J. Jefferson. The question she asked herself was not whether and how to benefit her own pecuniary interest. It was instead how to benefit her own political interest. Her focus was on the best means to avoid an enormous influx of campaign funding that might well succeed in bringing her political life to an end.

I’ve already described how this shape-shifting is harmful to our republic, even though the thing the shifting tries to secure—more money for political speech—is pure. If there are compromises to ensure the funding, the compromise is the harm. If there is distortion to secure the funding, the distortion is the harm.

That there is distortion—or, again, more precisely, that it would be completely and absolutely reasonable to believe there is distortion—is the argument I made in chapter 10. “The funders” are not “the People”; why would you expect the dance necessary to attract “the funders” to be the same dance necessary to