Republic, Lost_ How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It - Lawrence Lessig [167]
106. Joseph E. Stiglitz, “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%,” Vanity Fair, May 2011, 2, available at link #127.
107. Tyler Cowen, “The Inequality That Matters,” The American Interest (Jan.–Feb. 2011), 4–5, available at link #128.
108. Huffington, Third World America, 17–18.
109. Sarah Anderson et al., “Executive Excess 2008: How Average Taxpayers Subsidize Runaway Pay,” 15th Annual CEO Compensation Survey, Institute for Policy Studies and United for a Fair Economy (Aug. 25, 2008), 1, available at link #129.
110. Barry Lynn, Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 2010), 130.
111. Ibid., 130–31.
112. Hacker and Pierson, Winner-Take-All Politics, 151.
113. Gilens, “Inequality and Democratic Responsiveness,” 778, 793–94.
114. Kaiser, So Damn Much Money, 355.
115. Kirkpatrick v. Preisler, 394 U.S. 526, 530 (1969).
116. Federal Election Commission: Contribution Limits 2009–10, available at link #130.
117. Birnbaum, The Money Men, 72.
118. This point is emphasized powerfully in Edward B. Foley, “Equal-Dollars-per-Voter: A Constitutional Principle of Campaign Finance,” Columbia Law Review 94 (1994): 1204, 1226–27 (“Voting is only the final stage of the electoral process. It is preceded not only by the agenda-formation stage… but also by… the “argumentative stage.”… [W]e must acknowledge that a citizen does not have equal input in the electoral process if she is denied an equal opportunity to participate in [these earlier stages]”). It is also the insight that animates David Strauss’s. See David A. Strauss, “Corruption, Equality, and Campaign Finance Reform,” Columbia Law Review 94 (1994): 1373 (“[E]ach dollar contribution… is a fraction of an expected vote”). Strauss pushes the analogy (with all of its strengths and weaknesses) directly to the Court’s redistricting cases. In my view, what’s missing from this analysis is the recognition of how equality (and not just corruption) is derivative from the idea of the proper dependency within a representative democracy—upon “the People alone.”
119. Ansolabehere, de Figueiredo, and Snyder, “Why Is There So Little Money in U.S. Politics?” (2003), 125–26.
120. Gilens, “Inequality and Democratic Responsiveness,” 778, 794.
121. Atif Mian, Amir Sufi, and Francesco Trebbi, “The Political Economy of the U.S. Mortgage Default Crisis,” National Bureau of Economic Research (2010), 4–6.
122. Nancy L. Rosenblum, On the Side of the Angels (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008), 251.
123. Ibid., 252.
124. Birnbaum, The Money Men, 70.
125. Hacker and Pierson, Winner-Take-All Politics, 252.
126. Ibid., 252, quoting Naftali Bendavid, The Thumpin’: How Rahm Emanuel and the Democrats Learned to Be Ruthless and Ended the Republican Revolution (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 157.
127. Schram, “Speaking Freely,” 19.
128. Birnbaum, The Money Men, 3–4.
129. Zach Carter and Ryan Grim, “Swiped: Banks, Merchants and Why Washington Doesn’t Work for You,” Huffington Post (April 28, 2011), available at link #131.
130. Ibid.
131. Baumgartner, Berry, Hojnacki, Kimball, Leech, Lobbying and Policy Change, 257, 214. Baumgartner and his colleagues craft an extensive empirical analysis of the relationship between lobbying and policy outcomes. The short form of the conclusion is that a “direct correlation between money and outcomes… is simply not there” (214). “While no one doubts that money matters, and while there is no question that the wealthy enjoy greater access,” that doesn’t mean, they argue, that the wealthy “can necessarily write their ticket.” But this conclusion follows because of the relationship between short-term lobbying and long-term structures. While “the wealthy” “often do not” “win in Washington,” that’s “not because they lack power, but because the status quo already reflects that power” (194, 20). The status quo “reflects a rough equilibrium of power… and a quite unfair equilibrium… with much greater benefits going to the privileged and wealthy than to