Republic, Lost_ How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It - Lawrence Lessig [174]
24. Ibid., 23.
25. Ibid., 3–4.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid., 52.
28. Ibid., 50, quoting Benjamin Parke DeWitt.
29. This recognition was born at the turn of the century, as “muckrakers” made the corporate control of politics tangible and widely known for the first time. As Richard McCormick describes, “[t]hat businessmen systematically corrupted politics was incendiary knowledge; given the circumstances of 1905, it could hardly have failed to set off an explosion.” “The Discovery That Business Corrupts Politics: A Reappraisal of the Origins of Progressivism,” 247, 270. Progressives split on what to do about this fundamental fact of American politics—with the followers of Roosevelt arguing for bigger government to match the influence of business, and followers of Wilson/Brandeis arguing for stronger laws to limit the size of business. Whether any solution was possible, TR’s was particularly naive. But my point is not the wisdom in the remedies; it is the commonality of the motivation. See also Brooks, Corruption in American Politics and Life (1910) (pointing to campaign contributions as the source of corruption, and advancing a small-dollar alternative). For an outstanding early history of the influence of money in elections, see Anthony Corrado, The New Campaign Finance Source Book (2004), chap. 1, available at link #204.
30. Wallis, “The Concept of Systematic Corruption in American History,” 48.
31. Ibid.
32. Huffington, Third World America, 58–59; Hacker and Pierson, Winner-Take-All Politics, 51.
33. See Barry Ritholtz, Top 10 Hedge Fund Managers 2009 Salary, The Big Picture (April 1, 2010), available at link #75; Hacker and Pierson, Winner-Take-All Politics, 228.
34. Kaiser, So Damn Much Money, 267. See also Hacker and Pierson, Winner-Take-All Politics, 207.
35. Ibid., 267.
36. Ibid., 272.
37. Ibid., 264.
38. “Tom DeLay Convicted of Money Laundering,” FOXNews.com (Nov. 24, 2010), available at link #205.
39. Kaiser, So Damn Much Money, 270–71.
40. Ibid., 149.
41. Ibid., 346.
42. Center for Responsive Politics, available at link #206 (last visited June 21, 2011) (For the 2010 election cycle, independent expenditures totaled $210,912,167. Just four years prior, in 2006, independent expenditures totaled $37,394,589).
43. It is for this reason that I am skeptical of the utility of efforts to try to “reverse” Citizens United by denying corporate personhood. The root problem is an influence that drives representatives away from a focus on “the People alone.” Even if a reform were to achieve the reversal of corporate personhood, that wouldn’t by itself change the existing skew of influence.
44. Of course not all courts are this enlightened. In Miles v. City of Augusta, 710 F.2d 1542 (11th Cir. 1983), the Court refused “to hear a claim that” a talking cat’s First Amendment rights had been infringed, finding the cat not a “person” under the Fourteenth Amendment.
45. 494 US 652, 660 (1990).
46. Eric Uslaner has a compelling argument about how corruption relates to inequality. See Eric M. Uslaner, Corruption, Inequality and Trust, Handbook on Social Capital, Gert Tinggaard Svendsen and Gunnar Lind, eds. (2011). But the argument is causal. My point here is conceptual: the corruption of representative democracy is distinct from inequality in speech or resources within a representative democracy.
47. Birnbaum, The Money Men, 34.
48. Wallis, “The Concept of Systematic Corruption,” 37.
49. John G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 1985), 78.
50. Not every Framer was necessarily convinced of this need. Indeed, Alexander Hamilton, faced with the real task of inspiring a nation to pay its bills (both the government to pay its debtors, and the people to pay their taxes), thought the British form of “corruption” may actually be quite useful for a republic.