Republic, Lost_ How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It - Lawrence Lessig [39]
CHAPTER 9
Why So Damn Much Money
Midway through his extraordinary book So Damn Much Money (2009), Robert Kaiser, associate editor and senior correspondent at the Washington Post, reports a conversation with Joe Rothstein, campaign manager for former Alaska senator Mike Gravel. As Rothstein tells Kaiser:
Money has been a part of American politics forever, on occasion—in the Gilded Age or the Harding administration, for example—much more blatantly than recently. But…: “the scale of it has just gotten way out of hand.” The money may have come in brown paper bags in earlier eras, but the politicians needed, and took, much less of it than they take through more formal channels today.1
If we’re going to understand the corruption that is our government, we need first to understand this change. What explains the explosion in campaign cash? What are its consequences? No doubt, things cost more today than they did in 1970. But the rise in campaign spending wildly outpaces the rate of inflation.2 Between 1974 and 2008 “the average amount it took to run for reelection to the House went from $56,000 to more than $1.3 million.”3 In 1974 the total spent by all candidates for Congress (both House and Senate) was $77 million. By 1982 that number was $343 million—a 450 percent increase in eight years.4 By 2010 it was $1.8 billion—a 525 percent increase again.5
Why? And how did this rise affect how Congress does its work?
To answer these questions, we need to review a bit of recent history. There have been real changes in the competitiveness of American democracy that help account for the increase in the demand for campaign cash. This increase in demand in turn inspired a change in how campaign cash gets supplied. And that change in supply, I will argue, has radically altered how our democracy functions.
Demand for Campaign Cash
If the political history of the twentieth century can be divided into three periods—a period before FDR, the period of FDR to Reagan, and the period of Reagan to Bush II—our picture of Congress, as taught to us in universities and as studied most extensively by scholars and political scientists, is the Congress of the middle period, FDR to Reagan. The Congress that gave us the New Deal. The Congress that enacted the Civil Rights Act. The Congress that would have impeached President Nixon.
This was a Democratic Congress. In the sixty-plus years between 1933 and 1995, Democrats controlled the House of Representatives in all but four years. It controlled the Senate in all but ten. If anything happened during this period, it was because the Democrats supported it. When things didn’t happen, it was because they didn’t support it strongly enough.
For most of this period, no sane Republican could imagine taking permanent control of both houses of Congress. Like runners before Roger Bannister cracked the four-minute mile, most Republicans, and most Democrats, simply believed that such an accomplishment was politically impossible. The parties had a certain character. The nation had a certain character, too. Those two characters were going to produce a political world in which Democrats controlled and Republicans cooperated. That was the “nature” of politics in America.
In the late 1960s, nature changed. The seeds to that change were sown by a Democratic president, elected with the second-largest contested Electoral College vote in American history: Lyndon Baines Johnson.
Johnson is likely the twentieth century’s most important politician. Pulling himself up from almost nothing, by means none would be proud to confess, Johnson became a key leader of the Democrats in Congress. He knew better