Republic, Lost_ How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It - Lawrence Lessig [71]
Indeed, it is here that the most striking weirdness of our current system makes itself plain. Our Constitution has been interpreted to require an almost obsessive attention to equality in voting. Judges are required to ensure that the weight of my vote for my member of Congress is “as nearly as practicable” equal to the weight of your vote for your member of Congress.115
That constitutional obsession ensures a kind of extreme equality on two days every two years—the primary (where there is one) and the general election. On those two days, the weight of my vote—the thing that was to ensure the dependency the Framers intended—is equal to yours. Both equal, down to the fraction of a percent equal.
Yet in between those two days, I, and thousands of others, also “vote” in another kind of election: the money election. In that election, I get to vote as often as I want, so long as my total “votes” to any particular candidate don’t exceed $5,000; and $117,000 for all candidates, PACs, and political parties in an election cycle.116 The limits don’t apply to independent expenditures. So if I’m George Soros or the Koch brothers, I can spend an unlimited amount in addition to any amount I can contribute. And because of the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. FEC (2010), discussed more later, corporations, too, have an unlimited right to spend as much as they want promoting or opposing any candidate.
In this second election—the election for these dollar votes—there is absolutely no concern about equality. For this competing dependency that we have allowed to evolve within the economy of influence of Congress, there is no effort to ensure that the forces within that economy are in any sense divided equally among citizens. Instead, this competing dependency gives some in our society an advantage over the rest in our society.
It is as if on Election Day, there were two ballots cast. In one ballot, every citizen got one vote. In the other ballot, every citizen got as many votes as he could buy—up to 4,800, with each vote costing a dollar. Now, even if you gave the first ballot the presumptive control of the result—maybe you weight the two ballots, with 90 percent for the one-person, one-vote ballot, and only 10 percent for the buy-as-many-votes-as-you-want-up-to-4,800 ballot—there would still be something bizarre and illicit in this two-ballot procedure. As journalist Jeffrey Birnbaum puts it, “Moneyed constituents possess higher status than constituents who merely vote.”117 And government policy is perfectly consistent with the effects that one would predict, given the different influence this system permits.118
This, you may recall, was precisely the way that Ansolabehere and his colleagues—the scholars most skeptical about the effect of money on politics—suggested that money may still be buying results. Again, as I quoted them at the start of this chapter:
To raise sufficient funds, candidates might skew policies in ways preferred by donors. Campaign contributions might therefore act like weighted votes. And contributors, who are disproportionately wealthy, might have different policy preferences than the median voter.119
The evidence is pretty strong, at least for us citizens, that this is precisely what is happening.
Gilens ends his powerful essay by noting, “[T]here has never been a democratic society in which citizens’ influence over government policy was unrelated to their financial resources.” True enough. The troubling truth is in the final sentence to that paragraph: “But… a government that is democratic in form but is in practice only responsive to its most affluent citizens is a democracy in name only.”120
Again, we should be clear about the scope of Gilens’s claim here: He is speaking of cases where the views of the affluent conflict with the views of the majority. In that context, this