Republic, Lost_ How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It - Lawrence Lessig [72]
Of course no one is saying members of Congress are completely unresponsive to their constituents. That wasn’t Gilens’s point. It’s not mine either. Indeed, there are plenty of data to suggest that in many cases there is a strong tie between what “the People” want and what Congress does. So while Mian and his colleagues do find that mortgage campaign contributions have a rising and significant effect on voting patterns, they also demonstrate that members were also responsive both to voter preferences and to special-interest campaign contributions.121 No doubt, if our republic was meant to be dependent upon the people, there is much in the data to show that we are still, in important ways, a republic dependent upon the people. But not—and here is the critical point—upon, as the Federalists put it, “the People alone.”
The question, however, is not whether Congress sometimes gets it right, any more than the question with an alcoholic bus driver is whether he sometimes drives sober. The question is why we allow Congress to often get it wrong. Even if you think the system is bent just slightly, it is still a bent system.
“But,” defenders of the status quo argue, “don’t unions or the AARP also have unequal influence? Is there something corrupt about that?”
The answer depends on the source of the influence. No doubt, there was a day when a union could reliably promise candidates millions of votes. That power translated into important political influence. But that is power that comes directly from votes. It is precisely the power that the intended dependency of our democracy, upon the people alone, was meant to credit. My point isn’t that democracy requires equal influence. It is that the influence that is to express itself, however unequally, is the influence of votes in an election.
The same point applies to political parties. Across our history, political parties have had an enormous influence in controlling the direction and character of public life. That control has been a concern to many, especially liberals. “ ‘The system’ is robust,” Harvard professor Nancy Rosenblum has put it. “Candidates are dependent on parties, even apart from funding.”122 As she quotes Lincoln Steffens: “ ‘Isn’t our corrupt government, after all, representative?’ Steffens asked. He records a Philadelphia politician’s puzzled confession: ‘I’m loyal to my ward and to my—own, and yet—Well, there’s something wrong with me, and I’d like to know: what is it?’ ”123
Parties, like unions, exercise their power in two ways. First, by mobilizing votes. Second, by concentrating economic power. The former is not troubling to the dependency theory of democracy. Power through votes is just what the doctor ordered. It is the power through money that raises the problem here. Avoiding “unequal influence” is not the objective. Preserving electoral influence is.
“Isn’t that,” the defenders continue, “just what money does? No one literally buys an election (anymore at least). The only thing money does is buy speech that helps persuade voters to one side in an election over another. If you don’t object to unions driving members to the polls (literally, on buses), why would you object to spending money to try to persuade people to go to the polls (through television ads)?”
Great point. There’s no doubt that the purpose of campaign funds is to persuade. And there’s also no doubt that those funds persuade differently. Some of that persuasion comes from the television or radio ads a campaign is able to buy—getting a voter to support the candidate. Some of that persuasion comes from the ability to convince a challenger that a challenge is just not worth it—“There’s no way we could raise enough money to overcome his war chest of one million dollars.” All of that persuasion is benign from the perspective of a democracy dependent upon the people alone. Seen in this way, in other words, money is just part of a campaign to get votes.
The word just in that sentence, however, shouldn’t be passed over too quickly. For one thing the current system plainly does