• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 854 0

is filter out a wide range of people who might otherwise be plausible and powerful candidates for Congress.124 Under the current system, the ability to raise money is a necessary condition to getting party support. As Hacker and Pierson report about the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, “If a candidate proved a good fund-raiser, the DCCC would provide support…. If not, the committee would shut him out.”125 The point was reportedly made quite clear by Rahm Emanuel when he was chairman of the DCCC: “The first third of your campaign is money, money, money. The second third is money, money, and press. And the last third is votes, press, and money.”126

The more important point, however, is not about what the money does. It’s about what has to be done to get the money. The effect of the money might be (democratically) benign. But what is done to secure that money is not necessarily benign.

To miss this point is to betray the Robin Hood fallacy: the fact that the loot was distributed justly doesn’t excuse the means taken to secure it. Take an extreme case to make this critical point: Imagine a lobbyist signaled to a congressman that he could ensure $1 million in campaign funds so long as the congressman delivered a $10 million earmark for the lobbyist’s client. Even if the $1 million is for the benign purpose of persuasion, there is an obvious problem in the deal made to secure it. The distortion is in the deal, not in the way the money is spent. The problem comes from the distortion necessary to secure the deal, not from the effect of the money spent in a campaign.

Of course, in this example the deal is a crime. And I’ve already said I don’t think such crime happens (much). But the same point is true even if we substitute the more benign (as in legal) dance of the gift economy I described in the previous chapter for the quid pro quo game. Here again: If we assume the congressman has shape-shifted himself in all sorts of predictable ways for the purpose of ensuring funds for his campaign, even if that shape-shifting dance is not illegal, and even though the money he secures gets spent for the wholly positive purpose of persuading people in an election, that doesn’t acquit the shape-shifting. For, again, the problem is not the money; the problem is the distortion created to produce the money. Senator Wyche Fowler (D-Ga.; 1987–1993) tells a related story that makes the same point:

The brutal fact that we all agonize over is that if you get two calls and one is from a constituent who wants to complain about the Veterans Administration mistreating her father, for the 10th time, and one is from somebody who is going to give you a party and raise $10,000, you call back the contributor. And nobody likes that. There’s no way to justify it. Except that you rationalize that you have to have money or you can’t campaign. You’re not in the game.127

There’s nothing wrong with the effect the $10,000 will have. Nor is there anything wrong with the member calling back the contributor. The wrong here—tiny in the scale of things but standing for the more general wrong—is the call not made.

Consider one final example. Birnbaum describes a congressman in the mid-1980s who was undecided about whether to support funding to build the B-1 bomber. Reagan was “frantic for support” for the bomber, so the congressman was a “hot commodity.” A deal was struck to get the congressman’s vote. What was his price? A dam or some special funding for road construction in the district? No such luck (for his constituents). His price: “a VIP tour of the White House for twenty or thirty of his largest and most loyal campaign contributors.”128 Again, there’s nothing wrong with the White House giving VIP tours. But I suspect a constituent in this congressman’s district would be right to ask whether there wasn’t a better deal, for the district, that could have been made.

Once this distinction is made clear, the bigger point should be obvious. We don’t excuse a bank robber if he donates the money he stole to an orphanage. Neither should we excuse a political