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By Root 6860 0

your mind, it makes it harder to legislate absent those kinds of considerations,” added Bayh. “Yeah, it’s all politics all the time … Political calculus is more prominent in people’s thinking when they’re forced to think about campaigning and politics 24/7 for six years. Money is a big part of it. And why? Because there are going to be sleazy ads running against you, attacking your character—you’ve got to be able to set the record straight. And this comes back to the media again, just the cost of television. The atomization—again, even ten years ago, twelve years ago, the number of commercials you had to run to communicate effectively with the electorate was much less than today because they didn’t have all these cable channels. The audience is so fragmented. You have to run three or four more times the number of commercials to get the same exposure. And obviously, that’s big money. And the cost keeps going up per commercial. So when you combine those two factors, it’s just exploded.”

Bayh explained that “75 percent of the time a senator is ‘in cycle’ [meaning that the senator faces an election within two years] is spent raising money—not meeting with constituents, not talking to policy experts, not sitting down with colleagues trying to hammer out a principled compromise. It’s getting on the phone and asking for campaign cash or traveling to fund-raisers. You know, that’s the reality of it, unless you are überwealthy or are an Internet star or something. The final thing I’d say is … remember when Justice [Samuel] Alito had that moment when the president was saying the Citizens United case [striking down the law restricting corporate campaign contributions] was going to lead to a flood of secret cash into our campaigns, and Alito seemed to be mouthing the words ‘not true’? Come on! This is exactly what happened. You can say it’s good constitutional law, but you cannot [deny] what the obvious consequences of this are going to be. And it’s exactly what happened. And we ain’t seen nothing yet. There are going to be hundreds of millions of dollars in large increments of secret money influencing the elections of the highest offices in the land. I mean, it’s astonishing! … What’s going to happen [is this]: Senator A is running and is now aware that one of these secret groups will be attacking him with millions of dollars. [So you need] a secret group who’s going to be fighting on your behalf in $5, $10, $15 million increments. And that is the only way to level the playing field.

“So both sides will have their secret groups. They’ll be taking megamillion-dollar [corporate] contributions. So what will happen is, [a senator] will say, ‘Who is going to defend me?’ And then [the senator] will go to [one of these deep-pocketed corporate groups] and say, ‘I need your help.’ And they’ll say, ‘We love you. You’ve been a good friend. We will definitely help you out. But you know, the bylaws of our organization will only permit us to do that for people who are with us 90 percent of the time. So here’s a list of our top ten issues. Why don’t you go study that, fill it out, and give it back to us, because we’d love to help you out.’ And these are going to be real votes on specific pieces of legislation! And this [senator] is going to be looking at that, knowing that millions of dollars hang on how he fills out that questionnaire and the commitments he makes on real votes. It’s about as close to corruption as you can come without actually crossing the line. And to the average citizen, that would absolutely look corrupt. And you know what’s going to change that? It’s going to take another Jack Abramoff thing on steroids or another Watergate—it’s going to take a huge scandal that will be so shocking that not to change the system would be self-destructive.”

Together, the power of special interests and the financial demands of campaigns place Congress—as its own members admit—in danger of becoming a fund-raising organization that dabbles in legislation on the side. It is increasingly beholden to the wealthiest and most politically extreme interests