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A stable national majority coalition in Congress is therefore hard to achieve and sustain.4 Moreover, congressional procedures give tremendous leeway to individual members to delay legislation and block appointments to executive departments and regulatory agencies. In the Senate, a minority of forty-one senators is usually enough to stop legislation favored by the majority, via the filibuster. Congressional power is fragmented, veto power is rife, and special interests are very well represented and able to penetrate the legislative process.

To pass economic legislation, the president must inevitably run a minefield of local interests. Though the president wields considerable power over the executive departments and agencies and limited influence over regulatory processes, the White House cannot be assured of passing a program or budget through Congress. Each major budget vote is an adventure on its own, with the president winning some and losing many.

With weak national parties and with elections to Congress in single-member districts, the main local industries and wealthy constituents in each district are likely to have great sway over each representative. In a coal-mining district, the representative is likely to vote in support of coal interests (and against anti–climate change legislation) irrespective of party or overall ideology. Military bases, mines, major factories, financial markets, and other major industries in the district are all likely to define the voting behavior of members of Congress. Congress is therefore a maze of special interests. Passing national legislation means forming coalitions of local interest groups and trading off favors across these groups. This kind of politics naturally gives enormous weight to narrow interest groups.

The power of special interests is exacerbated by yet another unusual feature of American politics: nonstop campaigning. Due to an outdated choice made in the 1789 Constitution, the United States has a national election every two years, which is by far the shortest election cycle of any high-income democracy. Between 1960 and 2009, Sweden had fifteen national elections; the United Kingdom had twelve; the United States had twenty-five.5 The two-year cycle between congressional elections means that the United States is always in campaign mode and members of Congress are consumed by the need to fund-raise for the next election. Special interests are always at the ready to trade campaign financing for votes on crucial issues.

The Rising Power of Big Money

The large and growing role of big money in politics is the grim political reality of our times. It is the key to understanding the expanding tentacles of the corporatocracy. Campaign costs, especially to cover expensive media spending, have soared, as we see in Figure 7.1, which shows the estimated total campaign spending on each federal election since 1998, as estimated by the Center for Responsive Politics. These costs include direct spending by the candidates, spending by the political parties, and direct spending by third-party groups for media and marketing. The overall upward trend is a rise in campaign spending of around $450 million per each two-year election cycle.6 Even a nonpresidential federal election cycle now costs around $4 billion. Though this amount is not huge relative to the size of the country, about $50 per household, the rich are the predominant funders and thereby win the predominant political influence as a result. Public funds could easily replace the private contributions (and would account for a mere 0.13 percent of the federal budget), but the rich certainly don’t want to lose their leverage, and therefore they aggressively block any greater role of public financing.

Figure 7.1: Total Federal Spending by Election Cycle (in Constant 2008 Dollars), 1998–2010

Source: Data from Center for Responsive Politics.

Lobbying outlays, as shown in Figure 7.2, are also soaring by roughly $200 million per year, at levels comparable to the campaign spending, also