The Mixed Blessing of Citizens United
The Mixed Blessing Of Citizens United
The ruling, deemed a success by many, has hurt conservatives horribly. Real reform can be found by looking to our past.
The American Conservative
NOVEMBER 11, 2020
Few are satisfied with the present state of American politics: a polarized House of Representatives and state legislatures, a presidential race in which vast sums of money from unidentified sources are being spent, candidates distinguished by inexperience and frequently extreme views, and a politicized judiciary. Some blame this state of affairs on the Citizens United decision and on Republican gerrymandering of legislatures, but the situation is largely the work of ‘reformers.’
Until 1973, the campaign finance regime was well understood. Both parties’ national candidates drew support from well-known donors: Republicans from Pews and Mellons, Democrats from Marshall Field and Hollywood moguls, and an occasional eccentric like Eugene McCarthy’s benefactor in 1968, Stewart Mott. Politicians spent little time ‘dialing for dollars.’
In 1973, the Democrats, in a fit of post-Watergate righteousness, enacted ‘campaign finance reform,’ limiting individual contributions to $1,000. In the era before touch-tone phones, this burdened the index fingers of politicians, though the Supreme Court created an exception in favor of egomaniacs spending their own money. Less well-endowed politicians swiftly learned to delegate dialing to industry interest groups, which helpfully ‘bundled’ contributions. Though this helped give us the savings and loan scandal, there was little complaint from Democratic politicians, who also benefitted from thinly veiled political contributions by foundations to groups like La Raza and the billion dollars of tax-exempt funds fueling the ‘gay rights’ movement.
According to the Democratic narrative, this happy picture was disturbed by a bolt from the blue in the form of the Citizens United decision by a partisan Supreme Court majority, holding that corporations had a First Amendment right to make unlimited contributions, the contributors to which were undisclosed. While Citizens United shredded a lot of law relating to the power of government to limit use of the corporate form, its equation of speech and money was the innovation not of Chief Justice Roberts, but of Justice Harry Blackmun, who invented the ‘commercial speech’ doctrine to protect commercial advertising by abortion clinics. The liberals propose to overrule only Citizens United, not the broader doctrine, beloved of trial lawyers, that gave rise to it.
Likewise, reapportionment was a cause fostered by the ‘shiny-brights’ over the vehement and prophetic dissenting opinions of Justices Frankfurter and Harlan, who accurately foresaw an orgy of partisan gerrymandering and the devaluation of local governments. The Wizard of Ooze himself, Republican Senate leader Everett Dirksen, valiantly fought against it. It benefitted wealthy and growing suburban areas at the expense of declining cities and rural areas, producing legislatures that were socially more liberal, economically more conservative, less experienced, and more dependent on campaign donors. Senator Edward Kennedy’s Voting Rights Act, with its fostering of majority-minority districts, further enhanced both racial and political polarization and gerrymandering.
The fashionable cures are the overruling, somehow, of Citizens United, and the creation of ‘nonpartisan’ redistricting commissions, inevitably dominated by the ‘political scientists’ who got us into this mess in the first place. Two less conventional but more effective cures would lift individual ‘hard money’ contribution limits and, as Professor Michael McConnell has proposed, relax reapportionment standards to overlook disparity in size of districts where seats are allocated among subdivisions or groups of subdivisions according to a permanent formula requiring at least 42½ or 45% of voters to elect a majority of the legislative house.
But there is a more feasible reform which would require neither constitutional change nor (in most states) legislative action: curtailment of the importance of party primary elections in favor of conventions dominated by ‘superdelegates,’ local officeholders, the basis of almost all parliamentary democracies.
When the direct primary was fostered during the Progressive era, President William Howard Taft noted that “A convention system will take the more moderate man whose name will appeal to the independent voter, [The primary benefits] men of wealth and of activity and of little modesty … without real qualifications for office”— a good capsule description of Donald Trump. “[It] has made impossible as a candidate for elective office everyone who is not the choice of the machine or is not independently wealthy.” Fifteen years later, his son Senator Robert Taft observed: “The quality of candidates and officials has steadily deteriorated since it was initiated. No man except one who has no business or one who is very rich can afford to enter a campaign. The direct primary has made impossible the existence of a State Party organization and the result is that no State Party in recent years has initiated or carried through any important policy of state government.”
This reform, requiring only the enlargement of the numbers of ‘superdelegates’ at national and state party conventions, would restore James Madison’s system for the ‘filtering’ of officials by those who actually know them, and would put an end to the sort of ‘glamour boy [or girl]’ government that has afflicted the Presidency for nearly 25 years. As Judge Learned Hand once reminded us: “Publicity is an evil substitute, and the arts of publicity are black arts.”
Posted in: Corporate Welfare, Judiciary and Legal Issues, State and Local Politics, The Right