WASHINGTON (PAI) – Oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court can be exhilarating affairs. Or dreary ones. Or sometimes even unintentionally revealing.
Take last week, for instance, when Associate Justice Antonin Scalia started opining about how unjust our society would be if people of means could stuff, in a single election cycle, no more than $3.5 million into the pockets of their favorite political candidates. Said Scalia: “I don’t think $3.5 million is a heck of a lot of money.”
Of course he wouldn’t. In the circles where Scalia sits, billionaires have a constitutional right to pound the political system with all the millions at their disposal.
Any move that threatens that “right” must surely leave liberty at risk.
Well, as for us, give us real liberty, not the pale plutocratic imitation that so enthuses Antonin Scalia. And real liberty can never thrive so long as our super rich enjoy a stranglehold on our political process. But if the Supreme Court chooses to erase our remaining post-Watergate campaign finance reforms, Richard Nixon’s scandalous reign may come to seem – thanks to growing inequality – mere kid’s play.
Scalia’s comment came as the court heard oral arguments in a case that could end up giving America’s wealthy a perpetual green light to contribute as much as they want directly to politicians and political parties. And that’s on top of the tsunami of unaccountable cash they already give to “independent” SuperPACs and similar outfits.
Credit Shaun McCutcheon, an electrical company CEO from Alabama, for starting the ball on this case rolling. In the 2012 election cycle, McCutcheon contributed heavily to conservative candidates and Republican Party committees. But the experience left the mega-millionaire feeling terribly aggrieved.
Federal campaign finance reform legislation enacted four decades ago in the wake of the Watergate scandal limits how much individuals can give directly to candidates and political parties. In 2012, McCutcheon ran up against those limits, then sitting at about $46,000 for candidates and $70,000 for party committees.
McCutcheon had wanted to give candidates and party panels much more than that. Under the law, he couldn’t then – and he can’t now either. The current, inflation-adjusted aggregate limit for the 2014 congressional elections: $123,000.
But wealthy individuals like McCutcheon, thanks to the high court’s 2010 Citizens didn’t have nearly as much wealth available to spend as the nation’s rich today.
In other words, a billionaire can’t currently give a particular congressional candidate a $1 million check. But the same billionaire can legally hand a TV station $1 million to run 30-second ads that extol that candidate’s virtues – or attack that candidate’s opponent.
This sort of “independent expenditure” can make a major impact as campaigns play out. Independent expenditures can also complicate campaigns, especially when deep pockets go “off-message” in the advertising they finance. In most situations, candidates and political parties would much rather have billionaires contribute directly to them and not go off and spend independently.
If the Supreme Court uses the McCutcheon case to erase our last remaining Watergate-era campaign funding limits, these political insiders will get their way. They could, for the first time in years, solicit unlimited contributions from America’s wealthy with no restrictions whatsoever.
That turn of events, unions and public interest groups point out, would leave political candidates and party officials even more eager to grant wealthy donors “improper influence.”
The prospect of such improper influence prompted the Communications Workers to lead a pro-small d-democracy anti-campaign cash protest in front of the High Court the day the justices heard the oral arguments.
Inside the courtroom, U.S. Solicitor General Donald Verrilli did his best to explain why the limits should remain. Without limits on direct contributions to candidates and parties, he argued, 500 exceedingly wealthy Americans would be able to bankroll the entire political “shooting match.” We would have, Verrilli charged, government “run of, by, and for those 500 people.”
Fred Wertheimer, America’s elder statesman of campaign finance reform, has a warning of his own. Repealing limits on direct contributions to candidates and parties, he contends, would take us right back to the same political corruption that led to the Watergate scandals.
But Wertheimer may be understating the danger. Repealing limits on direct contributions to candidates and parties would likely create a political environment far more toxic than anything right before Watergate.
The reason? Back before Watergate, in the mid 20th century, America’s rich didn’t have nearly as much wealth available to spend as the nation’s rich today. The incomes of today’s wealthy simply tower over the incomes of America’s wealthy in the years right before Watergate.
Some numbers: In 1972, the year of the Watergate burglary, the nation’s top 0.1 percent averaged, in today’s dollars, the equivalent of $1.48 million in income each. In 2012, America’s top 0.1 percent averaged $6.4 million, over four times as much.
But the gap between rich then and rich now becomes even greater when you take taxes into effect. In 1972, taxpayers averaging $1.48 million in today’s dollars paid 40.7 percent of their total incomes in federal income tax. In 2012, the non-partisan Tax Policy Center estimates, taxpayers in the top 0.1 percent paid federal income taxes at about half that rate.
The bottom line: America’s really rich in 2012 had over six times more after-tax dollars in their pockets, after inflation, than their counterparts in 1972.
Watergate corruption? If the Supreme Court ends all limits on what our contemporary super rich can throw into election campaigns, American politics faces dangers far more troubling than anything Richard Nixon ever created.
Veteran labor journalist Sam Pizzigati edits Too Much, an online weekly publication on income inequality, from the Institute for Policy Studies. E-mail: editor@toomuchonline.org
Photo: Associate Justice Antonin Scalia. Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP
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