Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress—and a Plan to Stop It by Lawrence Lessig

Author:Lawrence Lessig [LESSIG, LAWRENCE]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: POL000000
ISBN: 9780446576420
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2011-10-05T05:00:00+00:00

This dynamic is common. One Joyce Foundation study found that “four fifths of [individual donors] said that office holders regularly pressured them for contributions.”13 Almost 84 percent of corporations reported that candidates pressured them for contributions at least occasionally; 18.8 percent said this happened frequently.14 Even the reformers reportedly practice this extortion. As Clawson describes, one “PAC officer reported that though John Kerry (D-Mass.; 1985–) makes a public issue of not accepting PAC contributions, his staff had nonetheless called the corporation to say that Kerry expected $5,000 in personal contributions from the company’s executives.”15

“The longer I stay in Washington,” reporter Jeff Birnbaum writes, “the more I believe the protection-money racket is a good metaphor for what a lot of campaign giving is about.”16 A protection racket, or a gift economy—you pick, but each of which depends upon the other side’s having something to give. And the key for reformers on the Right to see is that the more the government’s fingers are in your business, the more the politicians have to “give.” “Donors coerce politicians,” as Clawson puts it, “and politicians coerce donors.”17

The same dynamic explains the organization of Congress. Newt Gingrich “believed that the more committees and subcommittees a person can be on, the more attractions they can acquire to present to contributors.”18 Of course, as I’ve already reported, the attendance at hearings of those committees has also fallen off dramatically. But that’s consistent with an account of the growth of committees that looks more to the influence of committee membership on potential funders than to the importance of the actual work of the committees. As Martin Schram reported after interviewing former members of Congress, “lawmakers freely acknowledged that they and their colleagues often sought assignments to certain ‘cash cow’ committees primarily because members of those committees are able to raise large amounts of campaign money with little effort.”19 Here is the purest example of regulating to raise money, open and notorious in the current context of Congress.

The lesson is simple: Getting a smaller government is difficult enough. Getting a smaller government when members have a direct financial interest in a bigger one might well be impossible.

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