The question of how we finance election campaigns in this country is a critical question of our time. It cuts to the core of the current crisis in American democracy. And it underlies nearly every major economic and social justice battle in our land. From guaranteeing health care to the 45 million uninsured to protecting the environment from toxic polluters, from providing quality education to all our nation's children to raising the minimum wage to a livable wage, the struggle for justice begins with the struggle to overhaul the way we finance our election campaigns.
The campaign finance system today operates like an exclusionary wealth primary, which pre-selects the candidates who can raise and spend the most money. Consider the facts:
1) The winners of the wealth primary almost invariably go on to win election. Ninety-two percent of U.S. House of Representative winners and eighty-eight percent of U.S. Senate winners first win the wealth primary - outraising and outspending their opponents - and then go on to win election.
2) The vast majority of campaign money comes from a tiny and wealthy segment of our society. Less than one percent of the population contributes more than eighty percent of all money in federal elections in amounts of $200 or more. A 1998 survey found that the vast majority of such contributors are wealthy white men with annual family incomes higher than $100,000.
3) Elections are now auctioned to the highest bidder. A candidate running for the U.S. House of Representatives today must have, on average, half a million dollars in order to win. A U.S. Senate candidate must have $4.6 million. With Mr. Bush and Mr. Gore's unending money chase, this election year promises to be those most expensive ever in U.S. history, with total spending exceeding $3 billion for the presidential and congressional races.
4) The wealth primary barrier maintains its strongest presence in communities of color. A recent study showed that the nation's top 100 communities in terms of campaign contributions are eighty percent white and that each of these communities gave an average of $1.4 million. In contrast, the 100 communities with the highest concentration of people of color each gave an average of $7,000.
This system is morally bankrupt and politically corrupt. It allows monied interests to control our elections and our government, excluding the voices of ordinary citizens. Take the oil and gas industry as just one example. Through their millions of dollars in campaign contributions to both corporate political parties, oil and gas companies have bought access and influence at the public's expense. Ken Silverstein's piece in the May 22 issue of The Nation magazine documents the corrupting influence of the Occidental Petroleum Company with the Clinton/Gore Administration. Occidental Petroleum has had a long and friendly relationship with both Al Gore and his father Al Sr. Since Gore joined the ticket in 1992, Occidental has donated nearly half a million dollars in soft money to Democratic committees and causes. In turn, in late 1997 Al Gore "championed the Administration's $3.65 billion sale to the company of the government's interest in the Elk Hills oilfield in Bakersfield, California, the largest privatization of federal property in US history." Today, Occidental is pushing to drill on the sacred land of the U'wa tribe in northern Colombia, with the quiet assistance of the Clinton/Gore Administration. The environmental Vice-President has no clothes.
But we must not only rise against the corruption resulting from this campaign finance system. We must also rise to reclaim the bedrock principle of democracy: political equality for all. The power of the democratic vision lies in that simple promise. As James Madison wrote in The Federalist Papers:
Who are to be the electors of the federal representatives? Not the rich, more than the poor; not the learned, more than the ignorant; not the haughty heirs of distinguished names, more than the humble sons of obscure and unpropitious fortune. The electors are to be the great body of the people of the United States... Federalist Papers No. 57.
Despite James Madison's eloquent words more than two centuries ago, this nation has yet to fulfill this promise. The struggle for political equality for all has included the fight to eradicate wealth barriers to equal political participation. In 1937, a group of poor voters brought a constitutional challenge to the poll tax, a fee charged to voters in order to vote. They lost. The Supreme Court upheld the poll tax as constitutional. In 1951, a second group of poor voters challenged the poll tax. They, too, lost. And, then, in 1966, in the heat of the Civil Rights Movement, came Annie Harper, a poor Virginia voter and a group of poor voters with her, challenging Virginia's $1.50 poll tax. This time, the Supreme Court got it right, striking down the poll tax on equal protection grounds:
A State violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution whenever it makes the affluence of the voter or payment of any fee an electoral standard. Voter qualifications have no relation to wealth. Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections, 383 U.S. 663, 666 (1966).
The poll tax, a barrier which existed for decades in this country, could no longer stand.
The campaign finance system of today has replaced the poll tax of the past as the newest wealth barrier to equal and meaningful participation in the political process, the newest wealth barrier to the right to vote.
As with the poll tax, the solution to the campaign finance question is abolition. The poll tax could not simply come down to seventy-five cents or to fifty cents. It had to be abolished altogether. Abolition here means full public financing of our elections. If our elections are to be truly public, they must be publicly financed. We believe in public schools. We believe in public parks. We ought to believe in public elections.
This campaign stands with the growing grassroots movement for full public financing. Activist coalitions in more than 30 states are mobilizing for this overhaul. As a result of activist campaigns, voters in Maine, Massachusetts, and Arizona, have passed, by ballot initiative, full or near-full public financing systems for their state elections. In Vermont, grassroots organizers pressured the state legislature to enact a similar law for its gubernatorial and lieutenant governor races. Citizens in Missouri and Oregon will vote this November on similar initiatives.
These systems are voluntary and fully constitutional. A federal appeals court in Boston recently upheld the Maine law in its entirety. Candidates qualify for such public funds by demonstrating their popular support through generating a select number of qualifying contributions at the five-dollar level. Once qualified, candidates who choose to participate in this system forgo private funds and receive equal amounts of public financing for their campaigns. The cost, at $5-10 per taxpayer, is far less than the billions of dollars in legislative favors to campaign contributors - in the form of corporate subsidies and payoffs - for which taxpayers now foot the bill.
This campaign also joins the call for free media time for all qualified candidates participating in such public financing systems. We the people own the airwaves. We have the right to place conditions on the licensing of such airwaves. We ought to require broadcasters to provide all ballot-qualified candidates with equal amounts of free-media time during an election season. At the same time, we need to reform the current patchwork of ballot-access laws, that often make it impossible or unreasonably difficult for third-party candidates to qualify.
Finally, this campaign supports the new legal movement in the courts for a reversal of the U.S. Supreme Court's 1976 ruling in Buckley v. Valeo, which equated money with speech and which struck down congressional campaign spending limits on First Amendment grounds. No one has the right to drown out other people's speech. Reasonable campaign spending limits are necessary to ensure that those who participate in a public financing system are on equal ground with those who do not. As Supreme Court Justice Stevens wrote in a January 2000 opinion: "Money is property; it is not speech." The time has come to revisit the Buckley ruling. Twenty-four years later we know that unlimited campaign spending threatens the integrity of our electoral process and contravenes the basic values of the First Amendment.
The promise of political equality.
In his "I Have A Dream" speech in August 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. talked about a promissory note which had come back marked "insufficient funds." He was talking about that promise, a promise embedded in our Constitution and a promise which remains unfulfilled. That promise cannot co-exist today with the current campaign finance system. If this nation is to uphold its expressed commitment to a democratic vision, then this barrier, like ones before it, must come down.
