At a country club (of all places!) in Nashua, New Hampshire, on Monday, Jeb Bush articulated what might be the worst idea for campaign finance reform I have ever heard. John McCormack has the details:
Bush does not have a policy primer on his website for campaign finance, so hopefully this is just an off-the-top-of-his-head idea—because it is truly awful. It would supercharge political corruption in Washington, D.C., while simultaneously knee-capping groups seeking to reform the status quo.
Political corruption is, at its core, a result of a conflict of interest that politicians feel between the general welfare and some private or parochial concern. This is why money in politics is so integral to corruption: It gives politicians an incentive to ignore the public interest and instead heed the call of special interests. In Congress, this problem is rooted in the committee system. Interest groups with business pending before some committee use campaign contributions to butter up legislators, in the hopes of getting them to vote their way.
As it stands right now, however, the capacity of money to do the trick by itself is quite limited, due to caps on individual and PAC contributions to candidates. This is why campaign cash has to be combined with lobbying, offers of jobs after leaving office, favors for friends, etc. But Jeb Bush appears intent on doing away with such indirection. He wants interest groups to be able to contribute unlimited sums of money of candidates. Sure, average citizens will be able to do likewise, but who are we kidding? The ones who will give … and give and give … will not be average citizens concerned about the general welfare, but interest groups with business pending before the government.
This proposal will also favor incumbent politicians, especially members of Congress, whose network of cronies have lots of spare cash that’d be happy to donate, provided that the member vote their way. So, if you think the problem with congressional elections is that only 95 percent of incumbents get reelected, this must sound like a great idea. Everybody else should pause.
But Jeb would go farther than this. The Super PACs are a bugaboo among good-government types, who see them as an angle for further influence peddling, but I am dubious of that claim. I think they have the potential to break the status quo in Washington. I see them as being qualitatively different than the system described above.
Super PACs cannot coordinate with politicians, so it is very hard for them to purchase influence the same way lobbyists who work the inside game do. Their methodology is also different than lobbyists who make donations to their patrons. Super PACs make direct appeals to the public, while the typical approach is just to hand cash to politicians. For incumbents, the purpose of raising all this cash in the traditional way is to intimidate challengers from running, thus securing reelection without giving voters are real choice. The Super PACs can cut directly against that. They can help worthy candidates who are struggling to raise funds in the traditional way. They certainly have their problems, but in theory they are a tool for outsiders to challenge the status quo.
But Bush would do away with all of this. Combined with his idea of allowing for unlimited direct contributions, the end result would be the entrenchment of what Ted Cruz has called the Washington Cartel: the bipartisan deal struck with special interest groups, whereby members of Congress offer legislative favors in exchange for campaign contributions. Bush would make this relationship easier to forge while simultaneously hobbling an important tool for outside groups to insist upon change.
Campaign finance reform is not a priority for anybody except me and a handful of good-government types on the left, so I doubt that this idea will move many votes. But that does not change the fact that it is a truly awful proposal.
The most that can be said is that perhaps Bush had not put much thought into the issue. But the fact that his instincts lead him in this direction should not be overlooked. The truth is that the way politics operates in Washington, D.C. is terribly contrary to the republican principles upon which this nation was founded. The general welfare is regularly sacrificed to ambition and self-interest. If Jeb Bush gets his way on campaign finance, things will get much, much worse.
Jay Cost is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard and the author of A Republic No More: Big Government and the Rise of American Political Corruption.
