Not a single major 2020 presidential contender is disclosing the names or activities of bundlers of campaign donations. That’s the latest news from the Center for Responsive Politics.
The only candidate to make even a half-hearted attempt to do so is South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who stopped updating his list of bundlers in April. Other Democratic candidates, including Kamala Harris and Amy Klobuchar, have promised to do so but haven’t followed through, while still others claim to have no bundlers at all, including Andrew Yang and Tim Ryan, or no “official” bundler program, such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
The lack of disclosure is a big step backward from recent elections, in which multiple candidates, including George W. Bush, John McCain, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama, shared “at least some information” about the people who wander the nation’s posh quarters, shaking the trees to produce money for candidates each year.
The First Amendment allows unlimited individual political speech, and by logical extension unlimited spending on its dissemination. However, campaign finance laws limit the amount that any one person can contribute to a political candidate on the grounds that excessive gifts by individuals to politicians could undermine faith in the integrity of the whole system. After all, the argument goes, large donations to politicians from people with interests before Congress could give the impression of bribery or, more accurately, if you understand Washington, extortion.
This view, and the system that arises from it, is wrong for multiple reasons. The most important is that the system described above positively empowers lobbyists. After all, who can more easily assemble dozens or hundreds of people willing to make the maximum contribution to a member of Congress than the very lobbyists who seek favors on Capitol Hill and within the federal agencies? Every Tuesday night, after members of Congress take their last vote for the evening, they head to various townhouses and office buildings around the district for fundraising events that only lobbyists can put together. Only lobbyists, the very people paid to beg favors from government, have the ability to assemble dozens of people bearing maximum checks at the same location on the same night.
This system isn’t just flawed, it is actually counterproductive, encouraging maximum interference by those seeking to use government to inflict maximum harm on society for their own benefit. It would be more honest and less corrupt simply to let ideologically motivated billionaires, including people like George Soros and Charles Koch, finance candidates directly with unlimited money.
But you don’t have to agree with us on that score to understand the important role that bundlers play in the current system, or to see why candidates who run campaigns based on campaign finance integrity would be hypocrites not to disclose their bundlers. Every candidate in this year’s presidential race should voluntarily disclose bundlers.
Inevitably, some candidates simply won’t care. President Trump, who did not raise much big money (or much money at all) in 2016, has never disclosed bundlers. But those candidates who claim to be especially interested in campaign finance law, which is to say, basically every Democratic candidate, would be hypocritical not to do so.
