The Boy Who Could Change the World (20 page)

And if the favor is not returned, you can cut the person off—or even take small steps (or, in the case of the Godfather, big steps) to hurt them. This was Lyndon Johnson's modus operandi: friends get anything they ask for, enemies get destroyed.

The economist Samuel Bowles calls this sort of system “contingent renewal” and he finds that it pops up wherever you have a trade that can't be perfectly contracted. (In this case, you can't write a contract for the trade because the trade is illegal.) Imagine you want to buy a nice bottle of wine. Well, you can't write a contract for “a nice bottle of wine”—aside from extreme cases, it's impractical to prove to a judge that the wine wasn't actually very nice. As a result, the normal economic logic—pay the marginal cost for the product in a perfectly competitive market—breaks down.

But there's another option: you can do the wine-making company a favor. You can pay them a premium for their bottle of wine and keep paying it as long as the wine is good. The stream of future surplus payments encourages the company not to cheat you on any individual bottle—if they did, they'd lose all that extra money.

Lobbyists work pretty much the same way. They contribute huge amounts to politicians and, as long as they keep doing so, politicians keep giving them favors. If either party breaks the informal relationship, the other party can stop as well: if he doesn't get his favor, a lobbyist can stop contributing and encourage his friends not to contribute; if he doesn't get his donation, a politician can stop helping a lobbyist's clients and even move to hurt them. It's a classic case of contingent renewal.

What are the favors that lobbyists get? The official story is that money merely buys “access.” Lobbyists give their donation to the chief of staff/campaign manager and then, when they want a meeting, call her up to ask for one. She knows what they gave and instructs the scheduler to add it to the schedule. This is on top of all the direct access lobbyists get by buying invitations to expensive Capitol Hill fund-raisers.

But everyone knows major donors get more than merely access. The average constituent gets a couple seconds on the computer screen of a bored staffer who hits a button to send them a form letter. The average activist group gets a couple minutes with a low-level staff member. And when, on occasion, they do get some time with an actual member or a top staffer, they get a polite smile and some nods and a couple minutes to briefly air their concerns.

Contrast this with a lobbyist who is owed a favor. The meeting is not about simply listening to, and then ignoring, their requests. It's about strategizing together how to get things done, getting a commitment about a vote or a co-sponsorship or a phone call or one of the other myriad of favors a congressional office can give. It's about making a deal.

Members of Congress owe these lobbyists a favor because they gave money. The dreaded call time doesn't end with the end of the campaign. Instead it ramps up—now you're expected to raise money like an incumbent. The members with the most difficult seats are
put on the most lucrative committees (Financial Services is a key example). Here they're all but required to demand large sums of money from the people they're supposed to oversee.

Every spare moment, the chief of staff/campaign manager is going to try to spirit them out of Congress to one of the phone bank operations across the street to do some more call time. Anything else would be irresponsible. Amassing a huge war chest as an incumbent is the most important piece of reelection campaign strategy—raise enough money and everyone will think twice before daring to challenge you.

And aside from the call time, every morning and night there are the fund-raisers in the nearby Capitol Hill hotels. A few examples just from February 2nd: $1,000 for a fund-raising breakfast with Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) at 8 a.m., $5,000 for dinner with Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD) at 6:30 p.m. These fundraisers are a much more regular part of Capitol Hill life than debates, or even votes.

But sometimes even all the fund-raising in the world isn't enough and a campaign starts again in earnest. Back to the old days of turnout and persuasion, of TV ads and debates. And sometimes even all the money in the world can't win you reelection. The campaign party in the hotel ballroom isn't filled with whoops and cheers but a quiet and sad feeling of dejection.

But it's OK. The game isn't over. You can always show up back in town as a lobbyist. All the connections that you made during your career, all the access you had as a member, turn out to be worth something after all. And you can cash it in with one of those lobbyists who owe you a favor.

Part Three: Consequences

America often likes to think of itself as the greatest democracy in the world, but a clear-eyed evaluation of the consequences leaves great room for doubt. On every topic, ideas that meet with wide support from the public—as measured in a wide variety of ways—find themselves wrecked on the rocky shoals of Congress.

Take health care, for example. Polls consistently show that a majority of Americans support a Canadian-style single-payer system,
which would save money and expand access. However, despite being popular among the public and a clear policy improvement, the idea is immediately derided as “politically impossible” in the American context. Why? Because it would destroy the business of wealthy insurance companies.

During the recent health care debate, even the moderate public option—supported by overwhelming majorities, including most Republican voters—was killed because it was too threatening to powerful corporate interests.

There are examples in every field. Most Americans support breaking up the big banks and putting the criminals who run them in jail, a position too extreme to even be proposed during the financial reregulation debate. Even commonsense measures, like accurate dietary guidelines or a reduction of economically harmful subsidies, face no chance in such a corporate Congress.

Even on that heated issue of the budget, the public's preferences are almost the reverse of the proposed policy: the public wants military spending to go down, but it goes up; the public wants spending on education, job training, and energy reform to be increased, but it gets cut.
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Clearly there is a democratic disconnect—the members of Congress are not executing the will of the voters. The analysis above suggests several possibilities why.

           
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Candidate selection:
Perhaps only fans of insurance companies decide to run for Congress—or, more likely, only fans of business in general (who are predisposed to insurance companies' pleas).

           
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Campaign finance:
Even if these aren't the only people who run, they are likely to be the people who best get along with the major fund-raisers, PACs, and other key sources of money.

           
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Campaign tactics:
This money, in turn, is what's necessary to run a modern campaign—complete with TV ads and
mailers and expert pollsters. As a result, it's the best fundraisers who tend to win.

           
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Staff selection:
When they get to Congress, even good candidates hire tired and acculturated staffers. Thus their ambitious reforms are sabotaged by internal defenders of the system with divided loyalties.

           
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Staff ethics:
Attracted by their own “revolving door” (there's a lucrative market for former staffers), staffers are focused more on doing what their future employers might want than on what would best serve the public. And with their dual duties between congressional office and campaign, perhaps they get distracted by the pressing needs of the campaign and neglect what's best for the country.

           
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Lobbyists:
Or maybe it's lobbyists who are screwing the whole thing up. The money they have to write bills and suggest strategies certainly gives them a big advantage over interests that can't afford to lawyer up. And the money they raise for candidates gives them a powerful hold on those candidates' attention. Finally, if you can't beat them—join them. Many former legislators get jobs as lobbyists where their past service for the industry is repaid with a lucrative position.

Part Four: Change

There have been many, many ideas about how to reform Congress. We can categorize them in two basic ways: by the part of the process they address (candidate selection, campaigns, staff, lobbyists) or by the tactics they adopt (restrictions, incentives, tools). Some of these ideas have even been adopted—but as members of Congress themselves must usually vote on them, it's not clear how much the proposed changes are intended to address the substance as opposed to the perception of corruption.

Candidate Selection

While it's commonplace for members of Congress to urge more people to “get involved in the process,” I'm not aware of any examples of
formal congressional attempts to recruit more candidates. (After all, who wants more competition?)

Instead, the biggest efforts have come from outside the official system. As mentioned above, Progressive Majority works hard to identify and recruit progressive activists. And each party has an arm focused on candidate recruitment—although the goal is usually finding someone who can raise enough money to win a seat for the party, rather than adjusting the makeup of Congress as a whole.

It's possible to imagine you could make a significant difference by increasing these efforts—finding more and better people to run. At the moment, even when someone wins by random fluke, it's rarely the sort of decent, honest person you'd want to win—and even when it is, the cult of experience forces them to behave the same way as everybody else. If more good people ran, even if nothing else changed, there's a chance they could win at least occasionally and thereby inject a modicum of decency into the process.

Campaign Finance

Since Watergate, the bulk of campaign reforms have consisted of caps and disclosures. At present, federal campaigns are not allowed to raise more than $2,400 from an individual and more than $5,000 from a bona fide political action committee (PAC) in any two-year cycle. (Corporations are prohibited from donating directly; instead their employees must voluntarily donate to a bona fide PAC.) At the same time, all major contributions and expenditures have to be publicly disclosed.

The main effect of disclosure has been to create a string of TV ads and campaign attacks along the lines of “You took X million dollars from Y bad guy.” It's not clear how effective these attacks have been in any particular case, but they've undoubtedly contributed to a culture of assuming all legislators are bought and paid for. Unfortunately, the only people who can run campaigns without taking sizable amounts of money from bad guys are multimillionaires who self-finance, and on the whole they don't seem to be much of an improvement over the normal candidate.

The main effect of the caps has been to create a bustling market in figuring out how to evade them, culminating with the recent
Citizens
United
decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled that outside groups (including corporations) can spend unlimited campaign money on basically anything, as long as they don't coordinate their spending with the candidate. The result is a culture of coordination-without-coordination on top campaigns, where senior staffers will leak the details of their campaign strategy to the Capitol Hill press, where outside groups read it and figure out how to fill in the gaps. Obviously it's not the same as being able to direct how the money is spent, but it doesn't seem so different that it's made a noticeable impact on campaigning. As a result, campaign finance laws are largely seen as a dead letter.

The most serious proposal to address the problem is that of Fair Fight Funds. Under such a system, a candidate could opt-in to public financing of their campaign. In exchange for agreeing not to raise outside money, they would be given an initial chunk of money to fund a basic campaign (say $500,000), as well as an extra dollar for each dollar their opponent raises. (In some versions they receive $0.90 or $1.10 instead of $1.)

For example, imagine John Q. Public decides to run against Montague T. Moneybags. Public opts in to public financing and receives $500,000. Moneybags holds a big fund-raiser and raises $600,000. The government then gives Public an extra $100,000 to level the playing field. While the cost to the government is theoretically unlimited, there's not much incentive for Moneybags to keep raising big money if he knows Public is going to get another dollar for each new dollar Moneybags raises.

This plan really would neutralize the effect of money while being totally voluntary, but some legal experts believe the Supreme Court would find it unconstitutional, on the grounds that giving money to Public unconstitutionally discourages Moneybags's exercise of his First Amendment right to speech. (The present Supreme Court does seem to have an irrational distaste for campaign finance legislation. In response, some have argued that we need a constitutional amendment to push them to stop striking down strong laws.)

In the meantime, public financing supporters have scaled back their hopes. Instead, their current plan allows Public to receive the $500,000 but he then must raise the additional money through
small-dollar contributions. Such a system has two major flaws: first, a well-connected Moneybags can still wildly outraise an honest Public; second, even raising small-dollar contributions will bias a member toward the affluent upper middle class that already has a strong taste for political engagement. (Recall that American inequality is so severe that anyone making over $87,000 a year is in the top 20% and anyone making over $154,000 is in the top 5%.
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Having candidates responsive to them rather than major corporations would be an improvement, but perhaps not a major one.)