[EL] McCutcheon

[Tyler Culberson]

These figures derived from a Bob Biersack piece at OpenSecrets:
https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2013/09/mccutcheons-multiplying-effect-why.html


On Thu, Apr 3, 2014 at 8:45 AM, Tyler Culberson <tylerculberson at gmail.com>wrote:

> Doug,
> From Commissioners Ravel and Weintraub's statement yesterday, "In fact,
> only 646 donors reached the biennial limit during the 2012 cycle."
>
>
> On Wed, Apr 2, 2014 at 7:24 PM, Scarberry, Mark <
> Mark.Scarberry at pepperdine.edu> wrote:
>
>> Can we distinguish between two "anti-corruption" interests that could be
>> seen as being addressed by the dissent in McCutcheon?
>>
>>
>>
>> The first is the interest in keeping lines of communication open between
>> ordinary people and their elected representatives, so as to make
>> representative government responsive to the people **between elections**.
>> High levels of donations cause representatives to listen only (or mostly)
>> to the rich donors, breaking the link between ordinary people and their
>> representatives. The voice of the ordinary person is drowned out by the
>> voice of the rich donor, because the representative will listen only (or
>> mostly) to the voice of the rich donor. With a reference to Rousseau (which
>> one hopes does not incorporate his concept of the "general will"), the
>> dissent treats the breaking of that link as a form of corruption.
>>
>>
>>
>> The second is the interest in the formation of the views of the people;
>> the formation of those views may be corrupted if too much money is spent by
>> rich people to help form those views or to finance the formation of such
>> views. Here we run dangerously close to the concept of the "general will,"
>> a true will of the people that somehow is different from what they really
>> think, because their thinking has been warped by the spending of so much
>> money by the rich (perhaps creating a "false consciousness"). The spending
>> of huge amounts of money by the rich in furthering their own views drowns
>> out the voices of the ordinary people, as both the rich speaker and the
>> ordinary speaker try to convey their views to the people and to persuade
>> the people.
>>
>>
>>
>> Is it clear that the dissent only sees the first of those interests as an
>> "anti-corruption" interest that justifies campaign finance regulation? (At
>> first I wasn't sure, especially given the "drowning out" imagery, but a
>> more careful reading leads me to this conclusion.)
>>
>>
>>
>> Is it also clear that the first interest has nothing to do with which
>> person is elected, but rather with who the elected person will listen to
>> once elected? Thus it has nothing to do with any desire to level the
>> playing field for the election, right? Instead it has to do with the
>> actions that will be taken by the person once elected, which makes it
>> similar to a concern about quid pro quo corruption.
>>
>>
>>
>> My apologies if I'm asking the list to reinvent the wheel.
>>
>>
>>
>> Mark
>>
>>
>>
>> Mark S. Scarberry
>>
>> Professor of Law
>>
>> Pepperdine Univ. School of Law
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Law-election mailing list
>> Law-election at department-lists.uci.edu
>> http://department-lists.uci.edu/mailman/listinfo/law-election
>>
>
>
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