The Pros And Cons Of Campaign Finance Reform

Given the recent Supreme Court decision of Citizens United v. F.E.C., the impact of money on the political process has reached levels that America has never seen before. In the 2012 general election, more than 2 billion dollars were spent on the Presidential race alone, a number that will only continue to grow if the system of campaign financing is not reformed. Activists fighting for this cause, hereafter referred to as Reformers, give a number of options for how to fix a system that they see as broken. Strict caps on campaign spending and public financing of campaigns are two tools Reformers often cite for better ensuring that the influence of interest groups is limited and that the politicians elected are more focused on creating meaningful

If this were true, we would see that lawmakers would more often act in ways that benefit their electors rather than their donors. Corruption would be low, and there would be a distinct lack of crony capitalism.

Crony capitalism is a dysfunction in which the successes of private capitalist enterprises tend to stem from generous treatment by the government, usually through a purposeful lack of taxation and regulation on the industries in question. If we take a look at The

Economist’s 2014 Crony Capitalism Index, we see that the United States ranks second in the developed Western World in a measure of how strongly moneyed interests are tied up in politics, and the degree to which they leverage their influence. This index is not by any means the ultimate decider of how corrupt a government is, but it does go to show that from a numerical standpoint, the United States federal government is much more closely tied to wealthy individuals and interest groups than the vast majority of its

Western counterparts.

The argument could be made that this study was performed in 2014, after the

“The Revolving Door of

Washington” is a long-standing trope of American politics by which legislators become lobbyists and vice versa. Whether it is Obama’s appointment of ex-Comcast lobbyist Tom

Wheeler to chairmanship of the Federal Communcations Commission, or the immediate lucrative hire of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor by an investment bank that he had been regulating on the House Financial Services Committee, the symbiotic relationship of government and interest groups is not simply the result of a single 2010 court case. These findings are indicative that congressmen will not always do right by their district, and that many congressmen hold ulterior motives in their office, which points to the fact that the job performance of a federal legislator is not independent of interest groups or the manner in which lawmakers are elected. In this case, the manner in which the legislator is elected does play a role in how they legislate. If candidates were not burdened by the fundraising process, and were not permitted to take any money (directly or via Super-

PAC) from interest groups, the focus of the election would dramatically switch.