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October 11, 2002
Introductory Comments
Mark Green
Good afternoon everybody, thank you for coming. I’m Mark Green, a private citizen and a visiting lecturer at NYU Law School.
Often, you only know after the fact when there was an historical moment that led to a breakthrough or a breakdown in some public policy. Sometimes it’s a very obvious one—the election of John Kennedy, the death of John Kennedy. Sometimes they’re unobvious, as when Rosa Parks wouldn’t stand up when the presumption was that she should get to the back of the bus. We now are, in effect, in what will be regarded as a major historical moment on the issue of the American democracy and the democratic prospect.
Why? First, we are post-Enron and –Worldcom. Those two events, said Ralph Nader who lectured here last week, showed how his mistake in the 1960s was to underestimate the extent and cost of corporate crime. All the companies now being exposed on the business pages and front pages show not just financial malfeasance but also the nexus between money and politics—and how money can get policies enacted. And it was in this context that the McCain-Feingold law was enacted, the first substantial campaign finance reform in over a quarter of a century, not since the 1970s acts.
Second, what happened in Florida in the year 2000 would’ve been rejected as too fantastical a novel. But those lapses in that state electorally inspired and led to the bill that Demos’s Miles Rapoport and Josh Rosencrantz, the head of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU, will discuss more extensively.
The so-called Dodd-McConnell bill is a bit of breakthrough on the issue of voting rights and there’s an article on the front page of the Times that some civil rights groups think it’s not worth the candle and other groups think it’s a necessary but insufficient step.
And, finally, the court of appeals will be hearing the McCain-Feingold arguments in December. Last month, the second court of appeals in New York, in a 2 to 1 decision, upheld the Vermont law, which prohibits multi-millionaires and billionaires from spending their own money. Now, we are all familiar with the fact that spending limits were constitutionally rejected—in Buckley v. Valeo in 1976—on the argument that if you can’t spend more money, arguably you can’t speak more. But money is not speech, it’s property. We may have a moment, for the first time in a quarter of century, when the Supreme Court will rule on McCain-Feingold and perhaps even the Vermont expenditure law, which, if upheld, means any state could pass a law saying that billionaires can’t spend their own money to run for office. In my view, Buckley will be reversed. Whether it’s in two years or twenty years, we will look back on an era where people could in effect buy office and it will appear as ludicrous as a ban on interracial marriage. Now I know and like John Corzine, and I’m glad he’s the Democratic Senator from New Jersey. But he spent as much money for one U.S. Senate seat in 2000 as all the candidates for Parliament spent in the whole country of Great Britain combined in their last legislative elections. Therefore, this is the right time for a meeting to discuss what the American pro-democracy moment could look like.
What is democracy? I mean, we use the word almost like a cliché, something you don’t have to explain. But sometimes first principles are good to understand, and to me it means participation. It’s giving citizens a voice, allowing people to register and vote and talk back and fight back with the people who are elected to represent them. Now, a democracy, said Vaclav Havel, is like a distant horizon which you can move toward but never quite reach. And I think that’s a poetical truth. But we are far from that ideal. Perhaps we are the oldest democracy, but no longer are we the reigning champion when it comes to money and voting.
Recall how in France Le Pen—a bigot, racist, and anti-Semite—got such a high percentage that he got into the runoff. The articles all said it was because of “absent voters.” That’s very interesting. The presumption there is you vote and, if you don’t vote, you’re absent. So the percentage of the eligible electorate in France in the last presidential election plummeted down to about 72%. We haven’t had a 72% turnout of the eligible voters since close to the turn of the last century. It’s been half in presidential elections, a third in congressional elections, 10-20% in primaries. So 72% was awful in France, was actually inconceivable. On voting, I’ll allow Miles and Josh to speak. Let me now just conclude with some comments on campaign finance, which will be picked up by the man who many people around the country think his first name is McCain.
Senator Feingold’s first name is actually Russell. A popular Senator from the maverick Wisconsin tradition, he is an amazingly smart, calm guy whose public equanimity you could confuse for meekness. But he is probably the only Democrat who voted to continue the impeachment proceedings to get more information, voted against impeachment of Bill Clinton, voted to confirm John Ashcroft as Attorney General and then was the sole vote in the US Senate against the so-called US Patriot Act. This is a guy who marches to the beat of his own drummer. And I admire him immensely.
And without him, of course, we wouldn’t have the McCain-Feingold law. The issue of money in politics is not new. Plutarch kvetched that money was ruining the Roman Senate and it was said of Standard Oil at the turn of the last century that it did everything to the Pennsylvania legislature except refine it. Senator Boise Penrose, a 300 pound Republican in the U.S. Senate, committed candor a century ago when he once said to an audience of his big donors—ok, you exist to give me a lot of money so I can serve and pass laws that enhance your profits out of which you continue to give me your money. That is a terrific system for the donors and the recipients—unfortunately, however, it leaves out the taxpayers and the citizens from this closed loop.
While the problem has been around for a long time, it has metastasized. In 1976, the average congressperson got elected by spending $80,000, a senator $600, 000. The last cycle, the average congressperson got elected by spending not $80,000, but $700,000…the average Senator, not $800,000, but $8 million. In other words, if movie prices had gone up comparably, what cost $2.50 to see Robert Redford in The Candidate would cost $32.50 to see Joan Allen in The Contender. So it’s gone up 10-fold, more than three-fold in real dollars. 98% of House incumbents win, 94% of congressional candidates who spend the most money win. .1% of Americans who give $1,000 or more to candidates absolutely have more influence than the other 99.9% who don’t give $1,000. It is statistically about as likely that a House member running for re-election will die than lose. I’m not urging that anyone die. But, that’s why we have a Permanent Congress. Now democracy presumes competitive elections so people have options, but when you have a Permanent Congress, it discourages debate and openness. Finally, because Buckley v. Valeo allows self-financing and because special interest gifts come with strings attached so often, here are the costs: First there are what Judge J. Skelley Wright calls the silent casualties of politics. Women and men never run because they think they can’t possibly financially keep up with their opponents. My son is a freshman at Cornell and two days ago he told me that he overheard a student say he was interested in politics, but “I’m going make a lot of money and then I’ll try to pull a Corzine.” While I’m personally glad John won, you see the problem if you don’t happen to be the chairman of Goldman Sachs immediately before your election.
Second, Senator Bill Bradley said he spent most of his time as a candidate raising money to feed the broadcast monster called airtime. Candidates feel like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. You wake up, it’s the same thing day after day. If you don’t do it, you’re not in it. And I have a friend, a person with immense idealism and talent who has never run, but when I told him that I made 30,000 phone calls to get in to the finals to run for Mayor, he said, in effect, I’m out of here.
Third, I’m convinced the more dollars in the system, the fewer voters in the system. Voters are rational actors who realize that it may legally be one person—one vote under Baker V. Carr, but it’s actually one PAC—many votes and they just don’t speak in equal force.
Finally, someone once said to Senator John Breaux of Louisiana, can money buy a Senator? He said absolutely not—it can “rent one,” however.
The issue is not that people who seek and hold office are bad people—I’ll tell you they are so much more high-minded and idealistic than the tabloids would presume. The smoking gun is the system which compels good people to seek bad money with strings attached. Today’s front page article explains how all these interest groups gave to Governor Pataki. I am confident no one in his campaign ever said, “Interest group A, you won’t get a contract unless you give big.” You say that, you go to jail. But you don’t have to say that. Contractors are not dumb people. They assume that if they give, their calls will get answered—and that’s true. One Congressman said to me, “you know I just got a $25,000 soft money contribution. It’s the equivalent of an SUV.” If someone gives you an SUV, you like them. And it’s inconceivable that if someone gave you an SUV, you wouldn’t take their call.
In conclusion, we’re having this conference on the campaign finance act not just to bellyache but to inform. Justice Brandeis was right that states should be laboratories of experimentation. So Maine, Arizona, the City of New York and many other jurisdictions have public financing where small gifts are matched and there are expenditure ceilings tied into public funds. That is constitutionally permissible. There are also proposals for free television and radio, which is how it is in Western Europe but not in America. There are proposals to really reform or replace the Federal Election Commission. And there are other successful models that exist—like the presidential matching public funds system, which until now has worked to give public funds to candidates who were little known like Nobel laureate Jimmy Carter. Of course, he was initially an unknown but, because of public funds, he could be competitive and, ultimately, of course successful.
I want to now introduce my colleague Miles Rapoport. Miles was an elected legislator for 9 years in the Connecticut General Assembly. He served as the Secretary of State from 1995-1999. Connecticut’s loss then became a movement’s gain when he helped head what’s called DemocracyWorks, which is represented here. And then of course, he founded and now runs one of the best pro-democracy groups in the country, Demos, which is a network for ideas and action and a co-sponsor with the New Democracy Project of today’s event. Please welcome Miles Rapoport.
If you would like a copy of the full transcript from the conference, please contact the office at mail@newdemocracyproject.com
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