American Politics: Soon to be Sold
Steven VanDeLaarschot
Undergraduate/World Politics
The Supreme Court of the United States has just recently ruled in a 5-4 decision that corporations can now spend as much money as they want on political campaigns. The stated justification for this ruling by the majority is that the First Amendment guarantees this right. The problem with this decision is that corporations can donate ridiculously large sums of money to the candidates of their choosing and in essence buy elections. Let me repeat that: BUY ELECTIONS!
The clearest part of this issue that corporations make millions, if not billions of dollars in profits every year and can use that money for whatever they wish while the average American comes nowhere close to a million dollars of income in a year. No matter how many donors a campaign has, if all that those small donors can give is an average of $20 the campaign can be quickly outspent by a single large company like Halliburton, which could dump tens of millions of dollars into a single campaign to advance their own agenda. This is not democracy! Democracy is about everyone having a voice and everyone's vote counting so that whoever is elected to lead the people was voted in by a majority of the people. This ruling gives corporations an open door to have disproportionately loud voices, so much so that they could drown out the majority of American citizens.
Now some would argue that it is nonsense that elections can simply be bought like food because there are charismatic leaders like Barack Obama who would defy corporations. It may be true that not every election could be bought, that some candidates will continue to get in honestly and fairly, but they could easily become the exception rather than the rule. Charismatic leaders like Barack Obama are rare and most Americans cannot even name all of their states, Congressmen and Senators. It would be a simple matter for a powerful company to find someone to be their candidate, some corporate stooge brought in on the promise of millions of dollars, who would make all sorts of promises to the voters while the company backing them would buy endless amounts of advertising.
In every election the issue of money and funding comes up. A concern that is always present is which candidate is funded better and it is always a disadvantage to have less money than your opponent. The coverage of the 2008 presidential election frequently brought up the fact that the Obama campaign had significantly more money than the McCain campaign and that the McCain campaign had pulled out of certain states (like Michigan, for example) because they simply didn't have enough money to keep fighting there. Having the unlimited backing of a corporation in a campaign, especially a low-level campaign that draws very little media attention, can be the one thing that causes one candidate to be elected over the other.
Newsweek's Jonathan Alter wrote of this decision that “The majority has opened the door to a Chinese bank or a Russian oligarch buying Congress” (15). Not only has the Supreme Court opened the door for American corporations to ruin American politics, but there is the potential for foreign corporations to do the same. It is not hard to imagine the Chinese-backed companies buying elections for Congress and the Senate to influence American politics for their own desires, whether it helps America or not.
Sadly, foreign corporations would not even have to have a majority of Congress or the Senate to influence policy. All that they would need would be 41 Senators in a coherent block and they could filibuster eternally unless they get what they want. Imagine Congress not being able to pass any laws of any sort, not even a budget bill to run the government itself. News commentators have talked about deadlocked Congresses before; this would truly be a deadlocked Congress. With the way our government was created, winning 41 elections would be all that is required for a foreign country to paralyze our government, just 41.
The problems of this ruling do not stop there. If foreign corporations won a majority in Congress they could dictate American politics. People born and raised in China or Russia or Venezuela could dictate what laws are passed right here in America, their only purpose being the advancement of their own countries without caring one bit as to what happened in America. Our country could be run from Beijing or Moscow, not Washington. If Chinese-backed candidates won a majority in both houses of Congress they could pass laws forcing us to do whatever they wished and no longer would Americans truly have a say in their own government. The last time that happened, we were colonies. Once again, we were colonies to Great Britain and we fought a revolution because we had no say in our laws.
Try for a moment to imagine what life would be like if instead of Democrats and Republicans making policy in Washington, American policy was created by Vladimir Putin in Moscow or Hu Jintao in Beijing or Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. We don't like Russia all that much, only 20 years ago the Cold War ended. Given the opportunity it seems very likely that Russia would use this to its own advantage and America would be forced to bend its knee to Moscow. American technology, American goods of every sort, it would all become Russia's. We would be exploited like the colonies that we once were. It would be very likely that China would do just about the same thing, exploit the United States in order to fuel its own economy.
Freedoms that we cherish in this country, such as freedom of speech, could very easily become limited and those freedoms could be lost. This would fundamentally change our lives because we all enjoy our freedoms and we try to spread those freedoms throughout the world. Instead we could end up losing them here in our very own country and all it would take would be to buy off enough elections. It takes two-thirds of Congress to amend the Constitution, which means that if 290 Congressmen and 67 Senators were bought by corporations our Constitution could be changed dramatically.
This may seem extreme, but it is a very real possibility. The door has been opened and there will be those who step through it. For those who are skeptical, Bernie Madoff. He stole billions of dollars and don't think he is alone. While few crimes gain so much attention as his, there are criminals everywhere. There are small-minded, devious people who would abuse the American political system given the chance as long as it advances their own agenda.
We all think the same thing when we hear the word Watergate. Richard Nixon, the only sitting president who ever resigned and would have been the only one to be impeached and removed from office, was behind Watergate, but if we let corporations buy our elections and our seats in Congress Watergate will seem like nothing. It would be like comparing the size of an ant to the size of an elephant (with the ant being Watergate).
How those five members of the Supreme Court who made this ruling do not see the gravity of the situation is beyond me. These are supposed to be some of the greatest legal minds in our country and yet it escapes them how easily our democracy could be abused because of this ruling.
Sources:
Alter, Jonathan. “High-Court Hypocrisy.” Newsweek 1 February 2010: 15. Print.