Taxpayer Financed Campaigns

The Campaign Finance Institute (CFI) is an unusual organization in the so-called campaign finance ‘reform’ community. Founded and led by Michael Malbin, it’s one of the few groups in the ‘reform’ constellation that isn’t utterly hysterical on the subject of money in politics, and its research tends to rely on sound data that at the very least makes interesting points. And unlike its fellow travelers, CFI has been willing to think beyond the simple sloganeering and dogma of the ‘reform’ movement.

That said, CFI’s research (or at least their analysis and recommendations) suffer from the fact that it makes assumptions that have no real basis in fact or reason to believe they are correct, and in fact there is often ample evidence suggesting that their core assumptions are faulty.

Yesterday’s release of a new study by CFI drives this point home. Titled Public Financing of Elections After Citizens United and Arizona Free Republic, the study assumes up front that campaigns funded primarily by donors making small contributions are inherently superior to campaign funded primarily by donors making large contributions. The beneficiary of these supposedly superior campaigns are the general public.

But there is little reason to believe this assumption is true.

Justice Elena Kagan’s dissent in Arizona Free Enterprise Club (AKA McComish) yesterday is being praised by the so-called campaign finance ‘reform’ community today. The New York Times, for example, writes:

Justice Elena Kagan, writing in dissent, dissects the court’s willful misunderstanding of the result. Rather than a restriction on speech, she says, the trigger mechanism is a subsidy with the opposite effect: “It subsidizes and produces more political speech.” Those challenging the law, she wrote, demanded – and have now won – the right to “quash others’ speech” so they could have “the field to themselves.” She explained that the matching funds program – unlike a lump sum grant to candidates – sensibly adjusted the amount disbursed so that it was neither too little money to attract candidates nor too large a drain on public coffers.

There are a lot of things wrong with Justice Kagan’s dissent, but that’s the subject of a later post. For now, I just want to focus on one of the more interesting things she wrote, which might give ‘reformers’ pause before celebrating this dissent any further.

Today’s ruling in Arizona Free Enterprise Club’s Freedom Club PAC v. Bennet (also known as McComish v. Bennett, and which I’ll mercifully just call Arizona Free Enterprise Fund or AFEF from here) hinges largely on the idea of whether the government should be in the business of trying to establish a ‘level playing field’ for political speakers.

The idea of a government-directed ‘level playing field has long been a dream of the so-called campaign finance ‘reform’ community. But it is a dream that died long ago in Buckley, the defining campaign finance case for the last 35 years. As the Court noted in this case, borrowing from Buckley:

This sort of “beggar thy neighbor” approach to free speech-”restrict[ing] the speech of some elements of our society in order to enhance the relative voice of others”-is “wholly foreign to the First Amendment.”

Needless to say, this gets many people in the ‘reform’ community up in arms. As the argument goes, If some people are able to spend more in politics than others to advance their political views, oftentimes much more, how can we possibly say we have equal rights when it comes to free speech?

There are at least two answers off the top of my head.

At the New York Times, CCP Chairman Brad Smith cheers the decision in Arizona Free Enterprise PAC v. Bennett as one more step on the road to the proper separation of campaign and state.

For those who can’t stand the wait and wonder each morning what the Supreme Court will bring, the SCOTUS futures market is predicting that the Supreme Court will reverse the 9th Circuit and strike down Arizona’s tax financing scheme of rescue funds in McComish v. Bennett.  So is Tom Goldstein at SCOTUS blog.

Self-styled ‘reform’ group Common Cause today is excitedly pushing the story that because Connecticut adopted a system of tax-financed political campaigns, legislation they favor was able to pass the Connecticut General Assembly. From their release:

Lobbyists lose to Connecticut ‘Clean Elections’

As noted in the New York Times: “In a year when conservative politics have dominated even traditionally Democratic states like New Jersey and New York, Connecticut is closing out its most activist, liberal legislative session in memory…”

• Connecticut has passed a sweeping energy bill that modernizes the state’s energy regulatory structure, and will lower electricity rates for consumers, and help expand the Clean Energy fund and provide rebates that encourage energy efficiency, solar energy and electric vehicles.
• In addition, CT is the first state to mandate paid sick leave for businesses with more than 50 workers…

Though the New York Times article suggests these bills have passed because of democratic majorities in the House and Senate and a democratically-elected governor, Rep. Robert Godfrey said, “If there was ever an illustration of the loss of influence of lobbyists, this is it.”

Credit the Citizens’ Election Commission. Gov. Dan Malloy and  100 percent of other statewide officeholders ran under Connecticut’s public financing program. And 74 percent of the General Assembly – Democrats and Republicans – ran clean. For those of us who lobby at the Capitol, it is clear that legislators are not worrying about campaign money they need to raise from business lobbyists who represent clients that do not like these reforms. And at Common Cause, we are proud of helping to enact, protect and defend this landmark good government reform.

So apparently it wasn’t “lobbyists” that lost, only lobbyists for interests that Rep. Robert Godfrey and the folks at Common Cause don’t agree with.

But looking at the actual votes cast, it’s clear that the ‘clean elections’ program in Connecticut, known as the Citizens Election Program (CEP), was irrelevant to how and why legislators voted.

Reformers who want tax financed campaigns never cease to come up with Rube Goldberg type schemes finance their plans, but Senator Durbin has a particularly dumb idea.