Do you remember when the 22 year old British heiress Petra Ecclestone bought the Spelling mansion for $85 million cash and was told that she could have bought affordable housing for 1,000 families? Well think of this.
According to required campaign filings as reported by the Federal Election Commission (FEC), 148 candidates for all parties collectively raised $1,644,712,232 and spent $1,601,104,696 for the primary and general campaigns combined through November 24, 2008. This does not include the money from the public financing system funded by the presidential election campaign fund (PECF - people check off a donation on their tax returns) or the money collected by Political Action Committees (PACs). John McCain, Tom Tancredo, John Edwards, Chris Dodd, and Joe Biden qualified for and elected to take public funds while Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama chose not to participate in the public financing system. The Huffington Post on March 14, 2009 reported that the two-year election cycle of 2007 and 2008 saw record spending of nearly $1.2 billion by PACs. And, the FEC said that on Jan. 1, 2009 there were 4,611 PACs, which were formed by companies, unions or other groups to raise and spend money to help presidential and congressional candidates.
This $2.8 billion dollars spent on campaigns is more than 3 times what Petra bought the house for. It could have been spent to buy 3,000 or more homes or provided about 25 billion meals based on ABC’s Hunger at Home campaign that collected $188,000 and provided 1.3 million meals (see December 14 blog – Angels or Heroes).
Per the Encyclopedia Britannica, in U.S. politics, a PAC is an organization whose purpose is to raise and distribute campaign funds to candidates seeking political office. They are formed by corporations, labor unions, trade associations, or other organizations to solicit voluntary campaign contributions from individuals and channel the resulting funds to candidates for elective offices in the federal government, primarily in the House of Representatives and the Senate. PACs rose to prominence after the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 set strict limits on the amount of money a particular corporation, union, or private individual could give to a candidate. By soliciting smaller contributions from a much larger number of individuals, PACs circumvent these limitations and manage to provide substantial funds for candidates. By the late 20th century, the vast amounts of money raised by PACs had greatly escalated the cost of running for federal office.
In a July 11, 2011 article by ProPublica it said campaign finance changed dramatically after the Watergate scandal. With the Federal Election Campaign Act, Congress set up the FEC, tried to eliminate hidden donations and limited contributions to federal candidates and PACs. The next major change came in 2002. The McCain-Feingold law banned political parties from collecting “soft money,” or unlimited contributions from corporations, unions and others, and limited the ability of special-interest groups to run so-called “issue” ads that in reality attacked or supported candidates. Courts and the FEC almost immediately started gnawing at the new law. And in recent years, three court decisions rolled back many of the limits on special-interest groups and potentially opened the door to foreign governments or corporations spending freely on campaigns through U.S. corporations they control. (FEC regulations ban foreign nationals from contributing, but they say nothing about a foreign corporation donating money through a U.S. operated subsidiary.)
In September 2009 a federal appeals court, in EMILY’s List v. Federal Election Commission, struck down FEC regulations and opened the door for political nonprofits like EMILY’s List, which backs female Democrats who support abortion rights, to spend significantly more money on campaign activities. In January 2010, the Supreme Court dealt a major blow to McCain-Feingold. Ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the court said that the government cannot prevent corporations and unions from spending unlimited money to support or criticize specific candidates. Drawing on this decision in March 2010, a federal appeals court ruled in SpeechNow.org v. Federal Election Commission that political committees making independent expenditures - that is, spending not coordinated with or directed by a candidate’s campaign could accept donations of unlimited size. Together, the rulings super-charged some existing fundraising groups and paved the way for new ones. The FEC, deadlocked for months on issues of disclosure and foreign money, has not yet written new rules interpreting the court decisions. That’s left the field open for political strategists and lawyers. In my opinion, this situation and waste of money will only get worse.
Barney Frank, Congressman, said "Elected officials are the only human beings in the world who are supposed to take large sums of money on a regular basis from absolute strangers without it having any effect on their behavior". We know this doesn’t happen.
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