| There have been quite a few elections recently where politicians won with people's support and money. And they often won because they rejected corporate money. See Ro Khanna, who I think has a real shot of becoming the U.S. president in the next 8-12 years. If Alison Hartson can also win against the military industry complex and intelligence community-backed Dianne Feinstein in the upcoming Senate election in California, I think it will show a real reversal from politicians winning with corporate money alone and a trend that people and sick and tired of this type of politicians. But if you really want to solve this corporate money problem, you can. Just ban all corporate donations and limit individual donations to less than $500 per politician per year. Donations above $1,000 still seem to incentivize politicians to hold "fundraisers" with rich people and cocktail parties, instead of actually appealing to the masses. The "money vote" needs to be "equal and universal" just like the actual vote. Right now it's way skewed in favor of rich people and companies. The FBI would also need to launch automatic investigations against any politicians that are found to have >$10,000 donated (in total) to her or him that isn't coming from such <$500 individual donations. For instance, the fact that the latest Supreme Court Justice was backed by $25 million "dark money" is a spit in the face of democracy. He should have been investigated immediately over that by the FBI/an anti-corruption agency. You can't excuse this type of behavior with "well, they need the money to win!" anymore. It's destroying whatever is left of US' democracy, and it's regular people that will have to suffer the consequences for that. Winning isn't important anymore when the winners are also the "baddies." |
Okay, let's break this down a bit. What you're saying is:
1. A private individual (or collection of private individuals; we don't know) spent $25m promoting their views about an important political issue of the day.
2. This is bad.
That's an interesting argument, but do keep in mind that you're describing is about as pure exercise of the first amendment as you're likely to find. The founders would recognise a wealthy, powerful individual using the best communication technology available to spread their views, possibly anonymously, because that's precisely what they did, and precisely what they aimed to protect. Even if you think it's a good idea not to let people have an unrestricted voice to speak about political topics (and I'm unconvinced, to say the least), that's super not going to happen in the US of all places.
> He should have been investigated immediately over that by the FBI/an anti-corruption agency.
Investigated for what? Unless you're imagining some sort of blatant, explicit quid pro quo, any law you're hoping to find a violation of would itself be ridiculously unconstitutional.
Campaign finance reform is a great idea, but you need to keep in mind that in the US you can restrict money donated to campaigns, but you can't restrict money spent speaking about political issues. (Which I think is probably for the best, given how many people would like to silence Greenpeace, the ACLU, pro-choice groups, the New York Times, etc., etc. Especially these days...)