Tag: Campaign Finance Reform

For Once, Accountability.

“‘This case is a message from the people of the state of Texas that they want – and expect – honesty and ethics in their public officials,’ said Travis County District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg. ‘All people have to abide by the law.‘”

Some heartening news that dropped over Thanksgiving vacation: A jury of his peers found Boss DeLay guilty of money-laundering. “Punishment for the first ranges from five years to life in prison, but the former congressman from the Houston suburb of Sugar Land could receive probation…Reporters in the courtroom described DeLay as stunned by the verdict, which came after 19 hours of deliberation.“

At this point, I’m cynical enough to think that DeLay will eventually find a way to get this conviction overturned on appeal — particularly given the fact that his defense began with a huge blunder. Still, at least for one day, it was great to hear that Boss DeLay was finally called out for his crimes.

Come, Ye Huddled Masses, to Prison.


“According to Corrections Corporation of America reports reviewed by NPR, executives believe immigrant detention is their next big market…In the conference room, the group decided they would turn the immigration idea into a model bill. They discussed and debated language. Then, they voted on it…Four months later, that model legislation became, almost word for word, Arizona’s immigration law.“

This will probably be the most disgusting story you read all day. On what happens to be the 124th birthday of the Statue of Liberty, NPR’s Laura Sullivan delves into how the private prison industry got Arizona’s racial profiling law passed.

Even accustomed as I am now to stories of how money in politics has completely broken our republic — and why in holy hell do we countenance a private prison system in America anyway? — this is truly vile. “The law could send hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants to prison in a way never done before. And it could mean hundreds of millions of dollars in profits to private prison companies responsible for housing them.“

The Plot Against America.


“These records show that while the chamber boasts of representing more than three million “businesses, and having approximately 300,000 members, nearly half of its $140 million in contributions in 2008 came from just 45 donors. Many of those large donations coincided with lobbying or political campaigns that potentially affected the donors.“

The republic stands upon the edge of a knife, people. Stray but a little, and it will fall. While the NYT belatedly figures out the Chamber is up to no good in its overwhelming campaign spending — thank you, Citizens United — the Center for American Progress discovers that the vast right-wing conspiracy actually holds meetings(!):

“While the Koch brothers — each worth over $21.5 billion — have certainly underwritten much of the right, their hidden coordination with other big business money has gone largely unnoticed…The memo, along with an attendee list of about 210 people, shows the titans of industry — from health insurance companies, oil executives, Wall Street investors, and real estate tycoons — working together with conservative journalists and Republican operatives to plan the 2010 election, as well as ongoing conservative efforts through 2012.”

A House of Ill Repute.


“Two days after financial reform became law, Harry Reid announced that the Senate would not take up comprehensive energy-reform legislation for the rest of the year. And so climate change joined immigration, job creation, food safety, pilot training, veterans’ care, campaign finance, transportation security, labor law, mine safety, wildfire management, and scores of executive and judicial appointments on the list of matters that the world’s greatest deliberative body is incapable of addressing. Already, you can feel the Senate slipping back into stagnant waters.“

Come Senators, Congressmen, please heed the call: In a decent companion piece to James Fallows’ foray on the subject earlier this year, The New Yorker‘s George Packer tries to figure out what the hell is wrong with the Senate. And one of the best answers is buried in the middle of the piece: “Nothing dominates the life of a senator more than raising money. Tom Harkin, the Iowa Democrat, said, ‘Of any free time you have, I would say fifty per cent, maybe even more,” is spent on fund-raising.’“

The other big and much-needed solution: Filibuster reform. But with a handful of Democratic Senators already balking at the idea, that’ll be a tough climb this coming January, and no mistake. Nonetheless, it is very much a fight worth having. “[O]ver the past few decades the reflex has grown in the Senate that, all things considered, it’s better to avoid than to take on big issues. This is the kind of thing that drives Michael Bennet nutty: here you’ve arrived in the United States Senate and you can’t do fuck-all about the destruction of the planet.“

Widening the Breach.

“The SpeechNow decision effectively widens the field of organizations that can raise and spend money on politics more freely in light of the Citizens United decision, which swept aside decades of legislative restrictions on the role of corporations in political campaigns.“

The disaster on the Gulf isn’t the only gusher to worry about. Relying almost exclusively on Citizens United for their reasoning, the three-judge DC Court of Appeals struck down limits on individual contributions to advocacy groups last March, paving the way for even more cold hard cash overflowing the system. [FEC overview.] “The D.C. Circuit’s ruling was the first to apply and significantly expand [Citizens United], which invalidated limits on corporate expenditures in federal campaigns.“

I had heard very ominous rumblings about this hearing in the days after CU, but somehow missed that the actual decision had been handed down (Working as intended: It was dumped on a Friday) and only caught it on account of yesterday’s injunction. (Weirdly, there was no press release from CREW, Common Cause, or Public Citizen either, although PIRG was on the case.) The FEC does seem to be looking toward a Supreme Court appeal…but it’s hard to see that turning out very well, is it?

The Ballad of Casino Jack.

“The festival was over and the boys were all planning for a fall.
The cabaret was quiet except for the drilling in the wall.
The curfew had been lifted and the gambling wheel shut down.
Anyone with any sense had already left town.
He was standing in the doorway looking like the Jack of Hearts.”


Thanks, Bob, I got it from here. As the links above attest, the sordid dealings of “Casino Jack” Abramoff and his GOP associates — most notably Tom DeLay and Bob Ney — made for solid blog fodder here at GitM for several years. So, between that and my current place of work, I probably had more interest than most in Alex Gibney’s Casino Jack and the United States of Money, a documentary recounting Abramoff’s rise-and-fall. And…well, it’s not bad. But, unfortunately, it’s not great either. And in terms of making the points he wants to make, I don’t get the sense Gibney really stuck the landing.

Part of the problem is Casino Jack is a maddeningly mercurial sort — and unlike the recently-released Ney, the soon to trial DeLay, chastened aide Neil Volz, and others, he and “Gimme Five” kickback co-conspirator Michael Scanlon choose not to go on the record here. So, right away, there is a cipher at the center of this ostensibly biographical story. And even more problematic for the film’s narrative and structure: Casino Jack had his fingers in a lot of pies, and if there was any way to game the political system somehow to make money, he was on the case. In short, this is one long, twisted, and convoluted story.

And thus, Gibney is left with the ungainly task of trying to explain how Abramoff turned Northern Marianas sweatshops into a bribe farm for GOP congressmen, and how his shady, playing-both-sides kickback operation gamed Native American casinos. Not to mention how his phantom think-tank on the Delaware coast was in fact a money-laundering outfit. Or how the seemingly Mob-connected takeover of a fleet of Suncruz casino ships — and the murder of its former owner — went down. And, amidst all this, how Abramoff managed to move up the GOP food chain by throwing his money around, and was depressingly successful at it. This is all not even withstanding weird tangents like Red Scorpion. So, while Gibney does an admirable job explaining the details of these various operations, he has to jump through so many hoops to get it all down that the Big Picture often gets lost.

I’m probably being a little too hard on this doc, if only because I went in with very high expectations. I was hoping Casino Jack would be more of a concise and devastating prosecutorial brief about the plague of unfettered money in politics, but it’s more broad and meandering than that. (And, to be fair, whenever you take a subject this broad, there will be some meandering — See also Why We Fight.) Still, as I said, even if the high-level connections aren’t quite nailed down, Gibney does a good job of nailing the specifics of each particular grift — the sweatshops and casinos and whatnot. And, coming across with the nerdy charm of a more buttoned-down, politically-minded version of R.E.M.’s Mike Mills, author and ex-Republican Thomas Frank (The Wrecking Crew, What’s the Matter with Kansas) is an appealing interviewee throughout, and he enlivens the discussion considerably.

Speaking of Frank’s ex-GOP years: If you already knew the contours of this Abramoff story (and I suspect most of the people who bother to see this film will), perhaps the most interesting part of Casino Jack is the first half-hour, which chronicles the old College Republican days of friends Abramoff, Grover Norquist, and Ralph Reed. And from Reed’s penchant for outlandish stunts at campus protests, to Norquist’s unabashed admiration for Leninist tactics, to Abramoff et al’s abortive attempt to engage the Third World in their free-market fundie ways, it’s seem as if the young Reagan Right of the ’80s were mainly just a cracked-funhouse-mirror version of the ’60’s New Left they so despise. (This is also in keeping with what you might expect from books like Rick Perlstein’s Before the Storm, about the ’64 Goldwater campaign.)

Still, as we move into the present day and these young conservatives fan out into the political system, Casino Jack and the United States of Money unfortunately gets its overarching message muddled. Is this movie about the former (Abramoff) or the latter (the U.S.M.)? Is Casino Jack a uniquely well-connected criminal mastermind, or, worse, the clearest expression of a political system overwhelmed by cold, hard cash? It’s true the answer to this question may just be “yes,” but the documentary can’t seem to decide at times if it wants to skewer Abramoff (and, by extension, his “unindicted co-conspirators”) or catch bigger game — the whole rotten system — and as a result, both sorta end up writhing off the hook.

At one point, Casino Jack gets caught up recounting the exceptionally douchey e-mail traffic between Abramoff and Scanlon, which is fun and all. (The best laugh in the movie is when the beach bum lifeguard running their Delaware front operation turns out to be savvier than these two would-be Masters of the Universe: “Uh, you’ve been putting this all in e-mails?”) But, even as we delve into these sordid details, the scarier implications of the Abramoff story feel shortchanged — that not only does this pay-to-play stuff seem business as usual for the Dubya White House and DeLay ring, but worse, that this monied corruption festering at the heart of our republic is both legal and even institutionalized.

And so, when the Citizens United fiasco comes up at the end, it unfortunately feels like a bit of a non-sequitur, rather than the sad culmination of the story we’ve been told for two hours. Casino Jack and the United States of Money is an able attempt at muckraking, but, to my mind, it fails to capture the true horror unfolding here: Jack Abramoff may be languishing in prison right now, and for many, many good reasons. But the mess of a system he thrived in is still right here with us — and if anything, after Citizens United, it might soon be getting worse.

Kagan’s Time to Shine.

“‘I am confident that she’s a solid, reliable modern Democrat…She’s not George McGovern or whoever the liberal left of the Democratic party would want, but the left of the Democratic party isn’t where the party is any more. She’s a good, solid Clinton-Obama Democrat.‘”

Well, that’s the trick, isn’t it? Particularly that she’ll be replacing the irreplaceable John Paul Stevens. In any case, President Obama has made his second pick for the Supreme Court, and it is his Solicitor General and former Harvard Law Dean Elena Kagan. “As solicitor general, Ms. Kagan has represented the government before the Supreme Court for the past year, but her own views are to a large extent a matter of supposition.“

Making the progressive case for Kagan: Larry Lessig, an old friend of hers: “The Kagan I know is a progressive…[T]he core of Kagan’s experience over the past two decades has been all about moving people of different beliefs to the position she believes is correct. Not by compromise, or caving, but by insight and strength. I’ve seen her flip the other side.” Lessig expounds on this coalition-builder argument here: “To hear the liberals talk about it, it sounds like they think we need a Thomas or Scalia of the Left…But nobody who understands the actual dynamics of the Supreme Court could actually believe that such a strategy would produce 5 votes.” (To which one must ask, really? Who’s gonna flip?)

Making the progressive case against Kagan: Salon‘s Glenn Greenwald: “[G]iven that there are so many excellent candidates who have a long, clear commitment to a progressive judicial philosophy, why would Obama possibly select someone who — at best — is a huge question mark?…I believe Kagan’s absolute silence over the past decade on the most intense Constitutional controversies speaks very poorly of her.” This was a follow-up from another piece, where he argued: “Kagan, from her time at Harvard, is renowned for accommodating and incorporating conservative views, the kind of ‘post-ideological’ attribute Obama finds so attractive.” Interestingly, this last part seems much the same argument Lessig’s making in her favor, with the valence changed.

(As an aside, this feud got a bit heated, with Greenwald deeming Lessig a liar and stooge. Having been on the wrong end of Greenwald’s wrath myself on the Citizens United case, Lessig’s rebuttal to this charge sounded all-too familiar: “Chill, Glenn. Dial down the outrage. Dial back the hyperbole. And stop calling those who applaud you liars…[Y]ou can make your point well enough without painting everyone else as liars or constitutional crazies.” True story.)

Anyway, speaking of Citizens United, since the President has explicitly said that decision is lousy law several times over, I presume he’s made sure Kagan is in agreement on that front. (He has, right?) And, as I said back during John Roberts’ nomination, my feeling is generally the president’s prerogative in choosing Supreme Court justices should be respected. (Can’t countenance Roberts’ lying, tho’.) So, if Kagan’s the president’s choice, I’m prepared to give her the benefit of the doubt and support the nomination.

But, quite frankly, I shouldn’t have to doubt (and here, the next two links are via Greenwald.) As the NYT editorial page well put it: “President Obama may know that his new nominee to the Supreme Court, Elena Kagan, shares his thinking on the multitude of issues that face the court and the nation, but the public knows nothing of the kind. Whether by ambitious design or by habit of mind, Ms. Kagan has spent decades carefully husbanding her thoughts and shielding her philosophy from view.“

So, sure, I guess it’s entirely possible Kagan is a secret superprogressive of the Leonard Cohen type. (“They sentenced me to 20 years of boredom, for trying to change the system from within.“) But there’s another explanation that’s more likely. And, loath as I am to agree with David Brooks, his column today echoes almost exactly what I was thinking:

“Kagan has apparently wanted to be a judge or justice since adolescence (she posed in judicial robes for her high school yearbook.) There was a brief period, in her early 20s, when she expressed opinions on legal and political matters. But that seems to have ended pretty quickly. She has become a legal scholar without the interest scholars normally have in the contest of ideas. She’s shown relatively little interest in coming up with new theories or influencing public debate. Her publication record is scant and carefully nonideological…What we have is a person whose career has dovetailed with the incentives presented by the confirmation system, a system that punishes creativity and rewards caginess.“

That’s my rub too, and it dovetails with larger problems I have with DC political culture. More often than not, the people who tend to succeed here are the ones who keep their head down, play the DC game, stay resolutely non-ideological and unobtrusive in their opinions. never go out on a limb, never say or do anything that could hurt their bid to be a Big (or Bigger) Shot down the road. (Hence, the whole phenomenon of The Village.)The problem is, these plodding, risk-averse careerist types are exactly the type of people you don’t want making decisions in the end, because they will invariably lead to the plodding, risk-averse and too-often rudderless politics of the lowest common denominator.

I’m really hoping the future Justice Kagan isn’t another example of this troubling trend, because as I said when Stevens retired: “The Court needs a strong and unabashed liberal conscience right now. What it emphatically does not need is another centrist technocrat that will help push the Court ever further to the right” But, as Kurt Vonnegut put it in Mother Night, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” And when someone spends decades being so careful and circumspect in the face of so many obvious injustices, both by recent administrations and in the world at large…well, I really have to wonder about their judgment.


Update: Having said all that, this recently unearthed 1996 internal campaign finance reform memo to Chief of Staff Leon Panetta, on which Kagan is one of six signers, suggests she is in fact on the right side of the campaign finance reform issue: “It is unfortunately true that almost any meaningful campaign finance reform proposal raises unconstitutional issues and will provoke legal challenge. This is inevitable in light of the Supreme Court’s view — which we believe to be mistaken in many cases — that money is speech and attempts to limit the influence of money on our political system therefore raises First Amendment problems. We think…the Court should reexamine its premise that the freedom of speech guaranteed by the First Amendment always entails a right to throw money at the political system.” So that’s a big check-mark in my book — Unfortunately, other Clinton-era memos are less promising.

Conscience of the Court.

I’m late on this post on account of vacationing, but nonetheless: As the world knows (and long suspected after he only hired one clerk last year), Justice John Paul Stevens has announced his retirement after 34 years on the Court. (See also Dahlia Lithwick’s commemoration of Stevens’ empathy, as well as the Tao of Stevens here and here.)

Expected it may be, but this is not good news. The President is saying all the right things about picking a Justice who will uphold campaign finance laws in the wake of the Citizens United disaster. But, as the pathetic recent capitulation on Dawn Johnsen showed once more, this White House too often shrinks from a necessary fight in the name of an elusive “bipartisanship” that, quite frankly, does not exist.

With Stevens gone and the fearsome foursome of Roberts, Alito, Thomas, and Scalia still roaming the chambers, the Court needs a strong and unabashed liberal conscience right now. What it emphatically does not need is another centrist technocrat that will help push the Court ever further to the right. The ball’s in your court, Mr. President — It’s time to show more of the progressive gumption we voted you in office to provide.

The Government We Paid For.

“‘This is the earliest that the Center has ever offered an estimate,’ Krumholz said. ‘As election observers across the political spectrum work to assess the impact of Citizens United, this prediction offers a solid baseline to compare new spending levels against.'” Before even taking the torrents of campaign cash expected in the wake of the Citizens United decision into consideration, the Center of Responsive Politics estimates that the 2010 midterms will cost over $3.7 billion. (FWIW, the year 2006 clocked in at $2.85 billion.) Sigh…fasten your seat belts — It’s going to be a bumpy ride.