The Super PAC: Are our elections fair?

The Center by Jerry Morgan

Many in the media have made an issue out of how the super PACs can spend multimillions of dollars supporting a candidate and hide behind a mask of anonymity. Sheila Krumholz in the opinion pages of the New York Times asks: "Where did they get the money for that?" 

The answer, of course is the “Citizen’s United decision,” in which the gang of four: Scalia, Thomas, Alito and Roberts plus the proverbial “swing justice” Kennedy proclaimed that the first amendment was written “in terms of speech, not speakers” and that “its text offers no foothold for excluding any category of speaker.” 

Voila, the Super Pac. Any organization, inclusive of corporations, can now spend any sum they like, through a political action committee without having to disclose the donation.

Justice Stevens wrote the dissenting opinion:

"At bottom, the Court's opinion is thus a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt. It is a strange time to repudiate that common sense. While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics."

The argument that speech should be free regardless of who is speaking seems cogent but is in fact, spurious. The reason is that access to “speech” in modern society is restricted to those with money, at least if you want to be heard by a large audience. The constitution was not designed to insure the rights of the moneyed class at the expense of all others; in fact, it was designed to protect the rights of those who have an unfair disadvantage. 

Since the nature of “speech” has changed with the advent of the modern media, the flow of money from private interest groups needs to be restricted to protect the right of individual speech. Just as Justice Stevens argued, the election system and democracy itself has been threatened by this inane decision. And now we see it playing out before our very eyes.

So, disclosure is one thing; the very existence of such entities-the so-called super PACs—may be the real issue, worthy of revisiting. There cannot be a level playing field when entities can spend countless of millions of dollars to get their candidate elected. It is no accident that each of the remaining six candidates are multimillionaires in their own right. 

I have heard it said that it is no longer possible for a man or woman of modest means to become President. Arguably, some of our greatest presidents, including Lincoln, Truman, and even Ronald Reagan, would probably not have been president if they ran today. They would never have even been able to launch a campaign. In fact, today's elections are bought rather than earned.

When voters were left to making their own choice based on the debates, which may have had their own set of biases, there was a semblance of a level playing field. In fact, the man with the least money behind him emerged as the clear-cut winner, surging in the polls to open a big lead on the rest of the field.

Guess what, that man is not Mitt Romney, nor Herman Cain; it is Newt Gingrich, who, hands down, won every single debate so far, with the possible exception of the NH ABC debate where I thought his performance was mediocre. 

My point is, however, that how a candidate fares at the polls and the primaries should not be directly proportional to the amount of money spent. PACS and super PACS aside, every candidate for president should be allocated X amount of money to spend campaigning and not be allowed to exceed X, neither through direct nor indirect spending.

Our elections lack integrity and are hardly more relevant than some around the world that we critique as being "rigged".