'The DISCLOSE Act won’t fix campaign finance" Posted by Ezra Klein at WP

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The DISCLOSE Act won’t fix campaign finance

Posted by Ezra Klein at WP

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/07/27/the-disclose-act-wont-fix-campaign-finance/

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Campaigns need votes to win. But they need money simply to survive. They get that money from a vanishingly small percentage of Americans.

According to Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, only 0.26 percent of Americans give more than $200 to congressional campaigns. Only 0.05 percent give the maximum amount to any congressional candidate. Only 0.01 percent — 1 percent of 1 percent — give more than $10,000 in an election cycle. And in the current presidential election, 0.000063 percent of Americans — fewer than 200 of the country’s 310 million residents — have contributed 80 percent of all super-PAC donations.
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“This, senators, is corruption,” Lessig said Tuesday, in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. “Not ‘corruption’ in the criminal sense. I am not talking about bribery or quid pro quo influence peddling. It is instead ‘corruption’ in a sense that our Framers would certainly and easily have recognized: They architected a government that in this branch at least was to be, as Federalist 52 puts it, ‘dependent upon the People alone.’ You have evolved a government that is not dependent upon the People alone, but that is also dependent upon the Funders. That different and conflicting dependence is a corruption of our Framers’ design, now made radically worse by the errors of Citizens United.”

Last week, Senate Democrats took another run at blunting the influence of Citizens United, the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that permits unlimited contributions to independent political committees. The lawmakers voted for the Disclose Act, which would have required groups making more than $10,000 in campaign- related expenditures to disclose contributors who had donated more than $10,000. No longer would information about election spending be limited to, “This ad paid for by Americans United for a More American America.”

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