Contemporary politics requires raising lots of money. But that is also a formula for corruption, with elected officials potentially giving pay-back to those who gave them money for their campaigns. How can that be avoided?
One solution, found to be constitutionally dubious, was to strictly limit the amount of money individuals can give to a political campaign. Another, advocated by many conservatives, is to let people give what they want as long as “transparency” is maintained by making public the names of the donors. That way if lawmakers pass bills that enrich certain donors, the bribery would be obvious. So “transparency” has become part of most campaign finance laws.
But this has had an unintended consequence. Donor lists are being used as enemy lists, allowing the government and private groups to go after people who have given money to certain individuals or causes, harassing and punishing donors for their politics and their beliefs.
From Charles Krauthammer: The zealots win again – The Washington Post:
For a long time, a simple finesse offered a rather elegant solution: no limits on giving — but with full disclosure.
Open the floodgates, and let the monies, big and small, check and balance each other. And let transparency be the safeguard against corruption. As long as you know who is giving what to whom, you can look for, find and, if necessary, prosecute corrupt connections between donor and receiver.
This used to be my position. No longer. I had not foreseen how donor lists would be used not to ferret out corruption but to pursue and persecute citizens with contrary views. Which corrupts the very idea of full disclosure.
It is now an invitation to the creation of enemies lists. Containing, for example, Brendan Eich, forced to resign as Mozilla CEO when it was disclosed that six years earlier he’d given $1,000 to support a referendum banning gay marriage. He was hardly the first. Activists compiled blacklists of donors to Proposition 8 and went after them. Indeed, shortly after the referendum passed, both the artistic director of the California Musical Theatre in Sacramento and the president of the Los Angeles Film Festival were hounded out of office. . . .
Sometimes the state itself does the harassing. The IRS scandal left many members of political groups exposed to abuse, such as the unlawful release of confidential data. In another case, the Obama campaign Web site in 2012 published the names of eight big Romney donors, alleging them to have “less-than-reputable records.” A glow-in-the-dark target having been painted on his back, Idaho businessman Frank VanderSloot (reported the Wall Street Journal’s Kimberley Strassel) suddenly found himself subject to multiple audits, including two by the IRS.
In his lone dissent to the disclosure requirement in Citizens United, Justice Clarence Thomas argued that American citizens should not be subject “to death threats, ruined careers, damaged or defaced property, or pre-emptive and threatening warning letters as the price for engaging in core political speech, the primary object of First Amendment protection.” . . .
If revealing your views opens you to the politics of personal destruction, then transparency, however valuable, must give way to the ultimate core political good, free expression.
So how should campaign finance issues be handled? Just let everybody give whatever they want anonymously? Publicly funded elections? Or what?
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