A Modest Proposal for Campaign Finance Reform

             The recent Supreme Court decision in the Citizens United case, opening the floodgates to corporate and union political contributions, has led to a lot of legal breast-beating and teeth-gnashing.   But those on the left need to acknowledge that decrying an expansion of First Amendment protections is probably not wise in the long run.   And those on the right need to confront the fact that the influence of money on our politics is a big problem, now likely to get worse.

            So what is to be done?  Another tortured congressional debate doesn’t exactly seem promising—and might or might not result in something able to pass muster with the Court.  Instead, it’s increasingly clear that what we need is a constitutional amendment to reform federal campaign finance.

            I don’t reach that conclusion lightly.  The Constitution is not to be trifled with.  Amendments need to be timeless, simple and clear.  They need to appeal to a broad consensus in the country.  Despite the controversial history of campaign finance legislation, such a constitutional amendment seems possible—if we retreat a bit to larger principles.

            We need to start with a consensus about the problem.  How about this?:

• First, there is simply too much money sloshing around in American politics—campaigns are too expensive, throwing off too much heat and too little light, fund-raising takes up too much candidate time and effort, distracting current and would-be public servants from the issues that affect people’s real lives, keeping candidates from their families in ways that are unhealthy, and preventing good people from becoming candidates.
• Second, too much of the money comes from interests adverse to those of the electorate as a whole.  We call these “special interests”, but let’s try to be more specific.  We are suspicious of corporate contributions because of a sense that shareholders wouldn’t approve of this use of their money if they were asked; ditto for union contributions and union members.  We are suspicious of contributions driven by extreme ideologies pouring in to moderate communities.  We are suspicious of industries and activists who think of members of Congress as leaders of their committees rather than as representatives of their constituents.  We are suspicious of rich people who seem to be able to purchase public office.
• Third, Congress is too beholden to the funding system to be able to reform itself in any fundamental way.

Does anybody really disagree with any of those points?

If not, maybe a constitutional solution can be imagined.  Here is what it might provide:

1.     Only human beings, not other legal entities, should be permitted to contribute to federal campaigns.  If organizations want to encourage their human members or affiliates to contribute, fine.  But if they can’t convince them to do so, the contributions shouldn’t be made.  Bundling contributions is fine; hiding them isn’t.  Truly “independent” expenditures (although only by human beings)—supporting a candidate without working with that candidate’s campaign—are fine, but enforcement of a bright line guaranteeing that any such expenditures are truly and completely independent is critical.

28^th Amendment Section 1: No person other than a natural person shall make any expenditure or contribution toward advocating the election of any candidate in any primary or other election for President or Vice President, for electors for President or Vice President, or for Senator or Representative in Congress.

2.     Only would-be constituents should be able to contribute to federal campaigns, either directly or through independent expenditures.  That is, you can give to, or spend money to support a candidate seeking to represent you in the House, Senate or White House, but not one seeking to represent someone else.  This change would radically reduce the amount of money in congressional politics.  What rationale is there for opposing it?  You could say that senators affect all of our lives, and they do.  But the president affects the lives of almost everyone on the planet, and we don’t let foreigners contribute to presidential campaigns.  The question isn’t whom our representatives affect, but whom they represent.

28^th Amendment, Section 2: No natural person shall make any expenditure or contribution toward advocating the election of any candidate in any primary or other election for President or Vice President, for electors for President or Vice President, or for Senator or Representative in Congress unless that person is a citizen enrolled to vote in the election to which the expenditure or contribution pertains.

3.      The ability of the very rich to promote themselves for office also needs to be checked.  A provision of the amendment limiting anyone’s contribution to any federal campaign to the total amount spent by the highest-spending candidate in the last race for the same office might provide the beginning of such a check.  Vesting power in both the Congress and the states to set lower limits by statute should do the rest.

28^th Amendment, Section 3: No natural person shall make aggregate contributions toward advocating the election of any candidate in any primary or other election for President or Vice President, for electors for President or Vice President, or for Senator or Representative in Congress in an amount greater than the largest aggregate contributions made on behalf of any one candidate at the previous such election for the same office.

28^th Amendment, Section 4: The Congress and the several States shall have concurrent power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation, including by lowering the limits on contributions established by Section 3 hereof.

4.     If the Congress will not reform itself, the states need to assert themselves.  The Constitution provides that amendments must usually pass both houses of Congress, but it also makes it possible for the states to amend the Constitution by calling for a convention for that purpose.  The amendment outlined here could be passed by state legislatures, which could also simultaneously call for a constitutional convention for the limited purpose of formally proposing the amendment.  (The idea that a convention called into being for a specified limited purpose would have the power to expand its own charter is legal poppycock.)  Again, the amendment could provide that states would have concurrent power with the federal government to enforce violations of the amendment, in case Congress still did not get the message and tried to create loopholes or eviscerate enforcement efforts (see language for Section 4 above).

Proposing language: The legislature of the State of _____ hereby applies, pursuant to Article V of the Constitution of the United States, for a Convention for the sole purpose of proposing this Amendment to the Constitution.

That’s it—constitutional reform of federal campaign finance in four easy steps, and based entirely on three conclusions generally shared by almost all Americans—even if not all federal office holders and current lobbyists.  Any state legislature out there sufficiently fed up to get this movement started?

Obama and Reagan– past as prologue?

The end of the year, and the looming conclusion of President Obama’s first year in office, prompt all sorts of reflections about the state of the President’s popularity, and What It All Means. Here, for instance, from Steve Lombardo at Pollster.com, is a chart of how Obama’s rankings stack up against those of his six most recent predecessors at roughly the same point in their terms:

president	date	Approve %	Disapprove %
Obama	12/09	49	46
Bush II	12/01	86	11
Clinton	12/93	52	38
Bush I	12/89	71	20
Ragan	12/81	49	41
Carter	12/77	57	27
Ford	6/75	52	33

 

So it’s clear: Obama is at the bottom of the heap, right?

But let’s look at these numbers a different way.   Here’s another table, with a different cut.  It reduces the numbers above to ordinal rankings, based on approval, in other words simply ranking recent presidents after one year from most to least popular.   But it also adds another kind of ranking, the ranking of presidents by historians—a proxy for the ultimate judgment about how successful each of these men were during their term.  In this chart, I’m using the most recent C-SPAN poll from February of 2009:

president	Popularity ranking	Historical ranking
Obama	7
Bush  II	1	6
Clinton	5	2
Bush I	2	3
Reagan	6	1
Carter	3	5
Ford	4	4

 

So what do we have here?  First, of course, is the pretty clear point that there’s no meaningful correlation between these two rankings.  That is, a president’s popularity after one year in office is no predictor of success or failure in the presidency.  And this is true even if we ignore the numbers for George W. Bush—the popularity ranking because it was surely skewed by 9/11, the historical ranking because it could be a bit premature.

When thinking about President Obama, in fact, the most interesting row in this second chart is the one for Ronald Reagan.  Reagan is the president who, prior to Obama, seemed in the toughest shape at this early point in his presidency.  He was also, more clearly with each passing year, the most successful president since at least Harry Truman.

Perhaps there is a connection here.   Whatever one thinks of Reagan, he entered the presidency determined to change the direction of the country—and did so.  This is the very point candidate Obama made in early 2008, so infuriating former President Clinton, with whose record Obama drew an unfavorable contrast to Reagan’s.  There is also no question that President Obama’s sweeping policy ambitions are depressing his popularity.  Maybe they are also laying the groundwork for him to one day be ranked with Reagan as among the most successful of the modern chief executives.

The Last of the Best

Tommy Henrich, the Yankee right-fielder who died earlier this month at the age of 96, is probably best remembered as the batter who reached first base in a pivotal moment of the 1941 World Series, when Brooklyn Dodgers catcher Mickey Owen let a third strike get past him. But Henrich’s passing represented a milestone that evokes another season, and another squad—perhaps the greatest baseball team ever to play the game. Tommy Henrich was the last surviving member of the 1939 Yankees.
The 1939 Yankees won 106 games out of 151 played—they never played the three rained-out games that remained from the 154 game schedule because they were 17 games ahead of the second place Red Sox at the end of September. (The 1939 team’s winning percentage would yield 114 victories in a 162 game season, the same mark as the 1998 Yankee team that was our own era’s best.) When the ’39 regular season was over, they swept the Cincinnati Reds in the World Series. It was the Yankees’ fourth consecutive championship—the first time any team had accomplished that feat. (Only the 1949-53 Yankees would do better; the 1998-2001 teams, as we recall painfully, came up one inning short.)
The conventional wisdom is that the best baseball team of all time was the 1927 Yankees, the best of the Babe Ruth/Lou Gehrig clubs. Some statistical analyses rank the 1939 team ahead of 1927, some the other way around. Two statistics should be enough to make clear that there are powerful arguments for the 1939 team: they had the greatest run differential (runs scored less runs allowed) against the rest of the league of any team in history—and also the greatest differential between team and league earned run average. In other words, they scored more, and allowed other teams to score less.
But put all of that, and the rest of the blizzard of numbers, aside. Looking backward from 1939 to 1927 was to glance over just 12 years—the same as comparing the 2009 Yankees to the 1997 (or perhaps 1996) clubs. How would you do that? Well, you might start by asking the thousands of people (maybe even yourself) who saw both teams play. When that exercise was undertaken after the 1939, the verdict was clear. The New York Times called the team “beyond question the most amazing club in the 100-year history of baseball.” Time magazine agreed. Ed Barrow, who served as general manger of both teams, declared the 1939 team superior to the 1927 edition. The lead reporter in The Sporting News, then the Bible of baseball, concurred.
Who were these guys?
No fewer than six of the players can be found enshrined at the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown: pitchers Red Ruffing and Lefty Gomez, catcher Bill Dickey, second baseman Joe Gordon (a recent, posthumous inductee), and, of course, center fielder Joe DiMaggio and first baseman Lou Gehrig. (Gehrig actually played only eight games in 1939—it was the year his famous streak ended, the year when, fatally stricken, he declared himself “the luckiest man on the face of the Earth.”) DiMaggio was the team’s (and the league’s) MVP. His .381 season batting average was his career high. Like any great dynasty, the team was strong off the field as well as on it. Members of the Hall of Fame also include the team’s manager, Joe McCarthy, its general manager, Barrow, and its assistant general manager, George Weiss.
It has been 70 years since the 1939 Yankees celebrated in Cincinnati by singing “Roll Out the Barrel.” Seventy years is a very long time in baseball, and the team had been fading from baseball’s memory for quite awhile. DiMaggio retired in 1951, the last member of the team to play regularly. Right fielder Charlie Keller, the youngest member of the squad, was the last to play at all, in 1952. But team members remained in uniform through 1969, when Joe Gordon managed the expansion Kansas City Royals and shortstop Frankie Crosetti, who had long coached third base for the Yankees, coached for the Seattle Pilots.
When I wrote a book about the 1939 Yankee season in 2002, only three members of the team remained alive: Crosetti, pitcher Marius Russo and Henrich. Crosetti died in 2002, Russo in 2005. Now they are all gone. Tommy Henrich wrote the only memoir of the club. He called it “Five O’Clock Lightning,” evoking the hitting miracles of late afternoons in the Bronx. Across seven decades, if you look close enough, you can still see the flash.