(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . MSM Fail: TFG Spending Campaign $$ For Legal Bills? Misses SCOTUS Donor Connect [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-08-19 More media navel gazing: TFG (Trump, for the acronym-challenged) is taking campaign money and paying for personal legal bills --isn't that shocking? “To pay lawyers, [Trump] has often turned to money from supporters: Over the past two years, he has drawn tens of millions of dollars from a political action committee he controls called Save America PAC.” www.nytimes.com/... Ok, but why, exactly should I be outraged? Where is the MSM writing stories on the fact that raising campaign finances, and paying personal bills with that money is even legal? Are Americans all up to speed on that? Yet, that's precisely what recent SCOTUS cases like Ted Cruz v FEC (2022) make legal, which involved Cruz using donor money to repay a personal loan. Is that mentioned in any of the reporting? Nope. At least not in any of the msm sources I follow. Here’s Justice Elena Kagan in her dissent on allowing campaign finances to de facto be converted into personal income: “Repaying a candidate's loan after he has won election cannot serve the usual purposes of a contribution: The money comes too late to aid in any of his campaign activities. All the money does is enrich the candidate personally at a time when he can return the favor — by a vote, a contract, an appointment. It takes no political genius to see the heightened risk of corruption.” [emphasis mine] Why should people care about this detail, since we already know the system is awash with money? Let’s back up for a second. Here’s what should be considered: Accepting billionaire-funded candidates to run government just gets you a government that services billionaire donors through their representative proxies, supposedly the People’s representatives. Only, they’re not, are they? Not anymore, not after the American public has become used to the idea that there’s nothing wrong with private financing of the electoral system, as long as public money - our tax dollars - isn’t funding campaigns that are at the mercy of profit-making media to exercise their 1A right to broadcast their availability as candidates for public office. And that suits the donor class just fine. They have the hoi polloi just where they want us. Thinking of ourselves pinching pennies rather than our public institutions setting up a regulatory framework to oversee the financing of election campaigns for public office, in order to prevent an electoral contest from becoming an influence-peddling pyramid scheme, run by a star chamber of anonymous mega-donors filing the proper IRS paperwork, whether that financing comes from public or private sources. The same mega-donors wining and dining our SCOTUS justices are the ones paying for gerrymandered district maps and the same ones anonymously funding individual candidates! Isn’t the quid pro quo obvious? Without a single election taking place, private dollars have already herded voters into ‘safe’ districts, and provided anonymous campaign financing, that can now be legally converted into a personal income stream, for whatever lucky politician-hopeful manages to catch the attention of a Harlan Crow, or a downtrodden lawyer looking for entré into a higher income bracket finding Leonard Leo. But what’s public-facing is “Candidate A filed paperwork to run for public office...”, or “Nominee B has filed a government disclosure form for a circuit appointment…” With private, sweetheart, relationships like that, what politician, what judge, is going to tell such donors “Sorry, no can do on that issue you want taken care of…”, or legislation passed, or court reform stymied? But what about ‘small donors’ you may be asking? Is private financing of campaigns through small donors not a solution? Get rid of corporate donations altogether and strictly limit single donor dollar amounts (as once existed, in the distant past of the 1990s before Citizens United (2010)…but I digress). But small donor-only financing of campaigns only works if it can rely on a regulatory environment governing campaign financing, in addition to changing the legal status of apportionment abuse, aka gerrymandering, which is currently legal — even for federal office(!), though the apportionment power itself is held by state legislatures, essentially giving states, either individually or in concert, veto power over the composition of the federal government. Allowing small donor campaign funding in the absence of any real regulatory oversight is simply allowing the enlistment of small donors in a project that serves the wealthiest of donors — that ‘star chamber’ again — particularly if apportionment abuse (ie gerrymandering) remains legal. Why? Because it’s still turning what should be a citizen’s interest in his/her public institutions spending tax dollars wisely, and replacing that with a personal, private, interest in what is, essentially, a partisan return-on-investment. Because that’s what we’re talking about when we’re operating an electoral system that is privately-funded, whether from a few large donors, or many small donors. Cash that I donate to a candidate isn’t done in the spirit of an act of charity, it’s typically done with an expectation of electoral success. A return-on-investment, if you will. When that ‘success’ does not materialize, as it must, for some ‘investors’ donating hard-earned, net income, toward a candidate running for office in a democracy, which requires someone to lose the contest, it can be felt, personally by some, and on a psychological level, as a zero-sum loss. Not, “Oh well, I guess this is what the majority wants, in this democracy that we all inhabit (and finance) together. Let’s do better next time.”, but “I’ll be damned if I let ‘those people’ take my money and tell me my candidate didn’t get enough votes! We have to put a stop to their ability to succeed in winning elections!” As a voter personally invested in a candidate, I’m not left feeling like my ideas for how my government should be run didn’t gain traction with the public, I’m left feeling like my ‘investment’ was either wasted by a bad candidate, a bad campaign, or even ‘stolen’ by nefarious actors others have convinced me rigged the election. Because my private, personal, small donor, expenditure on a candidate achieved ‘nothing’, I’m primed to receive a message that ‘someone’ or ‘something’ is to blame for that loss of personal, private, money. And if I’m a mega-donor, I likely have the resources to double down on my loss by looking for angles by which I can increase my chances for electoral ‘success’ for my preferred candidate(s) in future contests. Like, say, funding research into how best to use legislative apportionment powers to manufacture ‘safe districts’ (ie Thomas Hofeller, master GOP redistricting consultant, deceased 2018). Or, alternatively, cozy up to electorally vulnerable legislators, or SCOTUS justices with a chip on their shoulder about their treatment by the legislative branches (ie Justices Thomas, and Alito, living the billionaire lifestyle at the hands of wealthy benefactors funding election law litigation all the way to the SCOTUS, sometimes for decades) The point is, there’s a psychology at work here when we accept, without question, the premise that there’s nothing wrong with equating Money with Speech — even if it’s limited to small donors only. Instead of an electorate that can presume a transparent process by which political parties fund their candidates for nomination to public office from a pool of public dollars every citizen contributes to in an equal manner (as almost all other democracies do), we create an electorate that has doubts about the transparency of the (party) nomination process as a function of an opaque and multi-dimensional fundraising process. No longer can we presume ourselves an electorate that shares an interest in supporting the ‘best ideas’ toward sustaining democracy as a function of expressing those ideas in actual Speech before the electorate; instead we’re creating an electorate that incentivizes the ‘best ideas’ for gaining power as a function of the Money required to achieve that power — no matter the means for doing so even if, as it now appears in 2023, that means supporting a candidate under 4 felony indictments. In short, private financing of our political system - whether by large, small, or a mix, of donors, feels a lot like gambling. Politics becomes a casino - particularly one that operates 24/7/365 - with large donor ‘investors’ engaged in betting ‘strategies’ to maximize their influence on outcomes; and small donors at the mercy of legalized apportionment abuse (ie. gerrymandering, often funded by anonymous big money donors), diminishing the value of a political ‘investment’ much like penny stocks soak up the cash of inexperienced market investors, replacing politics as an ‘exchange of ideas’, for a politics as a market to be cornered and dominated, preferably - for the ‘investor’ - in perpetuity. The appeal to private funding of campaigns for public office is to ‘personalize’ (some might say ‘privatize’) a civic interest - and duty - toward accountable self-governance, by putting a dollar amount on the ‘seriousness’ of that interest. The problem with that is, asking citizens to ‘put their money where their mouth is’ (“Money is Speech”, under current 1A interpretation) is tantamount to asking citizens to convert participation in a democracy for the sake of Democracy and turn it instead into participating in a market, that may, or may not, provide dividends. Only those ‘dividends’ aren’t money in your pocket, when it comes to the rewards of Republican gerrymandering, or even the sustainability of American democracy. For most, the dividend is simply the satisfaction of being on the same ‘team’. And this ‘market’, the 24/7/365 political market, unlike the financial market, is unregulated, just like Wall Street was unregulated before the Crash of 1929, requiring a regulatory framework to be put into place to prevent the over-leveraging that brought on the Great Depression. Apportionment abuse, or gerrymandering, is still basically a legal election strategy, as currently manifested in the exclusively Republican national strategy to gerrymander both state legislatures and Congress, called REDMAP Strategy 2010 (since updated to 2020). The only limitation appears to be whether it abuses racial minority representation or not. And oh, bye the bye, it turns out one or more of those SCOTUS justices, deciding those cases that involve our political system, like Cruz v FEC, are also receiving a lifetime’s worth of billionaire benefits, as Justice Thomas can now attest to, after being outed — yet again — by the crack reporting from Pro Publica. “During his three decades on the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas has enjoyed steady access to a lifestyle most Americans can only imagine. A cadre of industry titans and ultrawealthy executives have treated him to far-flung vacations aboard their yachts, ushered him into the premium suites at sporting events and sent their private jets to fetch him — including, on more than one occasion, an entire 737. It’s a stream of luxury that is both more extensive and from a wider circle than has been previously understood.“ And they have the gall to be upset at the people's representatives - you know, the people running uphill to save the republic those MAGA politicians and SCOTUS justices are raping - questioning SCOTUS justice integrity? That’s some nerve those billionaire-funded SCOTUS justices are displaying. And inconveniently, the msm aren’t giving us the whole story. The money, the influence, the psychology, the rigging that is justified by the personal/privatized financial loss incurred when a political ‘investment’ doesn’t pan out — it is all of a piece; the great swindle of the American voter, to replace a civic franchise with a private chit. No wonder American politics feels more like the voyeurism of putting bills in a bikini at a strip club, than it does lending a voice toward the destiny of a nation. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/8/19/2187372/-MSM-Fail-TFG-Spending-Campaign-For-Legal-Bills-Misses-SCOTUS-Donor-Connect Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/