The Supreme Court just made money matter even more

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There is a number that decides who gets to run for office in this country. It isn’t the candidate’s IQ, résumé or ideas. It is how much money he or she can raise.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court made that money matter even more.

In a case called NRSC v. FEC, the court tore out one of the last rules keeping a flood of party money out of individual campaigns — the limit on how much a political party can spend in direct coordination with its own candidates. Five months before the midterms, the spigot just opened wider.

If your honest reaction is a tired shrug — another ruling, more money, same direction — don’t look away from that feeling. Because hiding underneath it is the most unifying fact in American politics.

We agree on almost nothing now. But we agree on this: too much money runs the government.

Democrats say billionaires bought it. Republicans say special interests own it. Independents say politicians answer to donors, not voters. Same complaint, in three languages.

And Tuesday the court made it worse — again. This is year 15 of the same story: a straight line from Citizens United in 2010, through Federal Election Commission v. Ted Cruz for Senate, to today. Every few years, one more rule comes down. Every few years, a little more of your voice gets drowned out by someone else’s checkbook, under the veil of “free” speech.

I spent six years at the Federal Election Commission. I ran budget planning there when McCain-Feingold passed. And I learned something in that building that most people never get to see.

We want leaders who understand budgets, infrastructure, defense, medicine, energy and the law. Then we build a machine that measures none of that. It measures one thing. Can you raise the money?

Picture me running for Congress after 20 years inside the federal government. I know how the budget actually works, why agencies burn cash every September and how to stop it. I wrote the book on what the government does and where it fails.

None of it counts — not at first. The first question is whether I can dial for dollars four hours a day, charm wealthy strangers over dinner, and convince people with money to bet on me.

Only if I pass that test does anyone ask whether I know anything worth knowing. The system doesn’t just let money in. It puts fundraising at the front door and makes it the lock.

We already agree on the disease. We have just never been shown the cure.

More than a century ago, a Republican president proposed a cure. Theodore Roosevelt’s idea was almost insultingly simple: Take the money out of the race entirely.

Imagine: Filing opens. Anyone who meets the constitutional bar can run. Candidates go out and gather signatures — earned by knocking on doors and making their case. Clear the threshold, and you’re funded. Publicly. Every qualified candidate gets the same amount.

No donor dinners. No PAC money. The campaign becomes a contest of judgment, competence, character and vision — the exact things we already pretend elections are about.

Now look at what we actually have. Raise $20 million and you’re a serious candidate. Fail to do so, and you are invisible. Which is exactly the world this ruling deepens.

Roosevelt wanted to shrink the power of private money. The court has spent 16 years growing it. So can Roosevelt’s vision still be built?

Yes. But not through an ordinary law — and Tuesday’s ruling is the proof. When the Supreme Court reads the First Amendment to mean that money is speech, no statute survives contact with it. Congress passed these limits. The court erased them. The only instrument that outranks the court’s reading of the Constitution is the Constitution itself. It would take an amendment.

That is the target.

Amending the Constitution is supposed to be hard. The last amendment was ratified in 1992. The bar is high on purpose — an amendment is meant to reflect something close to a national consensus.

Consensus is the one thing we have. We don’t agree on immigration or abortion. But we agree that too much money runs politics. We’ve agreed for years. The only thing missing is a target. We’ve been angry at a problem without ever aiming at a solution. Here is the solution we desperately need: An amendment that says “Elections for federal public office shall be funded publicly. Every candidate who qualifies receives the same amount, on equal terms,” and that “Private money shall not be raised or spent to influence those elections, and all political spending shall be disclosed.”

Amendments that pass follow the same path. First the country agrees something has to change. Then it agrees on how. We’re already standing on the first step. Roosevelt handed us the second one more than a hundred years ago.

Publicly financed elections, written into the Constitution where no single ruling can reach them. That’s it. That’s the target.

Cheryl Kelley is a former senior government official with experience across five Cabinet agencies, including serving as director of planning, management and budget. She is an adjunct fellow at the Pell Center at Salve Regina University and the author of “An Informed Citizenry: How the Modern Federal Government Operates” and the novel “Radical, An American Love Story.”

Tags

citizens united

Federal Election Commission

NRSC v. FEC

Supreme Court

Ted Cruz

Theodore Roosevelt

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