WOLF: Then we’re in a catch-22, if there seems to be no way to challenge what could be illegal behavior.
GHOSH: Well, I think this is the challenge of our time, right? There are mechanisms, but they are currently manned by folks who are hostile to the laws they’re supposed to enforce. The FEC has that problem, and we’ve documented it. In fact, one of the main reasons why I think we’re in the position we are today, with elections being dominated by special interests spending billions of dollars, is because the FEC, the regulator that’s charged with enforcing the law, has consistently failed to do that.
This feels like a double standard
WOLF: It feels like an individual has more constraints on them. I can only give the maximum amount allowed by law to a political campaign, but somebody of means, or a corporation, can give as much as they want to a dark money group without putting their name to it. That’s a pretty clear double standard.
GHOSH: It’s a double standard that is a byproduct of our inequality in society. If somebody has a desire to influence elections and they say, well, I’d like to give $500 in this election, and they pick five candidates, that’s the model for campaign finance. You express your preferences through who you choose to donate to. But what is any individual $500 weighed against somebody like Elon Musk or some Fortune 500 company setting up a super PAC and giving it $200 million? There’s this deep imbalance that is essentially taking our economic disparities and turning them into political disparities. And that’s really what campaign finance law has always been about, that certain things are not for sale, that political office is not for sale in the same way as a yacht or an island. The law, over many years, has been degraded, not enforced, and is now being openly unwound. I think the situation has gone from bad to worse.
Dire but fixable
WOLF: How would you describe the current state of campaign finance law to the general American?
GHOSH: The state of affairs is really dire, but it also can be fixed. It’s not dire in a way where we don’t know what to do. There are bills that are in Congress now that could fix a lot of the problems that we’ve just been talking about. I mentioned the DISCLOSE Act. It would do a lot to improve transparency. There are also bills that would redefine how coordination works, and essentially would close a lot of these loopholes, including the one that the FEC carved out last year.
So it’s really important for people to know that the issues that they care about, the sort of kitchen-table issues that affect their lives, often rest on this fundamental issue of, where are politicians getting their money? And I think as we move more and more toward a billionaire-, megadonor-funded election system, we see people’s fundamental problems and what they want to see happening in government being disregarded. Instead, somebody like Elon Musk, who essentially ensured that his guy won the White House, it’s their policy that’s being driven forward.
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