Wealthy Individuals and Big Business to Finally Get a Free Shake in American Political Process

Like most Americans, I spend a lot of time worrying about the health of our political system. How, I wonder, can congress and state legislatures possibly grasp with the big problems in a climate when rich people and large corporations find it so difficult to have their voices heard? But Ken Vogel reassures me that help is on the way for long-suffering fatcats:

Not satisfied by the 2010 Supreme Court ruling that opened the floodgates to corporate-sponsored election ads, conservative opponents of campaign finance regulations have opened up a series of new legal fronts in their effort to eliminate the remaining laws restricting the flow of money into politics.

They have taken to Congress, state legislatures and the lower courts to target almost every type of regulation on the books: disclosure requirements, bans on foreign and corporate contributions and – in a pair of cases the Supreme Court will consider this month – party spending limits and public financing of campaigns.

The sustained assault, combined with the Supreme Court's rightward tilt on the issue, has some advocates for reducing the role of money in politics fretting about the possibility of an irreversible shift in the way campaigns are regulated and funded that would favor Republicans and corporate interests in the 2012 presidential race and beyond.

The 2012 election is coming up pretty soon, so I do think it's plausible that monkeying with campaign finance rules can advantage GOP candidates in that election. But over the long term I always do caution people against overstating the partisan stakes in these kind of things. The Democratic Party is and always has been a lean, mean, election-winning machine able and willing to assemble whatever kind of ideological mish-mash is required to gain office. I think there's every reason to think that whatever happens, Democrats will continue to win about half the time, if not somewhat more often than that. The real question isn't whether the system will reach equilibrium, it's what we'll be debating in order to get to that point. Already the evidence suggests that politicians completely ignore the preferences of voters in the bottom third of the income distribution. That could shift to a system in which the middle third is ignored as well. Who knows. But whatever the details, in the future rich businessmen will have an even stronger voice in determining national policy.