Personally, while I find a lot of the criticisms of Citizen’s United insufficient, I think there is a distinction to be teased out between money and speech, as there is between (say) lobbying and writing to your representative to give them an earful. Just because the distinction isn’t absolute doesn’t mean there isn’t an opportunity for, or indeed a need for, more sophisticated rules where very large sums of money are at stake. For the same reasons that, me, a private person, lending a friend five hundred bucks is mostly unregulated, while me, a bank manager, lending him fifty thousand might attract the scrutiny of various regulatory agencies.
I mean can we at least admit that financial incentives are almost always more compelling to the type of person likely to become a senator vs moral incentives?
I don’t think this is because congresscreatures are uniquely amoral, I think it’s because the natural human ability to rationalize anything to preserve your status/power/personal comfort means most people in that position would behave the same way. Similarly, I think most people who were President would order drone strikes, even people who, before getting elected, talked about how terrible drone strikes are. I think it takes a uniquely iconoclastic person to fully break from the incentives and intellectual climate that shapes how politicians behave, and that such iconoclastic people are likely to be ineffective politicians for various reasons relating to both how their colleagues would react to them and what other effects in one’s personality such inflexibility produces; the key to building institutions that behave humanely is to ensure you’re not sleepwalking into an incentive structure that makes it significantly easier for them to behave inhumanely, and this is the real meaning behind the notion that power corrupts people.
I think this is related to/is an expression of the principles behind effective anticorruption in poorer countries: it’s not enough to prosecute corrupt politicians and civil servants, you also have to make sure (whether through improvement of the local economy or paying them enough etc.) that corrupt behavior isn’t the only way to advance in your career, make ends meet, etc. My special ire is reserved for people like Newt Gingrich, who took a system which was in a slightly better state and used his influence to push it into a worse equilibrium–in his case, by pressuring representatives to spend more time away from Washington, raising money and campaigning, to procure a short-term political advantage at the expense of the long-term positive function of the House, in which representatives and their families spending a lot of time rubbing elbows made bipartisanship easier, as an outgrowth of preexisting social relationships.
It would almost be better if it were just straight bribery that we had to worry about - at least then corruption would be orthogonal to survival and we might have some reason to hope for individually virtuous politicians. As it stands, an honest politician has a disadvantage in winning and staying in office. Citizens United not only legalized bribery, it legalized the type of bribery most likely to corrupt the political process.
(Modulo @brazenautomaton ‘s well-taken point that campaign expenditures may not be as effective as corporations and politicians think, though note a world where campaign expenditures don’t affect campaign results but everyone thinks they do is very similar to a world where the more mundane type of bribery is legal. I’m the sense, at least, that individual politicians are swayed by gifts that don’t affect their re-election chances).
I’m pretty sure that the data doesn’t bear that out either. “The amazing thing about money in politics is how little of it there is”, and so on.
It might buy access and thus a legislator’s awareness of the thing you want to change, but it doesn’t buy loyalty. Money to a candidate cannot buy their loyalty and money from a candidate cannot buy votes for them. Money is actually not very useful in politics. Money withers in the presence of status, and status is immutable.
It also does buy “being taken seriously,” especially in the early stages of a politician’s career. Not even because you’re spending it on anything, but because the media uses “able to raise money” as a metric for “worth paying attention to.”
I am in no position to say how much of an effect this particular dynamic has, but at the very least it probably leaves a lot of politicians with bad habits.