There are still a handful of meaningful limits on political giving. | AP Photo, Getty Big money's grip stronger than ever

The Watergate investigation was still raging. The pardon of Richard Nixon, barely a month old, still reverberated in the nation’s consciousness. Against that backdrop, on an October afternoon in 1974, President Gerald Ford signed his name to legislation aimed at purging the corrosive influence of money in politics.

The law included new contribution limits and mandates for financial disclosure, as well as the first provisions for public funding of presidential elections. “By removing whatever influence big money and special interests may have on our federal electoral process,” Ford said,” this bill should stand as a landmark of campaign reform legislation.”


Forty years later, campaign finance experts agree that the grip of big money over the American political system has never been greater — or not in a century, since the days when Montana mining baron William Clark bribed a state Legislature into naming him to the U.S. Senate.

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Washington is not now as readily for sale as it was in Clark’s day (“I never bought a man who wasn’t for sale,” he is supposed to have said.) But a combination of already-permeable campaign finance regulations and Supreme Court decisions gutting even those legal restrictions have left money pouring into the electoral arena at a historic volume.

The Supreme Court’s decision this week striking down cumulative caps on individual hard-dollar donations was yet another blow to the post-Watergate finance regime that has sought for decades – with only the most modest success – to banish special interests from the political process.

Former Watergate prosecutor Richard Ben-Veniste said the state of play for money in politics is “certainly” as bad as it has ever been. If Nixon’s lieutenants maintained a $350,000 political slush fund that outraged the nation, that money is a drop in the bucket compared with the tens of millions spent these days through groups that face no contribution limits and do not disclose their donors.

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“Money has polluted the political process beyond recognition,” Ben-Veniste, a Democrat, said in an interview. “The Watergate reforms, which were in fairly short order by any historical perspective evaded by lawyering, lobbying and general U.S. ingenuity, soon became hollow.”

“Clearly, the system is severely broken and the Supreme Court has not helped us,” he said.

The Supreme Court’s decision in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission tore another hole in a regulatory framework so tattered that even ardent campaign finance regulators sigh over its impotence. Many of the current restrictions seem more geared toward providing gainful employment to compliance attorneys than toward truly getting cash out of elections.

There are still a handful of meaningful limits on political giving: Donors cannot give more than $5,200 directly to a single candidate over the course of an election cycle. Their contributions to party committees are capped as well. Thanks to the Watergate-era laws, far more political donations are disclosed now than in the past.

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And even though the Supreme Court opened the door to corporate political spending in the Citizens United decision, the barrier on businesses giving directly to campaigns remains intact.

The money, however, is still there – just channeled from megadonors, corporations and heavily funded interests through a range of exotic independent-spending organizations, instead of through political parties. It adds up to what many call a worst-of-both-worlds situation in which money pours into politics at a historic clip, but often to unaccountable outside entities that can push around candidates every bit as readily as the million-dollar party donors of old.

In that sense, some campaign attorneys argue, finance regulations may have made the influence of money even more acute or at least less transparent, driving funds away from candidates and parties and toward shadowy outside groups.

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Prominent Republican election lawyer Ben Ginsberg, a former top counsel to the Mitt Romney and Bush-Cheney campaigns, said of the current campaign finance framework: “If you’re going to be remotely objective about it, [it] has failed.”

As Ginsberg sees it, the Supreme Court’s 1976 decision in Buckley v. Valeo sharply limited what advocates of campaign finance regulation can legally achieve. After the court defined political spending as free speech, Ginsberg said, proponents of donation limits and other spending restrictions have essentially messed about with the rules of American politics without actually stemming the flow of money into the system.

“Their belief system in this, back since the early ’70s, has been trying to restrict candidates and parties and everybody else, for that matter,” Ginsberg said. “That has failed and the failures have just been multiplying.”

New York University School of Law professor Richard Pildes noted that critics of campaign donation limits – like the ban on soft money in the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act – worried from the start that they wouldn’t “drive money out of the system, you’re just going to drive it into one channel or another.”

“We certainly have seen that happen,” said Pildes. “You take the choice to have elections privately financed and then you add Buckley’s constitutional decision that caps on spending are not permissible, and it’s almost inevitable that you end up where we have gotten to over a period of time.”

The McCutcheon decision may actually bring some big-donor cash into the more transparent world of candidates and campaign committee. But the universe of donors affected by the McCutcheon ruling is relatively small, and no one expects the case to subdue the Wild West of outside groups that has risen up over the past decade.

The long arc of campaign finance reform is in large part the story of a Supreme Court that has looked with skepticism upon good-government attempts to restrict what the conservative-leaning judicial majority views as protected speech.

From Buckley through Citizens United, and now McCutcheon, the Court has peeled back the most aggressive restrictions on political giving and spending, leaving in place only the measures that the panel’s conservative majority sees as most obviously essential to limiting corruption.

The story of modern campaign finance reform is also a cautionary tale about unintended consequences. When Arizona Sen. John McCain and then-Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold authored the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act in 2002, a law barring political parties from taking unlimited donations, they plainly did not envision the rapid rise of so-called 527 groups – the independent advocacy organizations that channeled millions in major-donor money starting in the 2004 presidential race.

Nor, for instance, did the original authors of the post-Watergate campaign finance restrictions anticipate that capping political donations would end up massively favoring wealthy candidates who can fund their own campaigns. (Ford signed into law measures to restrict self-funding and limit election spending altogether, but the Supreme Court voided those as unconstitutional in Buckley.)

And few of the champions of the various campaign finance reform laws might have imagined that there would come a day when presidential candidates in both parties could reject public funding of presidential campaigns without paying a price.

In 2004, both George W. Bush and John Kerry accepted funding for the general election, along with the limits that entails (both rejected public funding for their primary campaigns.) Four years later, Barack Obama declined public funding for the general election. Four years after that, Romney joined him.

Nick Nyhart, an advocate for public funding of elections who heads the group Public Campaign, said Congress could take action to blunt the impact of spending in politics, creating a matching-fund system for small donations and increasing transparency for dark-money groups that do not disclose their donors.

To tackle money in politics in a more sweeping way, Nyhart said, it would likely take a constitutional amendment or a shift in power on the Supreme Court.

“Eventually, one of those conservative seats will come free. At that point, I think we’ll see quite a political battle,” he said. “When you combine this political inequality with the economic inequality that we see, I think you do have a catalyst for change.”

To opponents of campaign finance regulation, the tangled mass of spending rules that remain intact serve to only confuse voters and snarl campaigns in an increasingly arbitrary regulatory maze. They point to a number of states that allow totally unrestricted political giving, like Virginia and Texas, to make the case that a system with fewer limits on giving would at minimum let voters know who’s trying to buy influence.

Center for Competitive Politics President David Keating, an opponent of campaign finance restrictions, argued that the most appropriate check on money in politics would be the voters themselves – if they care.

“They should raise the contribution limits or take them off altogether. Let the voters decide,” he said. “No candidate is required to accept a $10,000 donation or even a million-dollar donation.”