It has become increasingly clear that the most important story of the 2016 presidential campaign is not Hillary Rodham Clinton's e-mail, or Scott Walker's bald spot, or Rick Perry's Poindexterization of his cowboy cred. The most important story is going to be how our elections have been completely corrupted by money at the same time as we experience one of the most thoroughgoing assaults on the franchise in the country's history. It doesn't matter how many people climb into the Republican clown car or how close Bernie Sanders is polling in Iowa. The deep-seated rot that has been injected quite deliberately into our elections is the story from which all others flow. The primary and fundamental debate must be between those who profit from the corruption, those who simply accept it and opt out, and those people who want to reverse the slow suicide of democratic government. God help us all if the latter group doesn't win.

The most depressing story of the spring was the admission of the head of the Federal Election Commission, Ann Ravel, that the FEC is powerless to enforce even the shreds of campaign finance reform that the Supreme Court has left to the country.

"I never want to give up, but I'm not under any illusions," Ravel said. "People think the FEC is dysfunctional," she added. "It's worse than dysfunctional." Ravel told the newspaper that the commission's partisan gridlock is its fatal flaw. The agency's six commissioners often find themselves locked in unbreakable ties along ideological lines, she added. Ravel, a Democrat, vowed she would "bridge the partisan gap" upon becoming the agency's leader last December. Five months later, she finds herself embroiled in the exact conflict she hoped to avoid. "What's really going on is that the Republican commissioners don't want to enforce the law, except in the most obvious cases," she told the Times. "The rules aren't being followed, and that's destructive to the political process," Ravel added.

Party on, dudes!

Two Republican commissioners disputed these claims, however. "Congress set up this place to gridlock," Lee E. Goodman said, according to the Times. "This agency is functioning as Congress intended," he added. "The democracy isn't collapsing around us."

No, it's rotting from within, just as Congress intended.

"We're not interested in going after people unless the law is fairly clear, and we're not willing to take the law beyond where it's written," said Caroline C. Hunter, the newspaper reported, adding that the Democratic commissioners saw the law "more broadly" than their GOP counterparts.

Which brings us to Jeb (!) Bush and his remarkably lucrative non-candidacy, the perfect example of how the country has decided to acclimate itself to the new world of legitimized influence-peddling with which Anthony Kennedy has blessed us. There is little question that Jeb (!) has been operating gleefully beyond what regulations there are left on the subject, and there is even less question that he will pay no significant price for being such an obvious scofflaw on the subject.

By signaling that Right to Rise is his campaign arm, Jeb Bush has broken down the wall between his super PAC and his campaign committee in the eyes of donors. Preventing coordination and preserving independence was one of the last walls that were left. The next step will be simply handing $1 million checks to candidates. Right now that's still illegal, but campaign finance opponents will challenge those candidate contribution limits as ineffective since (the Bush campaign will show) super PACs can serve almost the same purpose. Indeed, campaign lawyer Jim Bopp (the brains behind the Citizens United lawsuit) signaled as much this week, arguing that the way to take unaccountable money out of politics is to let individuals give whatever they want directly to candidates.

And why should he not do what he's doing. The FEC can't stop him. Blatantly flouting the law hasn't cost him as much at the polls as his onetime support for immigration reform has. This is the most serious story in a campaign that already is thickly encrusted with trivia and personality. Everything else is the shiny outward shell of a system gone hollow.





Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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