Talkin’ ’Bout Campaign Finance Reform

Since the infamous Citizens United v. FEC decision, the system of virtually unlimited campaign donations and multi-billion-dollar election cycles that it enshrined has faced a growing backlash. Campaign finance reform, however, has never been a bread-and-butter issue. But today, as anti-establishment candidates like Senator Bernie Sanders, Harvard’s own Lawrence Lessig, and Donald Trump continue to captivate the American public and dominate news headlines, campaign finance reform has emerged as a central topic in the upcoming presidential election. These candidates, however outrageous, recognize that the current political system is deeply corrupt—even if Trump seems proud of his role in that corruption. This rare shift in the mainstream political dialogue to a pressing, substantive issue of our time is a glimmer of hope for the future in the political circus that is the 2016 presidential election.

Sanders made campaign finance reform the heart of his presidential campaign from the start. Recently, he has described the status quo as “legalized bribery”, and he has vowed to introduce legislation for the public funding of elections. These are important ideas, though Sanders remains roughly 24 points behind Hilary Clinton in the race for the Democratic nomination,

Sanders calls it as it is, and has run on a genuine platform of political reform.

Lawrence Lessig, Sanders’s Democratic opponent and perhaps the country’s most ardent supporter of campaign finance reform, is quite a different animal; some commentators have even described him as a sort of Trump of the left. Though campaign finance reform is a cornerstone issue of Sanders’s campaign, it is essentially the only issue in Lessig’s. His plan, if elected, to resign the presidency immediately after the passage of a campaign finance reform bill he calls the “Citizens Equality Act of 2017” is bold, unprecedented, and unlikely to happen. But it has got people talking, and that conversation is doing far more good than it can ever do harm.

But the candidate who has essentially dominated media attention this summer is of course businessman Donald Trump. When Trump is not making racist, insulting, and unsubstantiated claims about Mexican immigrants or bizarre, pseudo-statistical claims about the economy, his callousness may actually be a force for good. Lessig has praised Trump for his honest dissection of the political system. Trump the mogul openly gave money to candidates across the political spectrum, including many of his current Republican and Democratic opponents. But rather than repudiate these donations, in the first Republican debate, Trump bluntly stated: “When they call, I give. And you know what? When I need something from them, two years later, three years later, I call them. They are there for me. And that’s a broken system.” Trump ought not to be championed as a reformer. His plans for changing the broken system he has correctly exposed amount to the empty claim that he will simply fix it. Trump may genuinely not understand this, but no candidate without a plan, bi-partisan support, or, at the very least, a modicum of political experience, can fix Washington.

This election season, the populists have brought the issue of campaign finance reform out of a position of relative obscurity and into the political limelight. Though Sanders, Lessig and Trump are unlikely to capture their respective parties’ nominations, they have ushered in a welcome change in the discourse. Mainstream candidates like Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush, and others whose campaigns are funded primarily through political action committees and Super PACs, have largely ignored the issue, and instead represent the heart of the corrupt system. We hope the outsider trio’s frankness about campaign finance reform will make the issue a permanent, dominant topic of discussion until the day reform finally comes.