John Nichols: A History of Campaign Finance
More than one hundred years ago, after a 1904 president race that saw big life insurance companies pour money into the project of electing Republican Teddy Roosevelt, the defeated Democratic candidate, Judge Alton Parker, raised the question of whether presidents and congresses would simply be bought by corporations seeking policies that favored their interests.
"The greatest moral question which now confronts us is: Shall the trusts and corporations be prevented from contributing money to control or aid in controlling elections?" declared Parker.
Roosevelt recognized that when he relied on corporate money to overwhelm an opponent, he stood on the wrong side of democracy and put the American experiment at risk. That recognition made the 26th president a reformer. He called for full public financing of federal campaigns and told the Congress in 1905 that: "All contributions by corporations to any political committee or for any political purpose should be forbidden by law."
Roosevelt did not get full public financing, and real reformers are still struggling to achieve this most necessary of all electoral reforms.
But Congress did in 1907 pass the Tillman Act, which banned corporate giving.
But the current Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts, is a conservative judicial activist who has made little effort to disguise his determination to rearrange political rules to favor his political and ideological allies. And Roberts has worked hard to build a court majority in favor of dramatically reducing, and perhaps eliminating, constraints on corporate dominance of the electoral and governing processes....
A lawyer who chairs the Constitution Subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee, [U.S. Senator Russ] Feingold notes with regard to controls on corporate campaigning: "These things were argued in 1907, when they passed the ban on corporate treasuries. It was argued in 1947, Taft-Hartley did this. The Supreme Court has affirmed over and over again that it's not part of free speech that corporations and unions can use their treasuries (to buy elections)."
If the court does overturn both law and precedent to advance a corporate agenda, Feingold says, "It's just an example of activism, and legislating by a court, if they do this."
It is, as well, dangerous for democracy.