The “Ending Spending Action Fund,” a Chicago-based SuperPAC, has jumped into Georgia’s U.S. Senate race, buying more than $1 million in air time for commercials against Michelle Nunn, the presumed Democratic nominee, as well as against U.S. Rep. Phil Gingrey, one of five major candidates running for the Republican nomination.
Nobody knows for sure where the money is coming from. The founder of Ending Spending is Joe Ricketts, the wealthy founder of TD Ameritrade, who lives in Jackson Hole, Wyo. However, the group itself does not disclose its donors. And while the motivation in attacking Nunn is obvious, the strategy behind attacking Gingrey is much more mysterious.
If you believe the Ending Spending ad, Gingrey isn’t a real conservative, which comes as a surprise to many here in Georgia. The ad bases that claim in part on Gingrey’s record on earmarks, the special budget requests that became a symbol of congressional free-spending. As the ad states, the Marietta congressman requested $94 million in earmarks from fiscal 2008 until the practice ended in 2010.
However, that’s nowhere near as much as Rep. Jack Kingston, Gingrey’s GOP opponent from Savannah. In 2008 alone, Kingston requested earmarks totaling $100 million, and in the last three years before earmarks were banned, Kingston requested $201 million, twice as much as Gingrey. (The third GOP congressman in the race, Paul Broun, requested none.)
Likewise, the ad attacks Gingrey for voting for the so-called “cash for clunkers” program, which during the worst days of the recession offered incentives to purchase new cars. But again, Kingston voted for it too, and as an appropriations subcommittee chair, he played a much more central role in spending. So it’s hard to take the ad seriously on its own terms.
There’s also a larger issue at stake, which is the increasingly dominant role played by wealthy, often anonymous contributors pursuing unknown motives and agendas. Thanks to a string of Supreme Court rulings, the most recent this month, mysterious out-of-state donors now have a louder voice in Georgia politics than almost anybody who actually lives in this state.
Those rulings are founded on two notions. The first is that unlimited, at times anonymous, money won’t have a corrupting influence on politics. That has to be one of the more naive claims ever propounded by the Supreme Court, and I’m sadly confident that the passage of time will prove me right.
The second is the notion that money is speech, and thus can’t be regulated. Money is not speech any more than a cow is an airplane, and once accepted, that false equivalence leads us to dangerous places. Among other things, it means that if I have 100,000 times more money than you do, then I have 100,000 times more speech as well.
That undermines the fundamental notion of democratic self-governance, which is that each of us have an equal voice and standing before a government of the people, by the people and for the people.
As a practical matter, of course, that is not true and never has been true. Wealth has always bought the ear of power, and power has always bent a knee toward wealth. In fact, that tight link between wealth and power has formed the basis of repressive political authority throughout most of human history.
The significance of the American system of government has been that it challenged that historic link more directly than any previous system. It did not sever that link; it merely weakened it, making us more equal under the law.
The pendulum is now swinging hard in the other direction.
