Comment by mcdonje
3 hours ago
There's a good chance it could have the opposite effect. The public doesn't pay as much attention to the workings of the government as donors do.
It's essentially an extension of the Sunshine Act of 1976, which made congressional votes public. There were claims that before it was enacted, legislators were able to vote their consciences, but then lie to donors and tell them they voted for their interests instead of their constituents' interests.
Since it passed, the public has been paying attention, but not like the donor class has been. Something needs to be not only bad, but have some sort of novel or salacious quality to make the news. If it's not near an election, people forget, if they paid attention to begin with. Donors pay attention. Representatives know this.
Ultimately, the problem is the money in politics, but this sort of thing can exacerbate the effects.
Yeah the real answer is banning private funding from politics in as many ways as possible.
As long as there are people who allocate billions with a sign of the pen, with zero personal responsibility and skin in the game, there will be whole industries dedicated to swaying their hand.
It's amazing how you've managed to position "politicians were pursuing their own hidden agendas and then lying about it" as a desirable state of affairs.
It sounds like they were defrauding people into giving them donations under false pretenses, and the transparency measures were effective at mitigating that.
There's quite a lot of strange bias in your comment: the unjustified disjunction between "constituents" and "donors", the concept of a "donor class" as some singular bloc rather than an arbitrary aggregation of anyone who donates on behalf on all sides of all issues, the idea that donations are more important than the actual votes, etc.
> It sounds like they were defrauding people into giving them donations under false pretenses, and the transparency measures were effective at mitigating that.
There are no pretenses in political giving, because it is illegal to tie a donation to a particular position, vote, or action by the politician. It’s called a quid pro quo and is the test for whether a donation is a bribe.
In the U.S. the political system is based on people, not positions or policy. Donations to a politician are to the person. It’s not a proxy for buying an outcome.
In practice, of course people are going to support politicians who they like and think agree with them. But under the law, a politician can’t rip you off by taking your money and then voting contrary to your desires.
My read was that the people who are getting fleeced aren’t paying enough attention.
That seems like an assumption, and a counterintuitive one: wouldn't you expect someone getting "fleeced" by the political system to be motivated to pay attention due to that very fact?
If you have a system of open transparency, then everyone who is motivated to pay attention has the means to do so. If they're not paying attention, it means they're not sufficiently motivated, and are choosing not to pay attention, not being constrained artificially.
is money the problem or just that most people don't care about most things, but a few people REALLY care about a few things? There's plenty of groups without much money that still gum up the works because they're persistent.
This is a basic concept of Public Choice Theory.
People worrying about money in politics are overemphasizing the instrumentality of money, rather than the underlying structural incentives that tend toward special interests dominating complex issues.
If money were removed from the equation, the concentrations of power, motivations to influence it, and asymmetries in those motivations will all continue to exist; political influence will just be exercised through other means, and some particular faction or class of people will still be at the sweet spot of having the greatest competence and the greatest motivation to apply those means.
A lot of people are reluctant to acknowledge it, but this is inherent to politics itself, and there is no straightforward way to fix it, other than to limit the reach of political power.