Voters are angry with Washington politicians. Congress’s approval rating is at 16%.1 50% of Americans have little or no confidence in the federal government.2 74% of voters said most elected officials put their own interests ahead of the country’s.3 While this information may no longer be surprising, few policymakers are putting forth real solutions to address the biggest cause of this: America’s campaign finance system. Our public opinion research has found that voters believe our political system has careened off the rails, in large part driven by the untoward influence of anonymous money. The campaign finance system is seen as a root cause of partisanship, gridlock, and vitriol in Washington. Voters think anonymous money has become a corrupting force, allowing politicians who are only concerned with reelection to be bought and sold by insiders. When they turn on the news and see stories about how Congress can’t get anything done in between campaign attack ads, who can blame them?
Part of the problem, no doubt, is the Supreme Court’s recent campaign finance jurisprudence, emblemized by decisions like Citizens United, which has unleashed nearly two-billion dollars of advertising onto our airwaves and into our homes since 2010.4Unfortunately, the Court’s precedents are unlikely to change in the immediate future—but that doesn’t mean nothing can be done. Calls for a constitutional amendment to overturnCitizens United have become ubiquitous, at least among policymakers on the left. But voters think that is a long shot. So they are just as likely to view that conversation as an attempt to get political cover as they are to see it as an attempt to actually get something done. Furthermore, it’s unclear that overturning Citizens United would even solve the problem. That decision allowed corporate political spending but, by far, most of the money spent by outside groups comes from individuals.5 And outside spending is nowhere near the only money problem in our political system.
With that in mind, we propose a series of repairs to our campaign finance rules. First, we must end the super PAC charade by tightening the rules that govern what counts as coordination between outside spending groups and candidates. Second, we must restructure the Federal Election Commission to make sure that there is a cop on the beat to enforce campaign finance rules and that those breaking the rules actually face punishment. Third, we need to bring anonymous political players out in the open by requiring donors to own the advertisements they fund and require politically active nonprofit organizations to disclose the sources of their political funding. Together, these changes would significantly decrease the influence of anonymous money in politics, and they could all be done without a constitutional amendment.