Introduction to Money and Influence
On my public radio station, a law firm’s underwriting pitch offers “help in all matters where money exerts an influence.” I can’t think of any matters where it doesn’t. Experience is our lens for seeing the world and ourselves in it. And I’ve spent most of my working life around political arenas where money and power go hand in hand—how to spend, where to spend, and who gets to decide. Who wins? Who loses? The effects grow even more intense when budgets are tight.
City Hall Chronicles
I started down this career path because someone at the state employment office remembered I had a library degree. So, I was hired to organize documents for the staff of Buffalo’s governing Common Council. I can’t talk about that job without describing the setting. City Hall was and is a gorgeous, art deco, marvel. Tan sandstone topped off with decorative tiles outside, it faces the obelisk of the McKinley Monument, commemorating the president assassinated in the city. It opened in 1929, just in time for the great Depression. The city always has been plagued by poor timing. Inside, the lobby had shades of dark marble, stone, gilding, carvings, murals. On my way to the elevators, I admired the alliterative “Frontiers Unfettered by Frowning Fortresses,” recognizing friendly relations with Canada. The elevator doors were “golden,” embossed metal. Upstairs offices were a let-down, unremarkable. The room I was meant to whip into shape held reports, plans, and other random materials stacked, piled up, scattered across the floor. There was information here Council staff could use, but not without sifting through the stacks and piles. No shelves, I noticed. A carpenter would build, I was told.
Political Dynamics in Buffalo
This was the 1980s tech dark ages, and the few desktop computers were reserved for key staff working on the budget and other critical issues. My job was useful, but peripheral. Except for the carpenter, no one offered any help or direction. Standing in the middle of the room, I felt like a character out of Rumpelstiltskin, tasked with, if not spinning straw into gold, at least imposing some degree of order. A challenge, since I’m not, by nature, all that organized. I had no choice but to improvise, using rudimentary tools. Appropriating an old typewriter, I got started: reorganizing piles into broad categories, coming up with a basic alpha-numeric coding system, entering it in a big looseleaf binder, labelling documents and shelves.
Educational Turn in Local Government
For me, the high point of every day was walking into the building, a public temple way too beautiful and incongruous with what went on inside. But the sight lifted my spirits before I headed upstairs for another day of schlepping, shelving, and typing. My first experience with local government and a cash-strapped one at that. The place teemed with intriguing personalities and stories. And I listened and watched and sensed important stuff happening out of my sight and earshot, behind closed doors. A few times, I went down to watch Council meetings, in the gorgeous chamber topped by a half-sunburst stained-glass skylight. But the meetings were pro forma, the real decisions made in the Democratic caucus. The single Republican Councilman sued to be included and won. I wonder if that prompted an additional layer of secret meetings. Political animals are ingenious and, as Winston Churchill noted, “It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.”
There were bright spots. We held a not all that grand library opening once I got things organized, with punch and cookies and coverage and interviews by local news radio. Later, I was asked to coordinate a showing of the film Taking Back Detroit. The chief of the Council staff had seen it on public TV and thought we might pick up pointers from another beleaguered city. He was nicknamed “the 16th Councilman” (I believe there were 15 at the time), and later became one in his own right after redistricting. But even his urging couldn’t convince many of the actual elected ones to attend. Perhaps they thought Buffalo was fine as it was or too far gone to take back.
Campaigning for At-Large Seats
The job turned truly “educational” when the Council’s five at-large seats went on the chopping block. Good-government groups probably considered them superfluous legacies from more prosperous times the city could no longer afford. And if I didn’t have a front-row seat, I was positioned close enough. Where did the money to bankroll the campaign to defend the threatened seats come from? Part of it came from Council staff. I remember the moment I was informed that I too, like all the others, would have to contribute. My part was prorated based on my already puny, part-time, salary. We also had to help with campaign mailings after hours. I found the ethnic appeals in the flier problematic, a bit distasteful, as step backward. “Save our [name–Black, Polish, Irish] Councilman.” So much for being one city, but I suppose you go to your base and old-time politics in a crisis. The phrase “how the sausage gets made” comes to mind. As defined by the Free Dictionary, it refers to “The process by which something is created or conducted away from public view,” because the average person would find the reality “unpleasant or unsavory” And they likely “don’t really want to know.” Not the kind of thing, if you worked in these settings, that you were supposed to talk about outside, but it was long ago and mostly public record, except for what you might call the ambience.
Shifting Political Narratives
As I remember, our efforts failed, and all five at-large seats were eliminated. But Wikipedia tells a different story, that only two seats went at that time, while the other three and the elected Council President lasted till 2002. Perhaps that was a compromise. When I can’t find additional details or even the names of the five embattled Council members, I’m struck by how very short political memories can be and that only big events like major scandals leave significant traces. And a few years later, even those are very soon forgotten, unless someone writes a book.
Comparative Perspectives: Louisiana and Buffalo
I live in Louisiana now, which, of course, has a reputation expressed in sayings like, “the best politicians that money can buy.” But to tell the truth, I don’t see much difference. What I’ve witnessed in both locations could easily be interchangeable. In Buffalo, Wikipedia reports on a current move to further shrink the Council, with redistricting after the latest US Census to match the drop in population and, of course, tax revenues. I suspect it may happen by administrative adjustment this time, redrawing of lines without so much as a whimper. But years since I’ve been in the city, so I can’t know for sure.
Impact of Citizens United Decision
I do know that the Supreme Court’s Citizens United Decision has changed the rules around money in politics. The Brennan Center for Justice recently issued a report examining the influence on state and local elections of the unlimited outside spending that’s now allowed. The Justices narrowly defined political corruption as only direct giving and receiving of bribes, but, as I’ve described, there can be so many possible nuances, so many ways to fiddle around the edges. But perhaps the Justices didn’t want to know. Lawrence Norden, deputy director of the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program, said, “When it comes to local contests, if you are just your run-of-the-mill millionaire, you could be the only person in a race that is contributing big dollars.” So, potentially, “You can fund the takeover of a state legislature.” Or a city’s Common Council, if the prize seems worth the investment? Norden added, “You would be crazy to think someone who entirely funded a campaign might not have more access or influence.” So, money is the constant, the given. Power, on the other hand, may be fleeting, but it’s so very tempting and with a kind of “cult of personality” around certain political figures while it lasts. And I find it worrisome that we could see new model money-bags political bosses not so very unlike the old time, “politics as usual,” variety.
Influence of Money in Legislative Processes
Moving to a national perspective, there are questions around input into the drafting of legislation. Amy McKay is a political scientist who studies ways companies and interest groups influence policymaking. Serving as an American Political Science Association Congressional Research Fellow on the Senate Finance Committee staff, she did want to know and was in perfect position to research the uniquely transparent bill-crafting process for the Affordable Care Act. (Maggie Koerth. Everyone Knows Money Influences Politics….Except Scientists: Why is it so hard to prove something that’s common knowledge? And why try to do it in the first place? FiveThirtyEight – ABC News Published Jun. 4, 2019). McKay applied plagiarism-detection software to trace how comments from big donors, corporations, and lobbyists “shaped proposed amendments to the bill.” Checking what she found against the non-profit Sunlight Foundation’s fundraising database, she discovered a trail from fundraising to fundraisers’ suggestions for the bill to amendments based on those suggestions. Senator Max Baucus, then chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, was not surprised to find that text from lobbyists ended up in the bill. “But so what? It’s not illegal.” Shouldn’t it, however, raise at least some concerns about the integrity of the process?
Challenges to Representative Democracy
And this leads me to wonder about ongoing erosion of representative democracy. Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard law professor whose work focuses on campaign finance law, says the kind of information McKay presented won’t change things. “The problem is philosophical. It’s in the heart, not the head.” But “the value of evidence is in the way it helps craft new philosophical appeals.” This may happen, he continued, by demonstrating that money has a subtle influence, over the whole of government. “A world where you [the elected official] have to spend half your time raising money means there’s this small number of people on whom you’re dependent and they have a huge influence.…. While the evidence doesn’t win the argument over whether we need stricter campaign finance laws, it does help build a philosophical case that maybe we should be thinking about influence in a different way.” Based on my experience, that sounds like an excellent place to begin.