Barney Frank (U.S. Representative, MA)

Why would an incumbent support the Fair Elections Now Act?

Well, the same reason I support much of what I do.  Cleaning up the environment, providing low-income housing for people who could not otherwise afford it, expanding healthcare.  I got into politics because I want to make the world a fairer place, and I think the system of campaign finance we have now adds to the unfairness in two ways.

First of all, it makes it harder for some people to run because they don’t have access to the funds.  Secondly, it pushes public policy in the wrong direction.  So, it’s a part of the overall package of things that I support.

Is fundraising a distraction?

Well, it is for people with competitive [inaudible].  It’s become more of one for me.  From 1982 when I was re-elected in a tough redistricting until really the time before I did not have a hard election campaign.  I still won fairly comfortably and I expect to win again this time, but because of my prominence as chairman of the Financial Service Committee, I become a target for the right wing. These are people who don’t want to see financial regulation adopted so they’ve come after me in a way that distorts my record and that takes money.

So I am, this past year, spending more time raising money and yes, it is a distraction.  Not as much for me as it is for other people.  It’s a particular problem if you’re a United States Senator from a competitive seat and most states are competitive in the Senate.  There’s not as many House seats, percentage-wise, that are competitive but fundraising is an ongoing preoccupation and yes, it’s a distraction.

What’s your take on the recent Supreme Court decision with regard to fundraising?

Well, it’s a terrible blow.  Actually, I come to you having just left a hearing that I was having this morning here in March when we’re doing this — I’m hoping by the time people hear this it will have passed — to do the maximum we can within that constitutional decision to limit the effect it will have on democracy.

I think it was a terrible blow to democracy to allow unlimited corporate spending and campaign circumstances.  It was a very activist decision.  It was so-called conservative restrained judges overturning years and years of state and federal law. Per the voted doctrine that no other democracy in the world has that I’m aware of, that limiting campaign spending is somehow antidemocratic.

So what I hope we will do is to at least put restrictions on what corporations can do.  The corporation ought to have to get a vote of the shareholders to do these things. There certainly ought to be clear identification; this comes from corporation X and that includes if a corporation has got to pool their money in a way that hides which individual corporation was there and they go through some conservative business group.  The individual corporate contributions to that should be made aware.

But I think the decision undermines democracy to a more serious extent than I would’ve liked to have seen and we’re going to do the most we can given that it’s constitutional; we can’t simply ignore it to limit it’s negative impact.

What do you make of money equalling speech and corporations equalling a person?

Well, it’s an American peculiarity of the wrong sort.  The conservatives on the Supreme Court did this.  Remember, what they basically did was to overthrow the law that Congress adopted after Watergate.  The fundamental decision that said money was speech; it repudiates years and years and over 100 years of campaign finance legislation, I believe.  It particularly crippled the law that was passed after Watergate and it doesn’t make any sense.  No other democracy thinks that.  Other democracies allow you to regulate money.  Money is not speech.

Look, we have two systems in this country.  We have a, an economy which is based on a capitalist system in which the more money you have, the more influence you have.  That’s necessary for a capitalist system.  That’s supposed to coexist with the political system in which equality is the goal.  It’s one person, one vote and more money isn’t supposed to give you this.  What they do when they equate money and speech is to break that down to the extent that the political system was former one person, one vote equality is a constraint on the capitalist system where money buys you influence.

Once you equate the two, you’ve eroded the equality principle.  You have eroded the ability of the political system to stand for people being equal because you have equated it in a totally illogical way, money with speech.

Would the founders be thrilled with the decision?

No one really believes that.  People will say things that they might be — it’s an insane.  It’s inconceivable that Jefferson and and Adams, back then more constricted your free speech than we did. Adams signed the Alien and Sedition Acts.  No, it’s inconceivable.

Basically what they’re saying is this.  They believe that in a purely small D democratic situation where everybody had an equal vote and say — policies they support would lose.  These are people who don’t want wealthy people to be taxed.  They don’t want us to go ahead with tough bank regulation and financial industry regulation, more properly, that we’re now working on. They don’t want to see minimum wage go. They are afraid that if the political equality principle works, they would be outvoted, so therefore, allowing money to dilute political equality.

So when they say they’re happy about this, they are because substantively they think it will make it easier for them to block things that would happen if the political power were more fairly exercised.

Do you think partisanship is intensified by the race for campaign funds?

No, I don’t think partisanship is. And by the way, I don’t regard partisanship as always a bad word.  I think political parties are necessary for a rational democracy.  You have to have some principles.  Partisanship can be carried too far and paradoxically, I guess, to some people, I was voted — they polled Republicans about Democrats, Democrats about Republicans — I was voted as one of the five most partisan and one of the five most bipartisan and nobody else was.  And I was real proud of that, because I think there were issues of principle that divide the parties, where you should be sticking to your principles, like I’m trying to do on financial regulatory reform.

On the other hand, there are issues where you can be more cooperative.  And I think it’s important that you recognize that there are areas which should be bipartisan, areas that should be partisan.  The key is not to allow them to spill over so that one poisons the other or dilutes the other. So partisanship’s not a bad word. There is excessive partisanship, but what drives excessive partisanship in my mind is not fundraising.

In fact, to some extent, fundraising has historically been kind of moderator because people with a lot of money tend to be kind of more in the middle, although there is an extent to which fundraising now may be driving partisanship, but it’s not the corporate fundraising, it’s the grassroots fundraising.  You get grassroots money by being angry at the other side so that really is the opposite of the suggestion that corporate money would do it.

What’s driving partisanship is, I think, probably technology.  People today don’t get their news from common sources increasingly.  They don’t all read newspapers or watch the same TV.  The left is on the internet, the right’s on talk radio.  They are getting very different views of reality.  They are self-reinforcing and they then are much more resistant towards the people who represent their viewpoints trying to work things out.

Publicly financed elections could be a waste of tax dollars.

Oh, I don’t think democracy is a waste of tax dollars.  You might as well say that having polling places open 13 hours a day instead of four hours a day is a waste of tax dollars.  I don’t think we pay enough on elections.  You know, one of the problems is we pay the election machinery is run by Frankie — in many cases, older people who are working 14 hours a day for $10 and a doughnut.  You don’t get the best people there.  Some of them are very good. No, I think [inaudible] is worth it and the amount of money is miniscule compared to what the Pentagon spends in a week.

Do you think any fellow member that supports public funding is either lazy or they don’t really understand how policy is really made?

That doesn’t make any sense at all. If by lazy they mean that people don’t want to have to beg private citizens for money, I don’t think that’s laziness.  I think that’s probably an excess of integrity.  You have to overcome it and that’s not always a good thing.

As far as not understanding how policy is made, that statement literally makes no sense.  The notion that you have to ask private citizens to give you money to make intelligent public policy, it’s just incoherent.  I don’t know how to refute it because I don’t know what it means.

If taxpayers pay for political campaigns, what incentive do I have — or any member of Congress — to really do anything or listen to anybody?

Well, that’s really appalling.  One, votes and that really makes my point.  What should be motivating you — well, there are two things that should be motivating you.  One, your views of what’s good public policy and two, that’s tempered by the need to appeal to your voters.

What that individual appears to be saying is that it’s money that he needs to worry about, not voters.  That emphasizes my point, that empowering money that way displaces voting. That’s a very disappointing statement to hear and it’s also the case that what’s the incentive?  The incentive is, why are you in politics in the first place?  I would hope because you have a vision of the way society ought to be and you’re trying to achieve it.

Publicly funded elections address a problem that, let’s face it, it does not exist.

I guess if you are very conservative, if you don’t think we should have labor unions with the rights to organize, if you don’t like minimum wage laws, if you don’t want environmental protection to be strong and you don’t want to provide well-funded health care for people, et cetera, then it’s a problem that doesn’t exist.  Because what the current system does is to retard the adoption of those kind of public policies.

The notion that there’s no influence by money — I think a lot of my liberal friends exaggerate the influence of campaign money — but to deny that it’s there at all makes no sense.  And again, I used to be a political scientist before I discovered that a person with a short attention span shouldn’t try to write a PhD thesis, so I got into active politics.  I am not aware of a theory of democracy that says money should count.

There are various arguments about democracy, but they all begin with the notion that there should be legal formal equality. Obviously to the extent that money is an influence that diminishes the fundamental principle of democracy. I guess that’s not a problem if you don’t believe in democracy.

Is policy affected by campaign contributions?

No, it’s not the major impact.  And again, my friends on the left forget this.  Votes will beat money.  That is, if members know that there’s strong public opinion on a certain side that’ll beat campaign contributions, but campaign contributions are, are relevant at a second level.

There are some issues where there isn’t any great public opinion and it’s not that people consciously give away their money for votes — that almost never happens — but you can’t help but be influenced, I think, by who your friends are, et cetera, and in the absence of strong public opinion or people having strong feelings, money is an influence.

But it’s an influence in two ways. It’s not simply that money influences the people who are in office.  The more profound influence of money is that it influences who gets an office.  Look, once people are elected, a lot of the decisions are made and I don’t know how anybody could deny that the inequality in the campaign finance system biases who gets elected.  So leave aside the influence it has on people already in office. It obviously has a powerful impact on who gets into office.

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