By Stuart Gaffney and John Lewis–
As the destructive chaos of the second Trump presidency continues to unfold, we find ourselves returning over and over to the inordinate influence of big money in American politics. A staggering $15.9 billion was spent nationwide on federal election races during the November 5, 2024, election cycle, with approximately $5.5 billion spent on the presidential election alone.
The world’s richest person, Elon Musk, whose estimated net worth exceeds $300 billion, spent well over a quarter billion dollars on Republican candidates in the 2024 election. As a reward, he was granted unprecedented power within the Trump White House. Although the role that Musk and others with immense fortunes play in the Trump administration is astounding, billions of dollars fuel the campaigns of both Republican and Democratic candidates on an ongoing basis and exert immense influence on how they govern when elected.
And we are also mindful that, during the 2024 election, Republicans spent substantial amounts of this money on vicious attack ads that vilified transgender people. According to Imara Jones, Founder and CEO of TransLash Media, the Trump campaign expended a total of $215 million on anti-trans ads, constituting “the single-largest ad buy” of his campaign. Sadly, the Trump administration’s relentless attack on trans people continues today.
How did we get to this point where big money so dominates American politics?
Throughout history, warnings as to the dangers of greed, the accumulation of wealth, and the threat that big money poses to society abound. “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God,” and “the love of money is the root of all evil” are two admonitions found in the New Testament.
“Money makes the world go around, the world go around” is the lively refrain of the cautionary song “Money, Money” from the 1972 movie musical Cabaret. Connecting the importance of money to the American psyche, President Calvin Coolidge proclaimed: “The chief business of the American people is business.”
When it comes to politics, nothing says it better than the maxim “money talks,” whose origin is said to date back to the fifth-century BCE playwright Euripides. The fabled instruction “follow the money” attributed to the Watergate informant “Deep Throat” tells us where to look for the source of corruption.
As far as the nuts and bolts of how so many billions of dollars are legally allowed to be spent in federal elections, the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, in which the Republican Court majority ushered in the era of unlimited spending by so-called super-PACs, plays a pivotal role.
The core precedent, however, responsible for the shape of our democracy today was decided half a century ago. Back in 1974, Congress passed and President Gerald Ford signed into law campaign finance legislation designed to root out the corrupting influence of money in politics. The bipartisan law was enacted in response to the political crisis precipitated by Watergate and as part of a national awakening to corruption in American politics.
The legislation significantly limited an individual’s campaign contributions to any federal candidate, their total contributions to all federal candidates combined, the amount of money that groups or individuals could spend independently on federal elections, and the total amount of money that a candidate could spend either from their personal financial resources or from campaign donations.
In its landmark 1976 Buckley v. Valeo decision, the Court eviscerated the statute, leaving only the limits on individual contributions to candidates in place. If those restrictions enacted on a bipartisan basis 50 years ago had remained in effect, voters in the 2024 election would undoubtedly have had far different choices of candidates, Elon Musk would not wield exorbitant power in the White House today, and our nation as a whole would be far different.
We wondered whether anyone on the Supreme Court back then had any inkling of what lay ahead. As LGBTIQ people, we were surprised to learn that the strongest forewarning came from Justice Byron White, who a decade later authored the notorious anti-gay Bowers v. Hardwick decision. White was the sole dissenter who would have upheld all of the law’s limits on money in politics.
White avowed that the campaign finance protections were “critical to … dispel[ling] the impression that federal elections are purely and simply a function of money” and that federal offices such as the presidency may be “bought and sold.” He warned that, without them, the only people who will run for office are those who have “the facility and the stomach for doing whatever it takes” to “raise or contribute large fortunes” of their own to win elections. He viewed the restrictions as “common-sense” to ensure that elections were not only between candidates who have “overpowering advantage by reason of a huge campaign war chest.”
The majority opinion in Buckley made lofty pronouncements about how, in America, “the people are sovereign” and their ability “to make informed choices among candidates for office is essential.” It claimed that limiting the amount of money spent in elections would result in significantly “restricting the number of issues discussed, the depth of their exploration, and the size of the audience reached.” We ask fifty years later how $215 million worth of sensationalist Trump ads, peddling gross stereotypes and falsehoods about transgender people, in any stretch of the imagination contribute to “exploration” of issues in “depth” or help voters make “informed choices” about candidates.
It’s disturbing that White was the sole justice who foresaw the dangers that lay ahead in a comprehensive manner and that Republican majorities in more recent court decisions have further opened the floodgates to money in politics. Big money’s influence on American politics has become so pervasive that, for many people and especially those with the most power, it has become normalized as an inherent part of the American political system.
But White’s dissent reminds us that it doesn’t have to be this way. Big money’s dominance in American politics is a product of high court decisions that could have been otherwise. And therein lies hope for the future if a new national awakening takes place in the wake of the current political crisis and those who believe in democracy remain committed to the cause.
John Lewis and Stuart Gaffney, together for over three decades, were plaintiffs in the California case for equal marriage rights decided by the California Supreme Court in 2008. Their leadership in the grassroots organization Marriage Equality USA contributed in 2015 to making same-sex marriage legal nationwide.
6/26 and Beyond – From Democracy to Plutocracy
Published on March 13, 2025
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