From a grad student in our department who used to work at the FEC:
Anecdotally, of the 300 committees I reviewed at the FEC, only one corporate PAC made independent expenditures over $5000 in the 2008 election and it was the Human Rights Campaign, which is a non-profit corporate PAC. The rest were unions (AFSCME, SEIU, etc.). I think labor unions are going to take much greater advantage of the decision than corporations – especially when it comes to things like GOTV drives and voter contact communications. I think the types of corporations that will get involved with that type of activity are the non-profit interest groups (Human Rights Campaign, NRA, Chamber of Commerce, etc.) as opposed to for-profit corporations like Goldman Sachs and Bank of America.
{ 3 comments }
2 comments:
1)Chamber of Commerce may be a non-profit corporation but its whole reason for being, as far as I’m aware, is to be a mouthpiece and lobby for for-profit corporations. The Chamber of Commerce has every right to do what it does of course, but to lump it into the same category as HRC and NRA seems peculiar to me. I would think the Chamber has more in common w/ industry trade groups and lobbies.
2)The possible effects of Citizens United are only one relevant aspect of the decision. The majority opinion is based on an approach to the First Amendment that is wrong and misguided, imo, no matter what the effects of the decision are. Even if the decision does not result in a flood of for-profit corporate money into ‘electoral communications’, it represents a particular way of looking at the First Amendment, one that puts natural persons as speakers and listeners on the same footing as non-natural “persons” (esp. powerful ones). That in itself is, imo, bad and unwarranted. And no amount of careful testing of counterintuitive hypotheses by specialists in American politics — whether those hypotheses are ultimately confirmed or not — can alter what the Citizens United decision does to the First Amendment. I think it is probably one of the worst Supreme Court decisions of the past 50 years: dogmatic, rooted in what the dissent aptly called “the wooden application of judge-made rules,” and, in a word, a disaster.
As Mayhew commented in 1974, it is hard to establish the causal effect of not representing your district when so few Congressmen significantly deviate. Similarly, if the threat of BofA donating looms large in financial regulation, we might not observe anything in the world even if a strategic dynamic were taking hold.
*financing the efforts of one’s opponent, that is
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