Sec. 2. Findings
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Congress finds the following: Free and open elections are a founding principle of our republican form of government. It is incumbent upon Congress to ensure that elections in the United States are free of corruption and the appearance of corruption. The free flow of money in politics, as exemplified by the current state of affairs, is corrupting and will distort and disfigure our democracy. Excessively high levels of spending on elections is fundamentally damaging to the public perception of our government, and threatens the fairness and integrity of our democracy.
Congress has a constitutional duty to guarantee a republican form of government for the States. Spending record sums of money on our elections threatens the continued existence of our republican form of government. Allowing unlimited spending on elections means the wealthy can crowd out other important voices in our political debates, thereby giving American citizens fewer sources of information. Federalist 52 states that Congress ought to be dependent on the people alone . Unlimited spending in our elections violates this principle and corrupts our government by making elected officials more dependent on donors than the people.
This dependency corruption gives the wealthy a greater say in our democracy than the average citizen, which is contrary to the intent of the Founding Fathers. Congress has the inherent power to ensure that elections for the government are conducted in a fair, honorable, and proper way to preserve our democracy and ensure the people have confidence in our elections and system of government. Congress has the authority to regulate campaign expenditures to promote integrity, prevent corruption, and ensure the public has trust in our election system, going back to the Tillman Act of 1907, which prohibits corporations from making direct contributions to political campaigns.
In 1947, Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act, which first prohibited corporations and labor unions from making independent expenditures in support or opposition to candidates for Federal office. The Watergate scandal, and the outrageous expenditure of campaign funds in that scandal, did great damage to public confidence in government and demanded a legislative response to restore this confidence. Congress rewrote the Federal Elections Campaign Act
(FECA)in 1974 as a response to Watergate and public calls for increased regulation of our campaign system. This law established the Federal Elections Commission
(FEC)and instituted limits on campaign contributions which remain law to this day. In 1976, the Supreme Court issued a decision in the case of Buckley v. Valeo which first established the principle that money equals speech, in addition to overturning FECA limitations on independent expenditures. The Buckley decision also stated that The constitutional power of Congress to regulate Federal elections is well established and is not questioned by any of the parties in this case . Equating money with speech can result in the wealthy having an undue influence on our elections at the expense of the great majority of the American people. In 1990, the Supreme Court issued a decision in the case of Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce which upheld a Michigan law banning corporations from making independent expenditures in elections. In Austin, the Court found that Corporate wealth can unfairly influence elections when it is deployed in the form of independent expenditures . Austin also established that the government has an anti-distortion interest in regulating political speech. The Court held that there is a compelling government interest in preventing the corrosive and distorting effects of immense aggregations of wealth that are accumulated with the help of the corporate form and that have little or no correlation to the public’s support for the corporation’s political ideas . In 2002, Congress enacted the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, which among other things banned political parties from raising so-called soft money . Spending in presidential elections has risen to excessive levels over the last decade, which threatens not only our government, but the integrity of our elections. In the 2000 presidential election, both of the major party candidates spent $343.1 million combined. This number climbed to $717.9 million in the 2004 presidential election. In the 2008 presidential election, Barack Obama’s campaign spent $740.6 million, more than both major party candidates combined in the previous election. Following the Supreme Court’s decision in the case of Citizens United v. FEC, there was a massive increase in outside political spending, which threatens to undermine the legitimacy of our political system. The FEC estimates that $7 billion was spent on the 2012 elections. According to the Wall Street Journal, so-called Super PACs spent $567,498,628 on the 2012 elections. Super PACs spent $98 million during the week of October 29, 2012, alone. Donations to Super PACs are dominated by the wealthy. In 2012, 58.9 percent of donations to Super PACs were $1 million or higher, and came from only 159 donors. Super PACs often accept funds from nonprofits which are allowed to conceal the source of their donations, thereby avoiding transparency and greater public scrutiny of their actions and motivations. Thirty-one percent of outside spending in the 2012 elections was not able to be traced to its original sources, which decreases accountability and transparency, threatens public confidence in our elected officials and our elections, and has a distorting effect on our elections. Corporations, now freed to spend as much as they like to influence elections, accounted for 12 percent of contributions to Super PACS in 2012, thereby helping to give corporate interests a greater voice in our political system than the average Americans. A January 2012 poll by Rasmussen says that 58 percent of Americans believe the United States needs new campaign finance laws. A January 2012 poll by Democracy Corps found that 55 percent of Americans oppose the Citizens United decision. Eighty percent of voters also believe there should be limits on the money spent in campaigns. An October 2012 poll by Bannon Communications Research found that 52 percent of Americans are in favor of banning corporate political spending, 89 percent of Americans believe there is too much money in politics, and 66 percent believe that money is the root of all evil in politics. After considering these findings, Congress is concerned by the unfairness of unlimited spending in elections and is taking this action to protect our democracy and our electoral system. Reinstituting the ban on corporate political expenditures and placing a limit on the amount of donations to Super PACs will help restore faith and trust in our democracy and will respond to calls by the American people for vigorous campaign finance reform and effective laws to protect our free democratic system of elections.