Alexander Hamilton thought he (and the others who wrote the Constitution) had it all figured out.
He and his colleagues never imagined that a group of billionaires would spend 43 years and billions of dollars to seize the US Supreme Court, which would then legalize political bribery.
They never conceived of a foreign billionaire family coming to American and building a nationwide media ecosystem that was capable of convincing Americans that up was down, wrong was right, and a convicted fraudster and rapist would be a noble president.
They would’ve laughed at you if you told them that the richest man in the world would come from apartheid South Africa to hook up with a grifter billionaire to become co-president.
In Federalist 68, Hamilton wrote:
“The process of election affords a moral certainty, that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.”
Indeed, while a knave or rogue or traitor may fool enough people to even ascend to the office of mayor of a major city or governor of a state, Hamilton told us, the people would ferret out such a con man or traitor and Congress and the Supreme Court would put a brake on such a man even if he were to slip past the voters and the Electoral College:
“Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honors in a single State; but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit, to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole Union, or of so considerable a portion of it as would be necessary to make him a successful candidate for the distinguished office of President of the United States.”
Hamilton’s pride in the system that he himself had helped create was hard for him to suppress.
He wrote, “It will not be too strong to say, that there will be a constant probability of seeing the station filled by characters preeminent for ability and virtue.”
He even bragged in Federalist 71 that presidents would be of such high character that they could easily avoid being seduced “by the wiles of parasites and sycophants, by the snares of the ambitious, the avaricious, the desperate, by the artifices of men who possess their confidence more than they deserve it, and of those who seek to possess rather than to deserve it.”
He also believed that good elected officials in Congress, dependent on the voters for their own political futures, would serve as a check against a corrupt president bent on exploiting his position for his own enrichment, the demands of special interest groups (like billionaires), or the interests of a hostile foreign government:
“But however inclined we might be to insist upon an unbounded complaisance in the Executive [President] to the inclinations of the people, we can with no propriety contend for a like complaisance to the humors of the legislature.”
Turns out, Hamilton was wrong. His nightmare scenario tracks back to five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court, starting with Lewis Powell authoring the 1978 Bellotti decision that says money is “free speech” and corporations are “persons.” It reached its fetid bottom with John Roberts’ and Clarence Thomas’ Citizens United blowing up almost all campaign contribution limits.
Without billionaire-controlled media (including billionaire-owned social media) and billions spent to carpet-bomb America with extraordinarily deceptive advertising, Donald Trump would never have had a chance.
By the late 19th century, we realized Hamilton was mistaken and put up guardrails to prevent this.
The Communications Act of 1934 established the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and gave it authority to regulate “broadcasting in the public interest.” It also established the Equal Time Rule, requiring broadcast stations to give major candidates for public office roughly equal exposure to the public.
In 1941, the FCC introduced the first specific limits on media ownership with its “Report on Chain Broadcasting,” which restricted ownership of multiple radio stations. In 1946, the FCC established the “duopoly” rule, prohibiting ownership of more than one television station in a market. No Fox or Sinclair, in other words, would be allowed a national footprint to corrupt our democratic system.
In 1949, the FCC formally adopted the Fairness Doctrine as a rule, and in 1959 Congress amended the Communications Act of 1934 to codify the Fairness Doctrine into law. Specifically, they rewrote Section 315(a) to read:
"A broadcast licensee shall afford reasonable opportunity for discussion of conflicting views on matters of public importance."
The 1975 newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership rule prohibited ownership of both a daily newspaper and a full-power broadcast station in the same market.
Similarly, we once had hard and fast rules against billionaires and giant corporations corrupting our political process.
After the Industrial Revolution of the late 1880s brought mind-boggling levels of wealth to a small number of men, those Robber Barons predictably reached out for control of the politicians, state and federal, who might regulate their behavior.
In response, states and the US Congress began passing serious laws to limit the corrupting power of money in politics.
In 1905, for example, Wisconsin passed a law (Section 4489a, Sec. 1, ch. 492, 1905) that explicitly said:
“No corporation doing business in this state shall pay or contribute, or offer, consent or agree to pay or contribute, directly or indirectly, any money, property, free service of its officers or employees or thing of value to any political party, organization, committee or individual for any political purpose whatsoever, or for the purpose of influencing legislation of any kind, or to promote or defeat the candidacy of any person for nomination, appointment or election to any political office.” (emphasis added)
The penalty included a substantial fine, up to five years in prison for individual executives and even the company’s lawyers, and the death sentence of the corporation itself being forbidden from doing business.
Two years later, efforts to control bad behavior by rich people and corporations went federal with the Tillman Act of 1907. That law explicitly forbade any corporation from making “money contributions in connection with any election to any [federal] political office.”
By 1925, the Tillman Act had been incorporated into the Federal Corrupt Practices Act, further limiting money in politics, and in 1938 we got the Hatch Act which limited contributions to $5000 per candidate and $3 million per party.
As a result, for most of the 20th century prior to the Reagan Revolution, politicians did what the citizens wanted. We got Social Security, the minimum wage, Medicare, unemployment insurance, Medicaid, food and housing support, new public schools, the right to unionize, high-quality education, nearly free college, nonprofit hospitals and health insurance companies, and tightly regulated banks.
Following the Agnew and Nixon bribery scandals we got another bunch of laws to regulate money in politics, including the 1971 Federal Election Campaign Act, and the 1974 creation of the Federal Elections Commission, which then promulgated rules further limiting “dark money” and other forms of political bribery.
That all began to end, however, when Richard Nixon swung the Supreme Court hard to the right with his appointment of Lewis Powell in 1972, as I lay out in detail in The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America. This laid the foundation for the Reagan Revolution and today’s massive corruption across the GOP.
By 1978, Powell had authored the case of First National Bank of Boston v Bellotti, which blew up nearly all of those laws.
In 2010 five corrupt Republican appointees on the Court finished the perversion of American politics with their Citizens United decision, overturning hundreds of state and federal laws dating back more than a century.
Thus, big money now runs the show, and, to paraphrase Lord Acton, big money corrupts absolutely.
As FDR famously said, “Government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob.”
It’s gotten so bad since Clarence Thomas was the deciding vote on Citizens United that legislation Americans clearly want can’t even get a debate in the House or Senate when they’re controlled by Republicans on issues including:
— Reducing or ending student debt
— Free or low-cost college
— Dental, hearing and eyeglasses for seniors on Medicare
— Raising the cap on Social Security so it’s solvent for the next 75 years
— Getting the Post Office into postal banking for low-income people
— Stopping global warming
— Making pharmaceuticals affordable
— Medicare for all
— Taxing the rich
— Cutting back on fossil fuel emissions
— Breaking up the big monopolies to restore competition and lower prices
All of these positions, when polled as a single policy point rather than through a partisan frame, are overwhelmingly supported by the American people. None can get into law because billionaires or corporations have paid off enough politicians to stop them.
This corruption of the “rules of the game” by the Supreme Court has, in turn, attracted criminally disposed sociopaths into government at all levels, from state legislatures to the US Congress. It’s so bad that we can’t even stop members of Congress from trading stocks on insider information.
This is America becoming a Mafia State; with Trump and the corrupt toadies he’s inserting into our government, we’re all now stuck living in Alexander Hamilton’s nightmare.
It’ll be at least two years before we can do anything about it at the voting booth, but now is the time to get mobilized and start planning.
Show up for your local Democratic Party meeting and volunteer; precinct committee persons can have an amazing impact on the direction of the Party. Join a group like Indivisible. Become an evangelist for democracy. Support independent media and share newsletters and websites with everybody you know.
Now is not the time to check out or run away and hide. Get active: Tag, you’re it!