Follow this and additional works at: Part of the Law Commons

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Yale Law School Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository Faculty Scholarship Series Yale Law School Faculty Scholarship 1-1-1998 Money and Politics Owen M.

1 Yale Law School Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository Faculty Scholarship Series Yale Law School Faculty Scholarship Money and Politics Owen M. Fiss Yale Law School Follow this and additional works at: Part of the Law Commons Recommended Citation Fiss, Owen M., "Money and Politics" (1998). Faculty Scholarship Series. Paper This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Yale Law School Faculty Scholarship at Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Scholarship Series by an authorized administrator of Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact

2 ESSAY MONEY AND POLITICS Owen AI. Fiss* Professor Fiss argues that onz'v mandatory publicfinancing ofelectoral campaigns can counteract the convsive influence ofmoney on politics. The greatest obstacle to an ~ffectivepublic funding scheme is the Supreme Court's decision in Buckley v. Valeo, which invalidated the ceiling on political exjjenditures enacted as part of the reform measure provolwd by Watergate. Professor Fiss examines the Court sfirst A mendment rationale for that decision, and finds it wanting. According to him, the Court did not give proper heed to the constitutionaljjrinciple which ought t6 have been controllingnamez'v, preserving the fullness ofjmblic debate-and thus, created a rule that interfered with the jjrojjcrfunctioning ofamerican democracy. Americans have long worri~d about the corrupting influence of money on politics. Each election season brings a renewed interest in the subject, as the amount spent on campaigns reaches shocking new heights and new scandals are uncovered, but that interest inevitably subsides before meaningful reform is achieved. The election of 1996 might be a break in this familiar cycle, as the involvement of foreign interests in the presidential campaign has given the suqject of campaign financing a special urgency and saliency-a new and perhaps more genuine opportunity for reform has arisen. l We should take full advantage of this turn of events, but stay ever mindful that the problem is money, not foreign monev. / Electoral campaigns require enormous sums of money to hire staff, conduct polls, cover expenses to travel this vast country, and prepare advertisements and place them in newspapers and on the airwaves. In the 1996 elections, more than $866 million was spent for these purposes. 2 For most of our history, candidates have financed their campaigns out of :;: Sterling Professor of Law, Yale University. This Essay is based on a lecture to the Eduardo Garcia Maynez Seminar in Mexico City on October 5, It has benefitted enormously from the criticism and editorial assistance of Christopher Kutz and Gregory Silbert. 1. See, e.g., Jamin B. Raskin, Dollar Democracy: Can We Stop It?, Nation, May 5, 1997, at 11; Symposium, The Pull of Money: New Directions for Campaign Finance Reform, Boston Rev., Apr.-May 1997, at This figure represents total spending by all presidential candidates, and all spending by the major political parties on presidential, congressional, state, and local campaigns. See Financing the 1996 Presidential Campaign (visited Nov. 5, 1997) < (on file with the Columbia Law Review). According to Dick Morris, President Clinton's former campaign advisor, Clinton and the Democratic National Committee spent more than $85 million on television advertising alone. See Dick Morris, Behind the Oval Office: Winning the Presidency in the Nineties 138 (1997). Total spending in 1996 by candidates for all offices, and by their advocates, has been estimated at ---I 9470

Chapter 9 Lecture: Business in Politics

Chapter 9 Lecture: Business in Politics The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from [business should be] listened to with great precaution. It comes from [people] who have a