The baby of Rosemary's Baby

by: Jay Stevens

Tue Oct 19, 2010 at 10:28:52 AM MST

In this year's midterm elections, there is no talk of satchels of cash from donors. Nor is there any hint of illegal actions reaching Watergate-like proportions. But the fund-raising practices that earned people convictions in Watergate - giving direct corporate money to a campaign and doing so secretly - are back in a different form in 2010.

This time around, the corporations are still giving secretly, but legally. In 1907, direct corporate donations to candidates were legally barred in a campaign finance reform push by President Theodore Roosevelt. But that law and others - the foundation for many Watergate convictions - are all but obsolete. This is why many supporters of strict campaign finance laws are wringing their hands.
Certainly, it is still illegal for corporations to contribute directly to candidates. But they now have equally potent ways to exert their influence. This election year is the first since the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, which allows corporations for the first time to finance ads that directly support or oppose political candidates. And tax laws and loopholes have permitted a shadow campaign network of Republican-leaning nonprofit groups to collect a flood of anonymous donations and spend it widely.

If the Republicans make big gains in the House and Senate on Election Day, there is rare bipartisan consensus that they will owe part of their victory to the millions of dollars raised and spent by these nonprofit groups, much of which has come from businesses.

The groups, including the Chamber of Commerce, the American Action Network and Crossroads GPS, which is linked to the Republican strategist Karl Rove, have committed to spending well over $150 million this year. President Obama has railed against these groups as they have poured money into races in which once-secure Democrats are hanging by a thread.

But the attacks may have only helped build the groups' fund-raising muscle. Crossroads GPS and a sister organization, American Crossroads, have received more than $100,000 in small donations through the Web, when they had expected most gifts to come in big checks. And the groups' leaders have only grown more influential - far more influential than the Republican National Committee, led by Michael Steele. Evidently, the corporate donors love having a secret route to influence politics and elect Republicans without showing their hands to a Washington still controlled by the Democrats.

So much for open elections and the democratic process.

Citizens United steamrolled previous court decisions that opined corporate involvement in our electoral process was unsavory and destructive to representative government. That is, the SCOTUS - or the radical elements therein - now considers the corporation "a burnished image of the good citizen." But given the involvement of corporations in politics in the weeks and months after Citizens United, you'd have to agree with the 1990 SCOTUS majority opinion in Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, which "lambasted" the entry of corporations "into the political arena" because of "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."

Wheee. Americans, meet your new overlords.