By: Rachel M. Cohen, Ryan Grim
In April, the Congressional Progressive Caucus announced that it was going to be drawing a line: Its political action committee would no longer accept corporate campaign donations.
“If we are going to end the influence of corporations and special interests in government, we have to start by not relying on their support,” said caucus co-chair Mark Pocan, D-Wis. “Only by being fully independent of their financial influence can we prioritize people over corporations.”
The development was largely ignored by the press, but for those who heard about it, the move raised an immediate question: Wait, the Congressional Progressive Caucus was taking corporate money?
Yes, it was. And not only did the Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC accept corporate contributions until recently, but also, almost all of its 78 members — including Pocan — still take corporate money individually, even as their caucus shuns it. Just four caucus members who will be returning to the House next session have pledged to decline corporate funds: Reps. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash.; Ro Khanna, D-Calif.; Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii; and David Cicilline, D-R.I.
[…]
The movement to get money out of politics has fueled a massive, rapid, and poorly understood sea change — one that’s come to a head in the 2018 cycle. According to End Citizens United, a campaign finance reform political action committee, 208 candidates took the “no corporate PACs” pledge this cycle. Of those candidates, 124 won their primaries, including big names like Beto O’Rourke, the Texas Democrat challenging Ted Cruz’s Senate seat, and Ocasio-Cortez, the insurgent candidate from New York City who ousted Joe Crowley, one of the top Democrats in Congress. (End Citizens United endorsed Crowley in the primary, despite his long record of taking corporate contributions, not expecting him to face a real challenge.)
Polls showed that Conor Lamb’s vocal opposition to corporate PAC money helped him eke out a victory in a district that Donald Trump won by 20 points in 2016. And in a Pennsylvania district to Lamb’s east, Jess King has made her refusal to take corporate PAC money, and the GOP incumbent’s reliance on it, a defining feature of her campaign, helping her bring her opponent’s lead down to the single digits in a district that Trump carried by 26 points. The defining line in Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign zeroed in on that distinction: “We’ve got people, they’ve got money.”
Meanwhile, all 78 candidates endorsed by the Justice Democrats — a progressive political action committee, 26 of whose endorsees are still in the running — have sworn off corporate PAC and corporate lobbyist money. And already, presidential hopefuls like Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Kirsten Gillibrand have responded to the growing hunger for campaign finance reform by announcing that they’ll no longer take corporate PAC contributions — an easier decision for them since corporate PACs aren’t likely to weigh in on presidential primaries anyway.
[…]
Adam Bozzi, communications director for End Citizens United, predicts that “20 or 30 or 40” candidates who reject corporate PAC money will win their House races this November, and that “a couple more senators” will soon join the seven who have already done so. (Those senators are Warren, D-Mass.; Sanders, I-Vt.; Gillibrand, D-N.Y.; Harris, D-Calif.; Booker, D-N.J.; Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I.; and Maria Cantwell, D-Wash.) These candidates “are not going to be bullied around” in Congress, Bozzi said. “That, plus the presidential primary, will lead to candidates pushing each other on these issues,” he added.
The hope is that the growing pressure will force the Michael Capuanos of the future to see that rejecting corporate PAC money is not only the most ethical choice, but the most politically attractive one as well.
“Corporate PAC money is a significant amount of money, but it’s not insurmountable,” said Bozzi. So-called “Red to Blue” Democrats who won in Republican-controlled districts last cycle, according to Bozzi, received an average of $16,000 each from corporate PACs. Democratic incumbents in competitive races last cycle received about 11 percent of their funding from corporate PACs, while the average for Democrats overall was closer to 19 percent.
Schmitt hopes that the focus on corporate PAC money will kickstart a more serious conversation about public financing — a consequential reform which can be accomplished without overturning Citizens United. This past May, House and Senate Democratic leaders unveiled their “Better Deal for Democracy” package, which includes a plan whereby candidates would receive a 6-to-1 match in public funds for every dollar raised from small donors. The reform proposals were spearheaded by Rep. John Sarbanes, D-Md., who has sworn off corporate PAC money for the past seven years. Sarbanes’s package has received the backing not only of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, but also more moderate Democrats like Pelosi and Steny Hoyer, D-Md.
“If you’ve been in politics for more than five minutes, you get tangled up in the money — everyone knows that,” Sarbanes told The Intercept. “The real question is: What are we going to do about it? If we get back the gavel in November, we will want to move quickly on this reform agenda.”
Republicans, for their part, are not that concerned. Rep. Tom Cole, a member of House Republican leadership from Oklahoma, told The Intercept that it’s a “fantasy” to think that voters care much about corporate PAC money. “As long as it’s legal, and you’re not getting hauled in front of the FEC [Federal Election Commission] for violating the law, I’ve found very few vote on that basis,” he said. “It’s not like they give you television time for free, you know, or let you mail your mailers out for free. So, I’m sorry, it just takes money to communicate. That’s nobody’s fault. That’s just the way the system is. So, taking money out just means you’re not going to win. If people want to make that a virtue, that’s fine, but usually the person that has the most resources wins about nine times out of 10.”
Any voter who does make it a litmus test, he added, was never going to vote for him in the first place.