This story is syndicated from The Tower, the newspaper of Princeton High School in Princeton, NJ. The original version of the story ran here.
Imagine you’re in a crowd of people shouting demands at a politician. You’ve got a loud voice, so you’re confident that you can be heard. Unfortunately, there are five thousand other screaming people in the same crowd as you. And everyone is getting drowned out by a guy who bought a top-tier surround-sound speaker system and rented that balcony above the politician two weeks ago. This is representative of current American politics, and how it currently drowns out the voices of the people.
There’s one often overlooked requirement to hold office in the United States: money. According to OpenSecrets.org, the amount of money each House Representative spent to win office in 2022 was around $2.79 million, and the amount of money every Senator spent to win office in 2022 was around $26.53 million. It is clear that elected officials are reliant on money, and it is far more efficient for them to turn towards a small number of wealthy individuals than to seek donations from thousands of average voters. The process of doing so is often covered under the term lobbying.
Lobbying is defined by Britannica as “any attempt by individuals or private interest groups to influence the decisions of government.” In the United States, this comes in the form of “public” campaigns undertaken to pressure politicians into specific policy decisions. The term is broad. It covers the practice of directly speaking to politicians, signing petitions, and funding research. However, the most common and influential method used in lobbying is donating large sums of money to political campaigns. There’s a reason that terms differentiating different forms of lobbying do not exist. It makes it far easier to confuse the public about what lobbying actually is.
The only problem is, lobbying isn’t supposed to work like that. There are set limits on how much individuals or corporations can donate each year to campaigns. Those limits can be conveniently circumvented by exploiting several loopholes in the law, especially those inherent to PACs.
The PAC, or Political Action Committee, is the main vehicle politicians use to accept campaign contributions. A PAC, according to OpenSecrets.org, is “a political committee that raises and spends money to elect or defeat candidates.” Federal law allows for two kinds of PACs: Connected and Non-Connected. Judicial decisions have allowed for a third kind of PAC known as “independent expenditure-only committees,” otherwise known as “Super PACs.”
A Super PAC can accept unlimited amounts of money, provided they don’t use those funds to “make contributions, whether direct, in-kind or via coordinated communications, to federal candidates or committees” as per the Federal Election Commission’s regulations. This means that candidates are barred from telling Super PACs how to spend their money. However, there are numerous legal loopholes around this restriction.
Stephen Colbert, host of The Colbert Report, created a Super PAC for the sole purpose of exposing these inherent loopholes. During a conversation with the president of his PAC, Colbert pointed out that while he “[couldn’t] tell him [what to do]” directly, he could easily convey his preferences to the PAC through indirect means, such as publicly expressing his views on television. The other major requirement, according to the Campaign Legal Center, is that Super PACs must “[report] their fundraising [and spending] to the Federal Election Commission.” However, the Campaign Legal Center also notes that Super PACs can hide their donors by simply “only [reporting] contributions from secretly-funded ‘dark money’ nonprofits, which themselves keep their donors hidden from the public.” Additionally, politicians can easily transfer money from Super PACs back to themselves. According to Politico’s coverage of Colbert’s Super PAC, Colbert’s lawyer explained that Colbert “could secretly steal the remaining $800,000 in his super PAC by creating an anonymous 501(c)4 and using an IRS loophole.”
Colbert’s experiment proves that politicians are able to accept unlimited amounts of money, not disclose its origins, and then hide it from the IRS. Many of these funds are used in lobbying processes, which have proven to be effective in creating change in favor of its patrons. For example, Politico reported in 2021 that Amazon lobbied Congress to preserve a prized tax break that has helped it lower its corporate tax bill. The company hired the tax lobbyist Joshua Odintz, a former Democratic congressional aide and veteran of the Obama administration, to lobby on the section of the tax code dealing with the research and development tax deduction. Although they were joined by other companies such as Intel and the National Association of Manufacturers for their attempt in 2021, Amazon’s own efforts to curb these tax bills have been happening for years, and have successfully pushed back the repeal of the tax break. According to Statista, corporations spent a total of $4.09 billion on lobbying in 2022 alone. Of course, that’s only the reported figure. Nothing stops a corporation from donating to a shell nonprofit organization, which can then transfer money over to a PAC.
The dozens of student-created clubs at PHS are a clear sign that students want to create change that lasts. The government is meant to be the tool for people to create that change. Attempting to create change with a corrupt government is like trying to fix a car with a broken wrench. As we become the new generation of civically active citizens, it is crucial to understand the intricacies of our current political space and where it is currently failing us.
