Cato V, Part IX: Four Hundred and Thirty-Five Ways to Get What You Want

Private individuals and enterprises do most assuredly traffic in the kind of influence peddling to which Clinton sought to call attention in the text of Cato V, of course. He was far from mistaken in believing that the fundamentally public nature of the American model of representative government entailed a degree of vulnerability to outside interference. But whereas he and his fellow Founders tended to pinpoint the source of this intrusion as being either foreign in nature – with Great Britain in particular seen as a likely potential source of infiltration and sabotage – or else originating in the minds of bankers and speculators whom they believed would gladly ruin a country in order to line their own pockets, the real threat would ultimately present itself in a very transparent and law-abiding fashion. Consider, by way of explanation, the way modern political campaigns tend to be conducted. Since campaigning as we know it here at the beginning of the 21^st century really came into being – roughly sometime in the middle of the 19^th century – it has tended to be a very expensive endeavor. Transportation costs money, rallies cost money, leaflets cost money, buttons cost money, and the expensive but far-reaching electronic media of the modern era – radio ads, television ads, streaming ads, and social media ads – cost even more. Fundraising is thus perhaps the most important single responsibility that any potential candidate for elected office must attend to from the moment they even begin to imagine their swearing in to the last possible second before the polls officially open. To be a political aspirant, therefore, is to pretty much always be on the lookout for new and larger sources of cash.

There are rules, of course, as to where this cash can come from. In the United States of America, campaign finance laws ensure that most political donations are recorded and readily accessible to the public, that individuals cannot donate more than a set amount, that ostensibly non-partisan organizations like labor unions and social welfare groups do not make direct donations to political candidates, and that political parties do not accept more than a given amount of money per election or per year. Because of the high stakes of national and even state elections – the prize being the power to influence and/or alter the laws and policy priorities of the jurisdiction in question – the ability to work effectively within and around these regulations has naturally become a skill of tremendous value to the public and private organizations whose material well-being or ideological objectives stand to be directly affected by the identity of the individual or the party in power. Enter the modern lobbyist. The job of a lobbyist, and the purpose of the firms that employ them, is essentially to turn private money into public influence. In its simplest form, this might entail little more than a campaign of persuasion whereby a candidate for office – many of whom, it bears noting, are already office-holders themselves – is convinced by way of personal favors – the gifting of luxury goods, the organizing of fundraisers, or the securing of individual donors, for example – to support such policies once elected as the employer of the lobbyist in question prefers. So long as such favors are reported, and do not exceed a set maximum in terms of their monetary value, no harm is reported as having been done.

Costlier forms of lobbying tend also to be less direct in consequence of the aforementioned campaign finance regulations restricting large money donations directly to individual campaigns. So-called “Political Action Committees” or “PACs” are an increasingly popular means of exerting this kind of indirect influence in American elections, owing largely to their ability to accept and spend tremendous amounts of money during the course of a political campaign almost entirely outside of the rule regime that currently governs political funding in the United States. This evident circumvention of campaign finance regulations is made possible by the existence of a particular subset of PAC, labeled as an “independent-expenditure committees,” whose operations are legally and functionally separate from those of a candidate or party-run political organization. So long as this species of PAC is operated independently of any political campaigns – and so long as its funding is disclosed in accordance with Federal Elections Commission regulations – it may accept virtually unlimited donations and spend virtually unlimited sums of money on political advertising, voter registration efforts, or any number of additional expenditures intended to aid a particular party or individual. The intention, of course, on the part of those people or organizations who donate to a PAC is that their support will both accomplish the election of their preferred candidate and ensure – pursuant to the aforementioned disclosure regulations – that the newly-minted public servant in question does not soon forget who it was that helped make their election possible.

And then there are what the United States Internal Revenue code refers to as 501(c) organizations, a category which includes (but is not limited to) labor unions, social welfare groups, and chambers of commerce. Provided that the primary stated purpose of a 501(c) is not partisan political advocacy, campaign finance regulations currently active in the United States of America allow for substantial participation, directly or indirectly, in electioneering activities without the need to publically report their donors. 501(c)(4) entities in particular – the aforementioned social welfare organizations – have in consequence become particularly active in state and federal political campaigns over the course of the decade preceding the 2020 elections, with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Planned Parenthood, and the National Rifle Association (NRA) being among the most prominent. Of these named organizations, the NRA has developed a particularly impressive and sophisticated regime of political fundraising and donations. Since shifting towards political activism starting in the mid-1970s, the NRA has combined a complex donor network with exceptionally effective lobbying tactics, not the least of which is the publication of an annual “report card” by the associated “National Victory Fund” rating office-holders and candidates from “A+” to “F” based on their public statements for or against gun control legislation and the Second Amendment to the US Constitution. According to this NVF scoring scheme, the NRA has distributed millions of dollars to any number of candidates over the course of the last forty years. In 2008 alone their donations totaled some forty millions dollars. In 2016 they pledged fully thirty millions dollars to the ultimately victorious Republican Party candidate for President.

As to where this money comes from, the answer is fairly straightforward. A little less than half of the NRA’s annual revenue – in 2010 amounting to just over two hundred and twenty-seven million dollars – comes from membership dues, near to half again – one hundred and fifteen million – is generated by fundraising, sales, and advertising, and the rest is made up of grants and/or contributions from individuals and corporate donors. Unsurprisingly, the corporations evidently most eager to fund the activities of the NRA include outdoor supply manufacturers, sporting goods retailers, and the developers of firearms. The extent to which this rough ratio of funding translates directly into the degree of influence each interest group may wield within the NRA is, and has been, a subject of debate. Without endeavoring to wade into the same wholly absent any stake in the outcome, it will here suffice to affirm that the NRA at least to some extent represents the interests of both its dues-paying members – presumably all of whom are reasonably avid customers of the world’s various firearms manufacturers – and of the developers and retailers of guns, ammunition, and weapons accessories who continue to do business in the United States of America. What this would seem to mean in the larger political sense, of course, is that one of the largest and most effective lobbying efforts undertaken from one election cycle to another across the length and breadth of the American republic is funded by – and presumably also serves the interest of – the collective gun-owning, dues-paying membership of a single organization and the manufacturers of the weapons which said members take it to be their unalienable right to own.

Where this all gets back to George Clinton, Cato V, and legislative influence – corruption being in this case perhaps too pointed a descriptor – is in the extent to which support by and funding from the NRA has become a necessary ingredient to the election of whole swaths of public officials serving at the state and federal level in various regions of the United States of America. Consider, to that end, the following construction. In certain jurisdictions of the American republic – barring an unlikely and very specific set of circumstances – it is practically impossible to secure election to either state or federal office without being a member of the Republican Party. This is far from unusual among modern democratic nations, of course. Political parties in counties across the world cultivate regional bases of power where experience has shown them that their resources will do the most good. It is also true, however, that in order to secure the Republican nomination in one of these jurisdictions – and in order to ensure that Republican voters don’t simply stay home come Election Day – the candidate in question must also secure the endorsement of the NRA. The Republican Party having established itself as the party of the Second Amendment since at least the 1994 mid-term elections which returned them to power in the House of Representatives for the first time since 1954 – a feat funded in no small part by NRA spending – the political interests of the National Rifle Association have enjoyed near-universal support among the membership and leadership of the GOP.

What this means in practice is that the supporters of the Republican Party – eager as anyone to see their interests hold sway over those of their political opponents – have to a large extent delegated the selection of candidates for public office to the NRA. By ranking nominees via the aforementioned system of report cards, said organization succeeds in communicating both whom its supporters should vote for – a group which at this stage includes most of the devotees of the Republican Party – and which of the nominees in question will have access to the funding necessary to successfully market their candidacy to the voters in the relevant constituencies. But while the membership and support bases of the NRA and the Republican Party at this point in time do substantially overlap – thus ostensibly indicating that the two organizations will tend to come to the same conclusions in terms of candidate selection – certain interests which could only ever form a minority in the latter enjoyed a much larger degree of influence over the former. Candidate selection within the Republican Party generally represents some manner of synthesis of local and national organizational priorities, with party elites offering – or perhaps attempting to enforce – their direction and the rank-and-file making their collective intentions known through the medium of primary and caucus votes. Candidate approval within the NRA, however, must respond to a certain degree of institutional pressure as well as to the interests of individuals and elites.

It is true, of course, that individual members of the Republican Party who hold, seek to hold, or seek to continue holding public office are to some extent also beholden to the interests and the entities that fund their campaigns – i.e. oil companies, insurance companies, aerospace companies, and the like. But these same institutional interests tend to exert less influence on candidate selection than might the equivalent corporate partners of the National Rifle Association. The NRA’s status as a 501(c)(4), after all, entitles its directors to absorb virtually unlimited quantities of money without the need to publically report every donor. In consequence, whereas it cannot but be quite clear where exactly a given Republican official is receiving their campaign funds – and thus, to some degree, to whom they are beholden – the anonymity that the NRA enjoys in terms of where its money comes from serves to effectively throw a curtain over the rationale underpinning its actions. It thus cannot seem to be anything but unclear from the outside precisely how the NVF determines which public officials receive what score and to whom said ratings – which carry with them the promise of financial support or financial destitution – are well and truly owed. Are the NRA’s corporate partners the principle drivers of candidate certification? The NRA directors? The rank-and-file membership? In all likelihood, only the leadership of the National Rifle Association can say for certain. What is clear, however, is that the NRA – among other social welfare organizations possessed of 501(c)(4) status – can and does directly influence the character and outcome of state and federal elections in the United States of America. As with the existence of state-controlled corporations like Brazil’s Petrobras – and the political consequences thereof – this is not a reality someone like George Clinton was at all prepared to imagine.

This isn’t to say that the way certain elements within Petrobras attempted to enrich themselves via the paid cooperation of public and party officials in Brazil is functionally or even morally the equivalent of the lobbying efforts yearly undertaken by the National Rifle Association or any of its non-profit counterparts. What the relevant officers of Petrobras, and Odebrecht, the Chamber of Deputies, the Senate, and the Worker’s Party did in Brazil was grossly improper and very much illegal. Public money – being the profits derived from the sale of Brazil’s petroleum resources by a company owned by the government thereof – was traded for favors, favors paved the way for kickbacks, and kickbacks made possible the purchasing of more favors. Wealthy individuals became wealthier while the Brazilian people were neither compensated nor consulted. What the NRA, its members, its corporate partners, and its allies in Congress and the states have done – and continue to do – is conversely both legal and entirely in compliance with campaign finance regulations. Like any 501(c)(4), the NRA can accept donations from whomever it wishes, make contributions to whomever it wishes, and establish the criteria by which its favor is measured and disbursed however it wishes. No one is forced to pay heed to the pronouncements of the NRA, no public money is made to change hands, and no one who accepts the private donations of the NRA – within certain established limits – is guilty of anything more than being a politician in the 21^st century. On this subject there would seem to be little room for argument.

What the behavior of Petrobras and organizations like the NRA have in common, however, is that they both sought – or seek – to gain influence over public officials serving within a given jurisdiction through the medium of financial incentives and for the purpose of securing a favorable environment for their non-partisan activities. The guilty officers of Petrobras – and of the relevant Brazilian construction firms – sought to purchase the cooperation of public and party officials for the purpose of further enriching themselves by way of a fraudulent bidding process for public energy infrastructure contracts. The directors and corporate partners of the NRA likewise endeavor to gain the cooperation of state and federal officials in staving off potential restrictions on the sale and ownership of firearms for the purpose of permitting manufacturers, retailers, and individual citizens the continued opportunity to make, sell, and buy the weapons and accessories that are their common interest. To be sure, one of these constitutes an illegal use of public money, the other a perfectly legal use of private money. But both inarguably entail a moneyed interest successfully buying political support for itself and for its partners. And both represent a form of financial influence which the late 18^th century American mind almost certainly could not have comprehended.

Recall, to that end, the fact that formal political parties did not exist in the United States of America at the time that George Clinton penned Cato V in November, 1788, and that campaigning for elected office was equally unheard of. Absent either of these contributing factors – both of which, in the context of the late 18^th century, were seen as distasteful – much of what Petrobras has done and the NRA continues to do would serve little to no purpose. Partisanship breeds competition, competition produces a desire for advantage, and advantage can often be bought. Competition can exist without partisanship, of course. People can compete very actively for a given elected office even if they don’t each of them belong to a party organization. But the addition of organization – i.e. the emergence of institutional parties with shared resources and common goals among their members – serves to elevate any given election from a matter of primarily local importance to one of potentially national value. Resources begin to flow in from outside the constituency in question, direction is handed down from national leaders and elites, and the outcome of the race in question becomes important, not just to the local interests involved but to the national organizations to which the competing candidates belong. Within this kind of elevated context, securing any kind of advantage becomes that much more important than in an exclusively non-partisan setting. George Clinton might have harbored some vague understanding that this was the case – the disdain his generation tended to feel towards the concept of partisanship generally centered on the notion that factionalism was inherently selfish and functioned mainly to distract public servants from actually serving the public. But it is highly doubtful that either he or his colleagues among the Founders could have imagined the degree to which party politics could – and soon enough would – facilitate the entry of collective fundraising and collective spending into the American political process.

It is the very idea of campaigning, of course, which makes the raising and disbursing of all this money necessary. And campaigning for public office was likewise something that people of George Clinton’s generation tended to think of as self-serving and uncouth. Taking their cues from what they thought of as the customs and mores of Roman antiquity – though in actual fact the ancient Romans were never as virtuous as those who have later sought to emulate them seem to believe – the Founders understood public office to be a kind of sacred trust bestowed upon those who showed the least interest in having access to power and who demonstrated the utmost sense of forbearance and personal integrity. Seeking after office was thus a natural disqualification from ever being able to hold it. Once simply lived a virtuous life without expectation of reward and were eventually – hopefully – elevated accordingly. They could not be said to gain reward for their behavior, of course, because public office wasn’t supposed to be rewarding. On the contrary, taking on a course of public service was supposed to entail sacrifice; a person was expected to come out of it poorer than when they went in, and gladly so. Within this conception of public office as a form of self-abnegation, the notion of campaigning was naturally thought of as anathema. To seek office was to seek power; to seek power was to be untrustworthy. Granting that people in any era, under any manner of social obligation, will still be people, outward adherence to this construction of public service did not mean that every man who ultimately possessed an office of public trust in the United States of American in the late 1780s never harbored personal ambitions or sought after more power than they had already. Regardless of how they actually felt about their public standing, however, or how earnestly they wished to improve it by ascending to some high office of state, men in the late-18^th century American republic still tended to adhere quite doggedly to a collectively-defined notion of gentlemanly conduct. And gentlemen, among other things, simply didn’t go around asking their neighbors to elect them to public office. To put it bluntly, it just wasn’t done.  

Contrary to this outwardly intractable sense of disdain on the part of the United States of America’s Founding Generation, however, campaigning has become one of the primary activities undertaken by any species of public servant in the present-day American republic. Forced to appeal to larger and larger constituencies as the state and federal electoral franchises slowly but surely expanded over the course of the 19^th century, aspirants to public office arguably had no choice but to broaden their appeal to the voting masses by way of aggressive self-promotion and the forging of alliances and voting blocs among otherwise disparate socio-cultural communities. In fairly short order, once this process was well and truly set in motion by ambitious political strategists like Aaron Burr (1756-1836) in the 1790s and 1800s and Martin Van Buren (1782-1862) in the 1820s and 1830s, it mattered very little whether the candidate in question found the concept of soliciting votes to be distasteful or not. Campaigning had a matter of political survival. The result, quite naturally, was a drastic increase in per capita electoral expenditures. Whereas a local notable drafted as a candidate for Congress in his home county in late 18^th century Virginia might expect to spend a little money on food and drink come election day for the purpose of showing his beneficence to – and thus validating the loyalty of – his neighbors, a candidate for the same office in the 1830s or 1840s would almost certainly be given to expend much larger sums on pamphlets, commemorative souvenirs, public speakers, rallies, and campaign song sheet music in addition to the traditional libations and vittles. Far from depending on their record of service and forbearance to open the way to political elevation, men who sought after some portion of the public trust needed to sell themselves to the voters by way of increasingly elaborate and all-encompassing forms of personalized advertising.

It is quite possible that Clinton could have brought himself to accept that this would someday be the case. He was, after all, a very canny political operative who understood the value of patronage, bloc voting, and populism better than the vast majority of his contemporaries and rivals. That being said, it would still seem doubtful that he could have easily wrapped his mind around the close relationship that presently exists in American political culture between lobbyists, corporations, tax-exempt organizations, and political campaigns. One reason for this, among others, is that none of these things existed during his lifetime. Political campaigning, as aforementioned, was seen as squalid and uncouth by men of Clinton’s class and generation. Corporations in the late 18^th century were small, limited in scope, and tended to have a distinct public purpose underpinning their existence. Lobbying hadn’t yet emerged as the invaluable right arm of corporate policy-making. And the only social welfare organizations recognized in any formal manner by state and federal governments in the 18^th century were the established houses of worship. Perhaps no single one of these entities or practices is so alien in concept that Clinton could not have been made to understand their purpose or value. He was, it bears mentioning again, a very canny fellow. But the sheer amount of money that corporations now regularly accrue, lobbyists traffic in, tax-exempt organizations donate, and political campaigns spend surely occupies a realm beyond even his wildest fantasies of what was possible given the resources available to the American people. Consider, by way of evidence, the following.

In January of 1791 – in the aftermath of the successful ratification of the proposed constitution against which George Clinton railed in print some two years earlier – the passage of legislation negotiated by Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton (1757-1804), Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), and Congressman James Madison (1751-1836) made possible the assumption on the part of the newly-minted federal government of the combined debts of the various states. The resulting national debt totaled, to the cent, $75,463,476.52. About forty million dollars of this – fifty-three percent of the total – was domestic debt; about twelve million dollars – sixteen percent of the total – was foreign debt. For the era, it must be said, these were not necessarily astronomical sums. The British national debt had reached about that same size in the middle 1750s, and grew even larger – to a high of £130,000,000 in 1764 – as a result of Britain’s participation the Seven Years War (1754-1763). All the same, seventy-five million dollars was still a very large sum of money in 1791, of the sort that only national governments could conceivably generate and spend over an extended course of years. Bearing this in mind, one is naturally given to wonder how George Clinton – or indeed any of his contemporaries – would have reacted to the notion of a single organization spending the combined total of the United States domestic debt in 1791 – that is, again, forty million dollars – for the purpose of electing a single individual to public office. This is exactly what the National Rifle Association did in 2016, after all. Would they have shrugged, nodded, registered any reaction at all? Or would they have been astonished to learn that a private organization could come into possession of that much money and spend it all, legally, for the purpose of influencing the outcome of an election?

One hopes by now that the answers to these questions are patently clear, and that likewise there is no longer any mystery as to why Clinton’s cited contention in Cato V that larger legislatures are less likely to come under the influence of some exterior interest than smaller ones represents something less than a dependable political truism. Clinton, for all his insight, was writing in the midst of an era radically different from our own in a number of fundamental dimensions. There were no formal political parties in the United States of America in 1788, and no political campaigning, no lobbyists, no tax-exempt social welfare groups, and no billion-dollar corporations. And while one might fairly debate whether or not the emergence of the same has made the American republic a more hospitable climate for the democratic expression of individual and community interests, they have inarguably changed the way that Americans think about politics and political organization. Combined, these entities and practices have made it easier than ever before to raise vast sums of money on very short notice, made the spending of said money a practical necessity, and brought about the creation of a set of rules by which said spending might be regulated and regularized. In consequence, while it doubtless would have strained credulity to imagine in the late 18^th century that any single entity or individual could ever possess the resources necessary to effectively buy the ongoing cooperation of a national legislature comprised of four hundred or five hundred members, such an outcome is more or less de rigueur in the present that is 2019.