With a voting public largely disgusted by the new freedom of corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money in elections, supporting a modest version of reform like the version of the DISCLOSE Act working its way through Congress would, in normal times, be an easy political win for Republicans.
But these are not normal times. For the second time this year Senate Democrats tried to advance a bill that would have forced disclosure of unlimited secret campaign spending and the second time Republican leaders blocked a vote on the DISCLOSE Act.
Republican lawmakers have a host of weapons at their disposal in the battle over women’s reproductive rights, but no weapon may have as much impact as unlimited campaign spending. How do we know that dark money is a key to a Republican anti-woman, anti-family agenda? Just look how hard they are fighting to protect it.
The DISCLOSE Act would have required any independent group that spends more than $10,000 on campaign ads during an election cycle to file a report identifying any donors who gave $10,000 or more. Historically Republicans have supported disclosure laws in part because they were viewed as less onerous forms of campaign finance reform than say, spending limits. To get a sense of how hard Republicans have flipped on this issue, 14 of the Republican senators who helped filibuster this last vote supported a nearly identical disclosure bill in 2000.
Campaign finance reform and the issue of unlimited secret money flooding our elections is an issue of immediate importance to women. The effort to break the back of our public unions, a backbone of women’s economic empowerment and success, is funded with dark money. The same is true in the fight against fair pay laws.
In the first half of 2012 states enacted 95 new provisions related to reproductive health, including 39 restrictions on abortion access alone. In 2000, before the impact of Citizens United would be fully realized “only” 89 new anti-abortion laws were passed. In the entire year. As soon as the Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius announced the contraception mandate in the Affordable Care Act religious organizations including the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops created a SuperPAC to fund the legal challenges. It’s resulted in over twenty federal lawsuits with countless more on the way.
It’s simply undeniable that as corporate and secret money flowed unrestricted so to did the attacks on women’s reproductive health.
This issue affects women on the front end as well. Thanks to the persistency of the wage gap, women cannot spend as freely in elections. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, even though women slightly outnumber men in terms of overall population, they accounted for only 29.6 percent of people making federal-level political donations in the last election cycle. That figure gets even smaller when you look at overall dollar amount donated. Women contribute less money less often to political campaigns, and this is true even as the number of contributions by women is on the rise. What’s happening then?
We’re being drowned out.
We can’t expect the attacks on women’s rights to end until the money in our election system is shut off. As hard as we fight for reproductive rights we have to fight for election reform because the two are fundamentally linked. As citizens we have a right to know who influences our lawmakers, and this is especially true when those lawmakers put our lives on the line.
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.
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