Jon Margolis is VTDigger’s political analyst.
All Vermonters and perhaps even all Americans owe a debt of gratitude to Attorney General Bill Sorrell because he filed suit against Dean Corren for violating campaign finance laws.
But maybe not the debt Sorrell had in mind.
He said he was just enforcing the law. He may indeed have been enforcing the law. But he was also – however unintentionally — illustrating two wider and more important realities about the world in which we live.
One is the absurdity of the campaign finance laws.
The other is an even more enduring fact of American life: real corruption is not against the law. It’s legal, in some cases because the corrupters wrote the laws.
Sorrell sued after an investigation indicated that both the Vermont Democratic Party and Corren, its candidate for lieutenant governor last year, had cooperated in planning and executing a pro-Corren email sent last October by Democratic state chair Dottie Deans.
The party didn’t list the email, which Sorrell has valued at $255, as a contribution. Because his campaign was publicly financed, Corren wasn’t allowed to accept contributions. The party, as a separate entity, could have sent the email had it done so without cooperating with the campaign. Sorrell said such cooperation did occur, and said he has the emails to prove it.
Sorrell couldn’t be all wrong here. The Dems have already ‘fessed up, reaching a “settlement in principle” with the attorney general in which they agreed to pay up to $10,000 as punishment for their part in this heinous misdeed. Case closed.
But think of what has happened here. The Vermont Democratic Party broke the law by … endorsing a Democratic candidate.
And the candidate is accused of breaking the law because he sought that support.
Stipulate that they both should have paid more attention to the legal fine print. Beyond that, this lawsuit demonstrates how the campaign finance laws have largely been reduced to legal fine print.
Now that the Supreme Court has eliminated most contribution limits and many disclosure requirements, campaign finance laws do very little to protect the public from political corruption or the appearance thereof, and almost nothing to prevent government from becoming a system dominated by legalized bribery.
By now, what campaign finance laws mostly do is provide billable hours for lawyers, with many of their cases dealing less with who spent how much than with whether the donors and their recipients engaged in the kind of collusion Sorrell alleges between the Vermont Democrats and the Corren campaign.
Talk about a waste of time. There is always collusion. In every capital – all 50 states and the big one down there on the Potomac – the political world is a small one. Its inhabitants know one another. They are constantly colluding. If Democratic and Corren staffers erred it was by allegedly putting some of their collusion in emails. Don’t they have cell phones? Don’t they all relax after hours in the same pubs? Those corner tables are meant for collusion.
What was it that Adam Smith said about merchants: that they never congregate without the talk turning to price-fixing? Well, politicos never congregate without colluding.
Campaign finance laws, stripped of most of their essence, call these collusions corrupt. They may be. But the entire system is corrupt. It now permits very wealthy people to contribute millions of dollars to campaigns and candidates (as long as the contributions are not made directly to the campaigns and candidates) without being identified.
They do not make these contributions expecting nothing in return. It is true that many of them are motivated as much by ideology as by crass economic self-interest, but it’s amazing how the two so often intertwine.
Vermont is spared the worst of this corruption. Because it is so small and most campaigns so inexpensive – a candidate can get elected to the state House of Representatives for a few thousand dollars or less – office-holders are less beholden to contributors than are members of Congress or of legislators in many states. Vermont lawmakers don’t have to spend half (or more) of their time raising money at fundraisers hosted by lobbyists, who are buying access, at the very least, for themselves and their employers.
It’s not as though the congressmen are crooks. They are not putting this money in their pockets, as were their counterparts in days of yore, when so many of them were on the payrolls of the railroads, the mining companies and others. They are putting it in their campaign committees, mostly to pay consultants to produce television commercials and buy the time to air them.
Another reason Vermont is somewhat exempt from the scourge of the current political finance structure — it only make sense for a few statewide candidates to buy TV time.
It’s mere coincidence, but is at least interesting that this contretemps occurs in this place and at this time. The place is Vermont, one of the states most invested in the EB-5 program, which grants permanent residence (meaning eventual citizenship) to a foreigner willing to invest $500,000 in a new business here.
Some of these businesses thrive and provide decent jobs for people who might otherwise not have one. But let’s be honest about what it is: legalized, institutionalized bribery. Some of the investors don’t even care if they get their money back. They are buying their way into the country.
The time is the early spring, when so many Americans, including Vermonters, spend hours each week watching scantily-clad young men run up and down a wooden floor hurling a ball between themselves and at a basket 10 feet above the floor. Very little is more fun than watching the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, even if the game seems a bit stodgier than it was just a few years ago.
And very little is more corrupt, legal though it might be. Many of the “student-athletes” who play in the games don’t go to class at all, or have their papers written and their exams taken by someone else Not one of them is paid by the institutions – some of them the most prestigious universities in the land – whose coffers their athletic skills so enrich. But some of them get under-the-table envelopes full of cash, or a car, or … or … well, this is a family website, we won’t go into any more detail here.
Everybody knows this. And all those who watch the games (OK, full disclosure, all of us who watch the games) are complicit in the corruption. What do we care? The games are fun.
In charging Corren and the Democrats, the attorney general is enforcing the law, which is his job. Should he prevail, Dean Corren could end up poorer by some $70,000. The only other conceivable impact of the lawsuit would be that the next time a Vermont candidate wants to collude with an independent donor, he or she will have staff do it at the corner table of a pub.
But it will do nothing to reduce corruption, in or out of politics. The corruption is not only all around us, it is within us.
