If there is a secular religion among Democrats, it’s campaign-finance reform — driving big money out of politics regardless of the limitations of the First Amendment.
The issue came up last week in the Democratic primary debate when Bernie Sanders accused Hillary Clinton of being supported by a super PAC that has raised more than $15 million from Wall Street interests. Visibly agitated, she accused Sanders of an “artful smear” by insinuating that she has given special access or favors to contributors.
The issue clearly rattles Team Clinton. It is now under pressure to release transcripts of lavishly paid speeches she gave to executives at Goldman Sachs and other investment banks.
“If it turns out she’s saying one thing to a crowd of Wall Street financiers and another thing on a debate stage, that also presents a problem,” NBC’s Kasie Hunt said following the debate. Don’t hold your breath for the transcripts to be released any faster than Hillary Clinton released a selective trove of her e-mails from her State Department days.
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But Team Clinton is now fighting back. Howard Dean is a former governor of Vermont, Bernie Sanders’s home state, but is backing Hillary. Friday on MSNBC, he sarcastically noted that Sanders shouldn’t boast about his freedom from super PACs given his ties with organized labor.
“I don’t hear anybody asking Bernie Sanders for transcripts of some speech he made for a labor union,” he told Andrea Mitchell. “Frankly, for Bernie to say he doesn’t have a super PAC — labor unions are super PACs. Now, they’re super PACs that Democrats like, so we don’t go after labor unions, but this is a double standard.”
Dean isn’t just any Democrat letting the liberal campaign-finance cat out of the bag. A leading contender for the 2004 Democratic nomination, he served as chair of the Democratic National Committee from 2005 to 2009.
“In politics a gaffe is when a politician inadvertently tells the truth, and that’s what Dean just did,” Grover Norquist, the head of the conservative Americans for Tax Reform, tells me. “Labor unions are super PACs that dwarf all others. Because they don’t have to ask for contributions, they can legally force workers to pay dues that are then turned into involuntary political donations and that pay ‘volunteers’ to work in campaigns.”
#share#Indeed, Dean’s comment exposes the reality that Democrats tend to complain about only one form of big money in politics: the money that’s not spent by them. That’s why they are so keen to have private-sector funds regulated or legislated out of the political arena. They count on public-sector unions to continue generously funding Democratic campaigns and causes.
In 2014, nearly 17 million union workers had $18 billion taken out of their paychecks. The practice began after the passage of the New Deal’s Wagner Act in 1935, which forced workers to join a union as a condition of their employment. Once a union was in place, it no longer needed to ask each worker to join. The workers either paid dues or did not work.
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Private-sector union membership has gradually declined as the high costs they imposed have reduced the size of U.S. auto, steel, mining, and manufacturing industries. Increasingly, unions have looked to the government sector — which can’t go out of business — for new members.
Democrats tend to complain about only one form of big money in politics: the money that’s not spent by them.
Today, some 40 percent of government workers belong to unions, compared with just over 6 percent of private-sector workers. The unions have created some genuine income inequality in America. Norquist points out that the average American worker in the private sector earns in pay, benefits, and pension about $60,000 a year. State and local workers earn an average of $80,000, and federal workers earn a whopping $120,000 on average.
Unions also have clout at the national level. President Obama justified almost $1 trillion in “stimulus” spending in 2009 as a way to prop up the economy, but it also subsidized state and local government workers — the people whose union dues often end up financing the Democratic party. The General Motors bailout helped keep unionized members of the United Auto Workers union employed while retired Americans who held GM bonds were shorted. So, too, were thousands of auto-dealership workers who lost their jobs — they weren’t dues-paying union members so the Obama administration ignored their plight.
But there are signs that the voters are waking up to the hidden clout of labor unions. Wisconsin governor Scott Walker passed legislation that stops unions from automatically taking dues out of workers’ paychecks — they must now obtain written permission from each worker. In recent years, Michigan, Indiana, and Wisconsin have become right-to-work states. The number of right-to-work states could reach 26 as early as this week if West Virginia’s GOP legislature, as expected, overrides the veto of a right-to-work bill by its Democratic governor.
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Howard Dean was right that unions are the super PACS of the Democratic party and its candidates. They, in turn, are the recipients of almost all the union money in politics. Business money tends to be split between Democrats and Republicans (recall Donald Trump’s confessions about buying access on both sides of the aisle).
But while unions will play an outsize role in shaping who the Democratic presidential nominee will be this year, their influence on the national level could be waning. More and more people are recognizing the real role unions play in American life, which has more to do with being political paymasters than it does with representing workers.
— John Fund is NRO’s national-affairs reporter.