The Supreme Court’s shocking decision today that Americans have the right to dispose of their own property as they see fit, including in furtherance of First Amendment-protected political activism, has the Democrats putting on a angsty performance that looks like a Wagner opera as performed by the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College class of ’81. “Big money,” they wail, is ruining our democracy.
So who exactly is behind that “big money”? Bunch of rich Republicans and the Koch brothers, right?
Nope.
Of the 20 largest current overall political donors, the majority favor Democrats, and favor them strongly: 62 percent of the biggest donors’s money goes to Democrats. They are, in descending order: a couple of hedge-fund guys who give 100 percent of their donations (more than $11 million) to Democrats, people associated with the city government of New York (84 percent to Democrats), the Democratic Governors Association, the National Education Association (89 percent to Democrats) the Carpenters and Joiners Union (79 percent to Democrats), the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal employees (100 percent to Democrats), the AFL-CIO (81 percent to Democrats), and—our first GOP-leaning group comes in at No. 8—the National Association of Realtors (53 percent to Republicans), the electrical workers unions (97 percent to Democrats), AT&T (62 percent to Republicans), Lockheed Martin (61 percent to Republicans — you’ll notice a trend in the pro-GOP groups), Comcast (58 percent to Democrats), the engineers union (79 percent to Democrats), Northrop (57 percent to Republicans), the American Association for Justice (i.e., lawyers, 96 percent to Democrats), Honeywell (58 percent to Republicans), Boeing (57 percent to Republicans), Votesane PAC (70 percent to Republicans), Every Republican Is Crucial PAC (100 percent to Republicans), and the laborers’ union (90 percent to Democrats).
Big money in politics isn’t two libertarian billionaires in Kansas — it’s teachers and real-estate agents, union goons of various denominations, and a sprinkling of military contractors. And it is heavily pro-Democratic.