I think that your enjoyment of this NYT article would be enhanced if you do as I did, and imagined that the author of it pausing periodically to hyperventilate into a brown paper bag.
Democrats are laying the groundwork for an ambitious reorganization of their struggling network of “super PACs“ that would exploit the loopholes and legal gray areas that Republicans have already used to raise hundreds of millions of dollars for the 2016 campaign through such groups.
The plans, laid out by the party’s top election lawyers in an emergency request filed with the Federal Election Commission on Friday, would pave the way for the creation of a host of new super PACs tailored to individual House and Senate candidates.
Basically, the Democrats are trying to get past their own stupid rhetoric on campaign finance. Technically, the Democrats are inviting the FEC to handily declare that the GOP is breaking all sorts of laws, but I don’t think that anybody really expects that to happen. What will likely instead happen is that the FEC will either decline to make a ruling, or just deadlock (I doubt that the Democrats on the FEC commission will be inclined to give formal clearance to the GOP). Once either of those two things happen, the Democratic party will then be free to piously claim that they have no choice but to follow suit and do all those things that the wicked – the ever so wicked – Republicans are already doing.
If any of this is concerning you, you probably shouldn’t be. The brutal truth of it is that the United States of America, even after the last seven years, enjoys an absolutely unique combination of population, power, and wealth. There is a lot of money and power on the table when it comes to our electoral cycle. People will spend money to either protect their existing resources, or to put themselves in a position to access new resources. This is the nature of things.
So people are going to put money into elections. Republicans, Democrats, Greens, even the Libertarians. And that money is like a river: block it in one place, and it will find another way to keep flowing downstream. And anybody who tells you differently – well, some of those people might be your friends, and I’d hate to call any of your friends dupes or liars. It wouldn’t be nice.
Moe Lane
PS: I’m a full transparency kind of guy. Give as much as you want, but you don’t get to hide it. Unfortunately, in our current political climate that’s pretty much equivalent to a suicide pact for anybody that the Left dislikes, and I don’t counsel people to commit suicide.