Guest Commentary

As the 2016 presidential campaign has made clear, American politics has entered the era of the Super PAC. Most of the candidates for president have not only set up their own candidate campaigns but will also benefit from single-candidate Super PACs supporting them. Candidates for Congress and state offices are sure to follow their lead.

Super PACs represent a nearly complete unraveling of our campaign finance regulation system. They are allowed to accept contributions of any size from almost any type of donor and spend unlimited sums on behalf of a single candidate or many candidates. Super PACs can and do already support federal, state, and local candidates.

That is not to say that Super PACs are completely without any form of regulation. They are required to report all contributions they receive and expenditures they make and are not allowed to coordinate with a candidate’s campaign. This disclosure requirement, however, has limited value, as donors to Super PACs frequently include organizations that do not need to report information about their donors — so an original donor’s identity can still be kept secret.

Likewise, the ban on coordination has limited impact. The value of donating to Super PACs is that Super PACs can and do communicate with candidates about specific policies they want candidates to support.

With all of that in mind, there are a few reasons to hope we can find a way out of the era of Super PACs:

1. It cannot get much worse. American politicians have long relied on special interests to fund their campaigns, largely because Americans have been reluctant to provide that funding. Self-interested donors step forward to give money to candidates who pledge to support specific policies. Super PACs now provide these special interests a way to fund candidates with little restriction on the extent of their influence. Sometimes you have to hit rock bottom to understand you need to make a change. America may soon reach that point.

2. Several presidential candidates have called for reform. While not all candidates agree on the need for reform, candidates from both major parties have emphasized the need for reform. Discussion of the issue of special interest money corrupting politics has previously lacked the urgency and attention that it has received this year. If a pro-reform candidate wins next year’s election, they will have a clear mandate to enact reform.

3. Groups focused on money in politics have put forward a reform agenda that would do more than try to “get money out” of politics. Our political system has always relied on elections to make our politicians dependent on voters to stay in office. As the size of the electorate grows, so does the pressure for candidates to raise money to communicate with voters.

This fundraising pressure has grown so strong that donors have supplanted voters as the group that politicians now depend on most. Past attempts at campaign reform have largely relied on contribution limits to reduce the influence of money in politics.

Recent research from CleanSlateNow.org has found that, while contribution limits can reduce the amount of money going into politics, contribution limits do not cancel out the pressure of candidates needing to raise money to communicate with voters.

However, more than a dozen pro-democracy organizations have joined together to propose a reform agenda that can help our country reverse course, based on four key reforms:

1. Amplify the voices of everyday Americans through public financing that matches small contributions made to qualified candidates;

2. Require real-time disclosure of contributions and expenditures for all political spending;

3. Reverse recent court decisions, especially Citizens United, either through a constitutional amendment or the appointment of Supreme Court justices committed to restoring the ability to enact regulations on campaign finance to prevent corruptions; and

4. Enhance enforcement of campaign finance regulations by strengthening the Federal Election Commission and appointing an attorney general who will crack down on violations of the law.

Fundamentally, the path back to a representative democracy requires far more Americans to begin participating in at least a small way in the funding of campaigns, whether through public financing or their own individual donations. The old adage “You get what you pay for” applies to our political process. As little as one dollar a month from tens of millions of American can start the process of cleaning up our campaign funding system. Or we can rely on self-interested donors to fund campaigns election after election, and expect politicians to behave differently than they have in the past.

Mark Mehringer is executive director of CleanSlateNow.org, a Denver-based nonprofit working to educate the public about the corruption caused by special interest money.