Nation on the take.

• Author: Fischer, Raymond L.
• Position: Political Landscape - Political fundraising

A senior analyst for the Center for Public Integrity and a former senior Washington correspondent for Scripps Howard newspapers, Wendell Potter authored Deadly Sin: An Insurance Company Insider Speaks Out on How Corporate PR Is Killing Health Care and Deceiving Americans, which won the 2011 Ridenhour Book Prize. Nick Penniman, meanwhile, is cofounder and director of the Huffington Post Investigative Fund, founder of the American News Project, publisher of Washington Monthly magazine, and executive director of Issue One. Motivated by their concern that our 240year-old self-governing republic has succumbed to a "coin-operated system" that favors players who can "pay to play," the authors wrote Nation on the Take: How Big Money Corrupts Our Democracy and What We Can Do About It to explain and expose the trickle-down effect of "hijacking policy and politics," and to suggest ways to reclaim self-government untainted by lobbyists and "big money" corruption.

Corporate funding of political campaigns dates from 1896, when Sen. Marcus Hanna (R.-Ohio) "bankrolled" William McKinley's campaign from personal funds and contributions from big banks and trusts eager to influence government policies favoring their interests. Big business responded to Hanna's appeal with $96,000,000 (in current dollars), including $6,900,000 from Standard Oil. The campaign began a pattern on increasing expenditures that now define American elections. Inevitably, questions about the impact of money on politics and elections have produced presidential and congressional concern about wealthy individuals and corporations that coopt the political system and threaten democracy.

Pres. Theodore Roosevelt took up campaign finance reform as a means of "fighting monopolistic corporations" and, in 1907, signed the Tillman Act, the first campaign finance law. Subsequent legislation made repeated attempts to regulate campaign finance until 1976, when the Supreme Court handed down the first of three landmark decisions. First, the Court ruled limiting individual campaign spending violated the right to free speech (Buckley v. Valeo). In 2010, the Court ruled 5-4 that the efforts of corporations and unions to provide monetary support for or against political candidates should be protected as free speech under the First Amendment (Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission). In writing the dissent for the quartet of liberals on the bench, Justice John Paul Stevens asserted, "The decision...