Not Everyone Cheers When The Playing Field Is Leveled

Michael Graham posted an article in the Boston Herald today about the recent Supreme Court decision on campaign donations.

Michael Graham explains why the decision is important to Massachusetts:

The U.S. Supreme Court’s campaign-finance ruling is the first ray of sunshine to reach the Massachusetts Republican party in a long time.

To understand why, you need to know three simple facts about who pays for campaigns, facts that are almost never reported in the mainstream media:

• Six of the top 10 campaign donors are unions. And their money overwhelmingly goes to Democrats. Incumbent Democrats in particular.

• Sixteen of the top 25 campaign funders are liberal, Democratic organizations like ActBlue ($97 million in campaign cash since 1989), which also give disproportionately to incumbents. Only three of the top 25 are Republican.

• None of them are the Koch Brothers. (They rank 57th.)

If you haven’t figured it out, the purpose of campaign finance restrictions is to protect incumbent politicians. This shouldn’t be a surprise given that these laws were passed by … incumbent politicians.

And in Massachusetts, “incumbent” is a synonym for “Democrat.” (When it comes to federal office-holders here, that is literally true.) So any change that makes life more difficult for incumbents is good news for the local GOP.

Union money has bought and sold elections in Massachusetts and some other states for a very long time. This ruling levels the playing field and lets other people with money play. That is why the Democrat party is making such a big deal about it.

The unintended consequence of this ruling may be that being able to be in public office long enough to go from being broke to multi millionaire may no longer be possible. It may be that being in public office may no longer be a career. Keep in mind that our founding fathers envisioned a government made up of ordinary citizens. Unfortunately we have forgotten that concept and created career politicians.

Not everyone loves it when you level the playing field.

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