Balancing The Money In Political Campaigns

Unfortunately, political campaigns in America have an awful lot to do with money. The Citizen’s United case in the Supreme Court balanced out the money to some extent, but an unbelievable amount of money still goes directly from union dues to Democrat campaign coffers.
John Hinderaker at Power Line posted an article today about some changes that may be coming to the political landscape because of legal challenges to the role of unions. The article includes the following chart from Open Secrets:

The chart shows the overwhelming disparity between union contributions to Democrat campaigns versus Republican campaigns. Some recent events in Wisconsin may be the beginning steps toward leveling the playing field.

A website called Right Wisconsin explains:

Now that Wisconsin’s educators have been given the right to choose whether or not to belong to a labor union, the unions are struggling to attract enough members to stay afloat. Proving all along that the union leaders didn’t really represent their members, as much as sponge off of them.

Under a provision of Act 10, public employee unions are required to file for annual re-certification by August 30 if they wish to remain a recognized bargaining unit. Thursday Afternoon, Mark Belling broke the news that only 37 percent of the teachers in the Kenosha Unified School District voted to reauthorize the union in a recent vote.
 
Now, given Brey’s (Christina Brey, speaking for the Wisconsin Education Association Council) comments in the Journal Sentinel, Kenosha is a trend setter, not an outlier.

So what does this mean? Most of Wisconsin’s public employee unions have lost between 30% and 60% of their members in the past two years. Obviously this seriously limits the amount of money they will be donating to political campaigns.

The article at Power Line reports:

The time has come, I think, to end the preferential treatment under which unions have long operated. Under the law, unions get a special deal: Section 7 of the Clayton Act exempts them from the antitrust laws. Absent that exemption, labor unions would be subject to the Sherman Act’s ban on combinations or conspiracies in restraint of trade. Repealing Section 7 would have one of two consequences: either unions would be deemed illegal per se as price-fixing conspiracies, or they would be subject to the Sherman Act’s Rule of Reason, under which they would have to prove that their net effect is pro-competitive rather than anti-competitive. Either way, unions would be fighting for their lives and would be in no position to dominate the political landscape.

Let’s truly level the playing field.