Charles Krauthammer writes today that he used to think there was a simple and elegant solution to the fight over campaign finance reform: “For a long time, a simple finesse offered a rather elegant solution: no limits on giving — but with full disclosure.” But now he’s changed his mind:
This used to be my position. No longer. I had not foreseen how donor lists would be used not to ferret out corruption but to pursue and persecute citizens with contrary views. Which corrupts the very idea of full disclosure.
It is now an invitation to the creation of enemies lists. Containing, for example, Brendan Eich, forced to resign as Mozilla CEO when it was disclosed that six years earlier he’d given $1,000 to support a referendum banning gay marriage. He was hardly the first. Activists compiled blacklists of donors to Proposition 8 and went after them. Indeed, shortly after the referendum passed, both the artistic director of the California Musical Theatre in Sacramento and the president of the Los Angeles Film Festival were hounded out of office.
….The ultimate victim here is full disclosure itself. If revealing your views opens you to the politics of personal destruction, then transparency, however valuable, must give way to the ultimate core political good, free expression.
Our collective loss. Coupling unlimited donations and full disclosure was a reasonable way to reconcile the irreconcilables of campaign finance. Like so much else in our politics, however, it has been ruined by zealots. What a pity.
I wonder if Krauthammer feels the same way about free speech? Or gun rights. Or fair trials. The scope of zealots to abuse the system in those cases is infinitely greater than the sparse, weak-tea “harassment” he points to in the case of campaign finance disclosure.
On a larger scale, I realize that the Koch brothers think they’ve suffered abuse akin to the Holocaust at the hands of Harry Reid, but that’s what happens when you enter the political arena in a big way. You take your lumps. That’s no reason to allow billions of dollars to influence the political system with not even the slightest shred of accountability for where it’s coming from. With allies as weak as Krauthammer, ready to cave at the slightest provocation, campaign finance disclosure is now just the latest victim of conservative goal post moving.
