US Congress: A Coin-Operated Stalemate Machine (and Whither AOC?)

Yves here. Tom Neuburger gives a hard look at AOC’s recent donations to corporate Democrats and tries to ferret out what she intended to accomplish.

Tom is at a loss to understand why AOC chose the party members she did. I am at a loss to understand why she thought $5,000 donations would have made any difference to the recipients even if they had been on board with taking funds from her. As I am sure readers know, there’s a dark art as to how heavyweight bundlers and donors work around formal contribution limits.

And on top of that, Congressional Democrats run a pay-to-play operation. Kicking in enough money to the DCCC is the cost of entry for getting House committee leadership positions. We explained this back in 2011, via the work of Tom Ferguson, in Congress is a “Coin Operated Stalemate Machine.” I strongly urge you to read the entire post. Key section:

A new article by Ferguson in the Washington Spectator sheds more light on this corrupt and defective system. Partisanship and deadlocks are a direct result of the increased power of a centralized funding apparatus. It’s easy to raise money for grandstanding on issues that appeal to well-heeled special interests, so dysfunctional behavior is reinforced.

Let’s first look at how crassly explicit the pricing is. Ferguson cites the work of Marian Currander on how it works for the Democrats in the House of Representatives:

Under the new rules for the 2008 election cycle, the DCCC [Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee] asked rank-and-file members to contribute $125,000 in dues and to raise an additional $75,000 for the party. Subcommittee chairpersons must contribute $150,000 in dues and raise an additional $100,000. Members who sit on the most powerful committees … must contribute $200,000 and raise an additional $250,000. Subcommittee chairs on power committees and committee chairs of non-power committees must contribute $250,000 and raise $250,000. The five chairs of the power committees must contribute $500,000 and raise an additional $1 million. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, Majority Whip James Clyburn, and Democratic Caucus Chair Rahm Emanuel must contribute $800,000 and raise $2.5 million. The four Democrats who serve as part of the extended leadership must contribute $450,000 and raise $500,000, and the nine Chief Deputy Whips must contribute $300,000 and raise $500,000. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi must contribute a staggering $800,000 and raise an additional $25 million.

Ferguson teases out the implications:

Uniquely among legislatures in the developed world, our Congressional parties now post prices for key slots on committees. You want it — you buy it, runs the challenge. They even sell on the installment plan: You want to chair an important committee? That’ll be $200,000 down and the same amount later, through fundraising…..

The whole adds up to something far more sinister than the parts. Big interest groups (think finance or oil or utilities or health care) can control the membership of the committees that write the legislation that regulates them. Outside investors and interest groups also become decisive in resolving leadership struggles within the parties in Congress. You want your man or woman in the leadership? Just send money. Lots of it….

The Congressional party leadership controls the swelling coffers of the national campaign committees, and the huge fixed investments in polling, research, and media capabilities that these committees maintain — resources the leaders use to bribe, cajole, or threaten candidates to toe the party line… Candidates rely on the national campaign committees not only for money, but for message, consultants, and polling they need to be competitive but can rarely afford on their own..

This concentration of power also allows party leaders to shift tactics to serve their own ends….They push hot-button legislative issues that have no chance of passage, just to win plaudits and money from donor blocs and special-interest supporters. When they are in the minority, they obstruct legislation, playing to the gallery and hoping to make an impression in the media…

The system …ensures that national party campaigns rest heavily on slogan-filled, fabulously expensive lowest-common-denominator appeals to collections of affluent special interests. The Congress of our New Gilded Age is far from the best Congress money can buy; it may well be the worst. It is a coin-operated stalemate machine that is now so dysfunctional that it threatens the good name of representative democracy itself.

If that isn’t sobering enough, a discussion after the Ferguson article describes the mind-numbing amount of money raised by the members of the deficit-cutting super committee. In addition, immediately after being named to the committee, several members launched fundraising efforts that were unabashed bribe-seeking. But since the elites in this country keep themselves considerable removed from ordinary people, and what used to be considered corruption in their cohort is now business as usual, nary an ugly word is said about these destructive practices.

So as much as AOC has seemed disappointing of late, the overwhelming majority of voters have no clue as to what she is up against.

by Yves Smith and Thomas Neuberger, Naked Capitalism |  Read more:

Image: Seth Wenig/AP Photo via Politico

[ed. A bit of inside baseball here for political junkies. Apparently AOC gave $5000 to various Democratic members of Congress to help with their campaigns, a few of them DINOs (Dems in name only), who see any association with her as radioactive in their conservative-leaning districts. So they've decided to reject or return the funds. The question is: why did AOC do this (and with such meager amounts)? Is she gravitating toward the middle, and becoming more of an establishment player? Trying to mend fences? Or, as one commenter suggested, playing "eleventy-dimensional chess" and using the money to shine a light on people who've never been exposed in this way to this kind of scrutiny before? Who knows? But as this post indicates, funding is a sensitive and intricate process. By the way, the numbers above are for Democrats. I'd bet the one's for Republicans are equally as stunning, if not significantly worse (I'm not going to check). Also, this is from 2011. Citizens United undoubtedly made the process (and money involved) even more obscene.]