President Barack Obama may have raged against the Supreme Court?s campaign finance game-changing decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, but he?s no hypocrite for now benefiting from it, former congressman and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Martin Frost says.
?If you?re a candidate ? I don?t care whether you?re running for president or running for Congress or running for some other office ? you live under the laws that are in place at the time, and so I don?t see any problem with the president benefiting from these outside groups after saying he disagreed with what the Supreme Court did,? Frost said during the final installment of POLITICO?s weeklong video series about money?s influence on politics.
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That doesn?t mean the nation?s campaign finance system, in which outside political organizations may now raise and spend unlimited amounts of money for or against political candidates, isn?t fundamentally broken, noted Frost, who represented the Dallas-Fort Worth area in Congress between 1979 and 2005 and is now a practicing attorney.
Such a situation is ?extreme,? Frost said, particularly since many political groups don?t have to disclose their donors and may spend their cash until Election Day.
?It is the worst possible result,? he said.
How to change it, Frost said, is a constitutional amendment ? something that?s incredibly difficult to achieve.
?The courts have taken the position that money equals speech. This is a free-speech issue, and so you can?t limit what corporations spend, you can?t limit what individuals spend, and so we?re stuck with this very terrible system, quite frankly,? he said. ?We did try and amend the Constitution when I was in Congress, and what you have to do is to provide that constitutional amendment that would give the authority to Congress to enact legislation putting spending limits on all kinds of groups and individuals. Only about three or four of us voted for it. Nobody wanted to be for that.?
As a result of this new campaign finance landscape, are political party committees destined to become marginalized?
?Political parties to a degree have,? Frost said. ?The parties run some of these issue ads attacking the opponent or supporting the candidate, but a lot more money will be spent outside the party structure on both sides. And it?s a direct result of some reformers thinking that they could fix the system and disregarding the fact that the U.S. Supreme Court was on the other side.?
Since Frost?s time in Congress, the act of fundraising itself has certainly changed, he said. Most notably: the amount of time lawmakers spend doing it.
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