Super PACs are destroying America

Hillary Clinton and the Super Trough

By THE EDITORIAL New York Times

Just weeks after her ringing call to “get unaccountable money” out of politics, Hillary Rodham Clinton is reversing course and joining the “super PAC” sweepstakes for unlimited donations from big check writers.

The clash between words and actions is defended by her supporters as being unavoidable in the cut-and-thrust of politics. Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign is increasingly nervous because Jeb Bush, the Republican front-runner in the race for big money, has been openly bagging super PAC millions for weeks.

Until now, Mrs. Clinton hesitated to fully embrace this new open-ended funding vehicle. Super PACs are an outgrowth of court decisions allowing unlimited corporate and union donations. These supposedly independent groups have bolstered candidates and, unfortunately, grown ever closer to operating like campaign managers for their candidates.

Mrs. Clinton is ready to court super donors, according to a report in The Times, with the aim of raising hundreds of millions through Priorities USA Action, a super PAC in which some of her longtime campaign advisers will take leadership positions. President Obama benefited from super PAC money in his re-election, but Mrs. Clinton would be going a step further by appearing at the super PAC’s fund-raisers, where big donors seek insider status.

To complaints of hypocrisy, strategists say Mrs. Clinton cannot afford to “unilaterally disarm” while Republican rivals like Mr. Bush skirt donation limits by shifting campaign operations to freewheeling super PACs and conservatives like the Koch brothers pledge $1 billion for the 2016 campaign.

Her campaign people insist that Mrs. Clinton can stand for reform even as she steps up to the super PAC trough. She will certainly have to explain this duality on the campaign trail. Sweeping campaign reforms have been promised by previous Democratic candidates, including Mr. Obama and Bill Clinton, only to fade from sight in the White House.

In the meantime, Mrs. Clinton should endorse the Empower Act, a proposal in Congress that would repair and update the presidential public financing system that served the nation well for a generation after the corruption of Watergate. She and both parties’ candidates should address the risks posed to the democratic process by the rise of super PACs — which, far from being independent of campaigns, are taking on a campaign’s central functions, in violation of federal election law.

There appears to be nothing to stop the phenomenon from taking over the electoral process, least of all the Federal Election Commission, whose Democratic chairwoman, Ann Ravel, has pronounced the commission “worse than dysfunctional” because of partisan standoffs. A Republican commissioner, Lee Goodman, put it another way: “Congress set this place up to gridlock.