This weekend, the Trump campaign officially announced their selection of a vice-presidential nominee with an unbroken record of commitment to letting billionaires and corporate special interests dominate our politics with their big money. Even Donald Trump criticized Super PACs when it was convenient, before reversing his stance to chase Sheldon Adelson’s millions. But Mike Pence is a longtime foe of reform who holds the extreme belief that it has put American politics “on the road to serfdom.”
It’s no surprise that Pence is closely tied to some of the most pernicious special interests in America today. Politico reports that “a number of Pence’s former staffers from his days in Congress have assumed major roles in the [Koch] brothers’ corporate and political spheres.” David Koch even contributed $200,000 to Pence’s gubernatorial campaign.
Pence’s ties to the big-money agenda go back a decade – but his problems with accountability go back even further. Pence has always had trouble living up to the high standards we expect of our elected representatives. During his 1990 congressional campaign, a Los Angeles Times investigation revealed that he was paying himself out of his campaign funds. The Washington Post reports that these payments included groceries, his mortgage, his credit card bill, his wife’s car payment, and his golf tournament fees. It must be convenient to shoot 18 holes on the donors’ dime! Of course, most Americans never have this opportunity – but that didn’t matter to Mike Pence.
Pence lined his pockets but lost the race, and ultimately didn’t make it to Washington until 2000. He claimed to support reform during that campaign. In Congress, he first took the position that he opposed the McCain-Feingold bipartisan reform effort but supported full disclosure. Shortly afterward, he hypocritically voted for a bill that would have decreased disclosure for 527 groups (These groups were frequently misused and abused in the early 2000s for the same purposes which Super PACs are used for today). But that was still far from the worst of his anti-reform efforts.
After the 2000 election, Sen. John McCain asked Pence “to fulfill the campaign promise [of supporting reform] that you and I made together.” However, when the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (also known as McCain-Feingold) came to the House floor, Pence voted against it. He later accused McCain of ‘sleeping with the enemy’ by cooperating with Democrats – a bizarre accusation to level against a decorated war hero and former POW. Pence instead chose to climb into bed with Sen. Mitch McConnell by joining his lawsuit against McCain-Feingold – a suit that the Supreme Court rejected. When the Court struck down the suit, Pence compared the result to the infamous Dred Scott case of 1857, which held that African-Americans could never be American citizens.
Pence consistently opposed other reform measures throughout the rest of his congressional tenure, such as the bipartisan 527 Reform Act of 2006. He also sponsored a bill to roll back parts of McCain-Feingold that would have vastly expanded contribution limits. The New York Times called the bill an example of “congressional spinelessness… that would gut existing controls, some of them dating back to the Watergate scandal, on huge donations.” In 2007, Pence even attached a rider to a Department of Justice appropriation that would have forbidden the Department from spending money to enforce some of the McCain-Feingold restrictions on outside spending. Not only did Pence want to roll back key reforms, but he was willing to play legislative games with crucial bills to make it happen.
When the Citizens United decision was announced in 2010, Pence claimed that “freedom won.” During his next race, a 2012 campaign for the Indiana governor’s mansion, ‘freedom’ for Mike Pence and his big money pals meant finding a $1 million “way around state laws limiting corporate contributions to candidates” via an anonymous pass-through. After two decades of trying to create bigger loopholes in the law, Citizens United and similar decisions gave Pence and his special interest supporters all the ammunition they needed. Pence doesn’t have to pay himself out of campaign funds anymore – not when his billionaire backers can handle all of his political needs.
Today, Pence has come full circle. After using campaign cash to cover his NRA membership and his membership of an elite Republican club in DC, he’s leaving Indiana to join the ticket of a pro-big money narcissist. Not only do the Koch brothers have $750 million to spend this election year, but they now have an “ideologically aligned” politician ready to ascend to the second-highest office in the land. Americans must reject the Republican ticket’s marriage of a prejudiced hypocrite and a big money stooge.