I have been a reader and commenter here for literally years, but I have never written a diary before, not thinking I had something unique to add. But what's going on in my Congressional district, as well as my experience running for office in NY, has prompted me to try to bring something to your attention. (Please be kind.)
About a month ago, Kos wrote a front page entry entitled "Crazy Jack Davis and the woes of the millionaire." In it he, described how 2-time loser Jack Davis, who ran against Tom Reynolds twice for the NY26th Congressional seat, was taking his lawsuit against the "Millionaire's Amendment" section of BCRA (otherwise known as McCain-Feingold) all the way to the Supreme Court. Talk about bad optics: here was a supposed Democrat arguing that it should be easier for wealthy quacks like him to buy a seat in the people's House.
The Supreme Court heard the case a week ago and the tea leaf readers in the press suggest that the oral arguments indicate Davis is probably going to win. That's bad enough, but now it appears the case contains a Trojan Horse which could end up invalidating the public financing systems of states like Maine and Arizona which have adopted them with great success.
According to the Brennan's Center's Laura MacCleery's piece in The Nation, the sticking point in Davis's case could be the "triggering" provision of the Millionaire's amendment that provides opponents of self-financing candidates the ability to raise larger donations than usually permitted, if the self-financier puts more than a certain amount into his or her own campaign. This is a potentially devastating issue, as Clean Money Clean Election states depend on a similar trigger provision to make their publicly financed systems viable.
Laura MacCleery explains that no one would participate in a publicly financed campaign if it meant unilateral disarmament.
As the Brennan Center for Justice and our allies pointed out in an amicus brief, in upholding the law a federal three-judge panel drew upon the provision's similarity to "trigger provisions" used in systems of public funding for elections in several states. These provide participating, publicly funded candidates with more money to match either the spending of a non-participating opponent or hostile independent spending, up to a pre-set threshold. Matching funds are critical to ensuring that the voluntary spending limits on which public funding is conditioned do not make participating candidates into sitting ducks in the face of massive outspending by their opposition.
At least one amicus brief filed with the Court takes clear aim at such measures. It is possible that a few of the more conservative Justices may craft a decision that knowingly or unknowingly imperils this innovative approach. If they do so, they will threaten public funding as a strategy for reducing politicians' over-reliance on wealthy corporate special interests.
The fact that this is happening because of someone in my district who calls himself a Democrat really kills me. That's quite a Democratic two-fer, isn't it? Make it easier to buy a seat and kill public financing -- two birds with one stone. But this is also personal to me. I ran for Assembly last cycle against a well-entrenched dead-wood Republican incumbent and got clobbered. Part of the reason was that my district has been reflexively voting for Republicans since before Lincoln (NY26 is upstate, western NY, worlds from NYC). But another very important reason is that incumbents have a huge money advantage in NY state races; they are so seldom defeated that hardly anyone gives money to challengers. In fact, I won over a local professional association board, and they agreed to give me $500, which would have been significant to my shoestring campaign. But the check never came, and it turned out that their state board prohibited their locals from giving designated political funds to non-incumbents. That's a microcosm of the entire system of NY politics.
Everyone, no matter where they might be from, knows Albany is a morass that is in desperate need of reform. Public financing (which the current governor is behind) is the only solution out there to cleaning up this mess, and NY's own Jack Davis might end up kill this promising solution in the cradle.
What makes it all the more maddening is that Jack Davis now wants to spend his millions to defeat a true people-powered, Netroots-supported candidate, Iraq War veteran Jon Powers. I have been volunteering for Jon for almost a year now, as he has put together a true grassroots campaign for Congress that has gotten the backing of people on the ground and across the nation, like John Kerry. Davis is insisting he will take this to a September primary and is confident his money will buy him a victory.
And Jack Davis isn't even a real Democrat. As others pointed out in comments on the Kos front-page piece, he only became a Democrat after being dissed in 2004 by Dick Cheney and Tom Reynolds, who didn't want to listen to his anti-free-trade tirades (trade, while an important issue, is really the only thing he campaigns on). In fact, Davis is such a nominal Democrat that he went before one of the county Democratic committees in this district earlier in the year and told them he wanted to go to Washington so he could help fight Nancy Pelosi!
So my congressional district, which has the best chance it has ever had of sending a good representative (Jon Powers) to Washington, may instead end up going to a DINO who killed public campaign financing. This district has been "represented" by Tom Reynolds, Bill Paxon, and Jack Kemp, wingnuts who have all cared more about the fortunes of the Republican Party than the fortunes of the people of this district. Don't we deserve better? If you can, please send some support to Jon Powers, the real Democrat running for Congress in NY26.