Last night I was on the Colbert Report, in a segment based on an interview taped last month. Also previously taped for the show was Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics. As I think I’ve mentioned before, it was undoubtedly one of the more unusual experiences I’ve ever had, and likely Sheila would agree.
Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c Colbert Super PAC – Campaign Finance
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A couple of points worth making about my appearance, and Colbert SuperPAC (technically, Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow):
- I was initially a little nervous about what would finally air – the interview was taped in mid-June, and given that much time it was easy to imagine them doing all sorts of editing and twisting of quotes to make me look more than a little foolish. But I’ve no complaints about the editing – the part where I looked a little foolish wasn’t due to editing, it was me. Sigh.
- On that pesky First Amendent – that came about half an hour into the interview, after a lot of very aggressive and – odd, let’s say – questioning by Mr. Colbert. What can I say – I got flustered for about 30 seconds, and my mind went blank.
- The bit about what are acceptable PAC expenses was pretty funny. It was edited a bit, but that was pretty much how the exchange went, concluding with a discussion of, if I remember correctly, an elephant who has slept with a politician and is on the payroll of the SuperPAC to write about it (this was a fairly typical line of questioning for the interview, btw). As I said, as long as he could show a reasonable connection to the purpose of his SuperPAC (to “destroy” his opponent, I believe he said), then pretty much anything is an allowable expenditure. It’s not difficult to imagine a private jet being used by a SuperPAC to fly their celebrity leader around to speaking engagements (although chartering, renting, or leasing are more likely to pass muster than buying, I’d expect), and a jet ski as for example a prop at a “buy American” rally or as part of an event tied to watersports doesn’t seem terribly out of bounds either (again, probably better to rent/lease than buy).
- As most ‘reformers’ have done in the wake of Citizens United, Mr. Colbert focused almost exclusively on corporate money in politics, as though there is something unique and distinguishable from union or individual money. At one point I’m asked whether there’s anything particularly corrupting about corporate money, and the obvious answer is no – there’s no reason to believe that money from corporations are is any more or less corrupting than money from unions or individuals. They both spend the same, after all. Also worth noting is that there is very little academic evidence that contributions from any source, whether corporate, union, or individual, have much influence in how politicians behave in office.
- Not included in the taped segment was an exchange early on regarding political scandals involving corporate money. Mr. Colbert asked me if I was aware of any, and I told him I wasn’t, at least not offhand. He seemed a little incredulous, which perplexed me at first. Thinking about the most recent political scandals, there’s not much evidence of corruption caused by corporate money spent on campaign contributions or other political expenditures. Randy “Duke” Cunningham, William Jefferson, Jack Abramoff, Eric Massa, Elliot Spitzer, Anthony Weiner, Mark Foley, even stretching back to AbScam and AZScam, the past few decades of corruption and scandal in our political system has little to do with campaign money and even less to do with corporate money. But if someone believes, as most ‘reformers’ do (and Mr. Colbert is a ‘reformer,’ whatever the persona he adopts for his show) that money in politics is by definition corrupting, and corporate money is especially so, it’s not difficult to imagine why he simply assumed the existence of significant corruption related to corporate political money.
- In his intro to the piece, Colbert claims that the FEC “made it legal” for him to accept unlimited contributions and talk about it on his show. This isn’t quite accurate, however – there was never any doubt that he could form his PAC and discuss it on his show, the only question was what, if anything, would have to be reported to the Federal Election Commission in terms of any in-kind contribution from Viacom (the company that owns, produces, and distributes his show).
- Further into his intro, he introduces CCP as a group that supports unlimited and “untrackable” money in politics. The unlimited part is correct, but not real sure where he got the “untrackable” idea from – as we’ve stated many times, disclosure of large contributions to candidates, PACs, and political parties has some modest benefit in terms of dissuading corruption. What we’ve also stated many times is that groups that don’t have political campaign speech as their major purpose shouldn’t have to disclose donors who haven’t necessarily given to support whatever minor amount of campaign speech they do engage in.
I’ve done a brief video on CCP’s YouTube channel with more thoughts on both my appearance on the Colbert Report and the SuperPAC in general, you can check it out here:
Finally, the beer was great, thank you Stephen!
