Joe Scott: Easton Coach Company has 700 employees in 14 locations throughout Eastern Pennsylvania and New Jersey. 80 some percent of our revenue comes from contracts with transportation authorities and municipalities.
At the end of the day if I squeeze out two or 3% at the bottom, I'm doing great. Much more than any other cost of my financial statement, I worry about health insurance because of its unpredictability. We just can't deal with double-digit increases every year and survive.
Richard Master: Over the last 10-year period, healthcare costs have grown radically. It's over two million dollars for 150 people on our plan. We've seen seriously ill people costing our plan for $500,000 each.
Joe Scott: A driver for us was diagnosed with a condition that is going to cost me at least $200,000 this year. It could cost me that for several years. There's no surgery. It's all drug treatments. They aren't rare conditions the things that people who work for me are going to get.
Richard Master: We've got 4% of the world's population and we're paying 40% of the world's drug bills. We're paying twice as much on average for these drugs, and that makes it a tremendous challenge to keep productive jobs in the United States. Every other country in the world negotiates drug prices. You see the Congress passing a law that Medicare cannot negotiate price. They have to pay for almost every drug and at the price that the manufacturer establishes. They got it with hundreds of thousands of dollars of lobbying expenditure per member of Congress over a period of years. This is not the democracy we grew up with. It's the big-money agenda.
Brian Klepper: Every law and rule is scrutinized by lobbyists, and that ensures that in combination with the contributions that every law and rule is spun to the advantage of the special interest, which means that almost nothing is ever advanced in the common interest, which fundamentally undermines the Republic.
Richard Master: Big money fights against anything that limits or reduces their profit.
Tim Roemer: It costs all of us as taxpayers; costs us dearly. We all pay the price.
Speaker 5: Three ODs arrive by ambulance in the hour or so we were there. Two more the next day.
Speaker 6: It's not even 10:30 in the morning in Huntington, West Virginia, and it's happened again. Another overdose.
Richard Master: A particularly ugly recent example of big money lobbying against the common good is the opioid crisis.
Speaker 7: This is where I now come to see my son.
Speaker 8: It's just it's so big. It's so out of control.
Richard Master: Thousands of Americans are dying every year in a massive epidemic of opioid addiction fueled by the pharmacy industry and the major corporate distributors who work with them.
Lisa S. Wolff: The DEA did the best they could and they were prosecuting a lot of people and they were prosecuting these pill mills and these doctors who were just setting up shop to sell opioids, but then there were things that went on with lobbying Congress for laws that basically tied the hands of the DEA.
Tina Ralls: James died in 2014 in August. At the time, he was struggling with addiction and I was a member of a parent support group. I believe we've now lost 22 children from one small support group and we are losing 58,000 people in this country to overdose every year. Of those people who die of a heroin overdose, 80% of them became addicted first to prescription painkillers.
Holly Lozinak: I didn't really think I had to talk to my son about drugs that were prescribed by a doctor. Jake was an awesome kid. When he walked into the room, his eyes just sparkled when he smiled and he was always laughing and happy. He was going to college. He had a job. He had lots of friends. He had a bright future ahead of him.
David Levine: One small town in West Virginia of 390 some people got shipments of nine million opioid pills over the course of a few years. The DEA whistle-blowers we talked to said that happened again and again and again.
Richard Master: With over $100,000,000 in lobbying money and millions in campaign contributions, pharma was able to pass a law that severely restricted enforcement.
Joe Rannazzisi: Why are these people sponsoring bills when people in their backyards are dying from drugs that are coming from the same people that these bills are protecting?
Tina Ralls: I don't know how any politician voted to gut the enforcement of the regulations around opioids. It's reprehensible.
Richard Master: Congress's restriction on the DEA's ability to do strict opioid enforcement is just one tragic example of the damage done by the big-money agenda. Just as big pharma manipulated Congress to protect their distribution of dangerous opioids, pharma has also made sure that Congress protects its ability to impose higher and higher pricing on the medicines that people need. Prices for branded drugs are generally twice what is paid in other countries. Out-of-control pharma prices cost us all in higher insurance premiums, higher taxes and flat wages.
Nick Penniman: Pharmaceutical companies have been able to protect a very profitable status quo because of their ability to spend so much money to influence elections and legislation.
Richard Master: Big pharma alone spent two and a half billion dollars in the last 10 years lobbying Congress. It cost our citizens billions of excess dollars and forces millions of our citizens to avoid taking the drugs that they need. Big money fights against reform across a wide range of issues.
David Levine: The influence of these different sectors from pharma to the fossil fuel industry to the chemical industry and the like are exerting tremendous influence on the politics here in America through the influence of their monies being poured into elections and lobbying, but we also see them pouring money into the US Chamber of Commerce, and that's really working at the detriment of many other businesses across the country.
Richard Master: The US Chamber of Commerce does not represent small and medium-sized businesses like my business.
Wendell Potter: The US Chamber of Commerce is a reliable ally for big business, for the pharmaceutical industry, for the insurance industry, for any industry able and willing to write a big check to the US Chamber. With that big check, they can get the assurance from the Chamber that they will lobby on the industry's behalf.
John Pudner: I'd run political campaigns for 20 years. I have told people local Republican meetings for two decades that the US Chamber is not your friend. The Chamber and big business are the friend of whoever just won. The small business has no chance, and that's the aha moment for a lot of conservatives and they realize, oh that's right. Your entrepreneurs are your conservative base.
Richard Master: The small and mid-size business community is the foundation of the American economy.
Joe Scott: We serve an important role. We employ people. Well, I put food on the table of 700 households. Their wellbeing is in our hands. I think that should get me some influence, but the truth is it doesn't. How do we fight against these people that are putting hundreds of millions of dollars up against us?
Nick Penniman: Forces within the economy continue to exist and profit because they're able to write the rules and rig the game, and that's not capitalism. That's a 100% cronyism.
Richard Master: Cronyism is when big money people fix the rules of the game. As a business person, I'm offended by cronyism. I want a level playing field.
Tim Roemer: What we typically see in crony capitalism is a situation which very large corporate interest or special interests are able to keep small businesses from getting into the marketplace.
Richard Master: Whenever a patent period for a significant branded drug comes due, the company will go to its allies in Congress. They will do everything behind the scenes to prevent generics from coming in and lowering our prices. That's cronyism in action.
Nick Penniman: Whenever a piece of legislation comes before Congress that would have a broad positive effect on the common good, it either gets derailed or gutted.
Robert Weissman: Things that the American public want just aren't considered seriously. There may not be any better example than the debate over healthcare that led to the passage of the Affordable Care Act.
Barack Obama: We are done.
Wendell Potter: During the debate over what became the Affordable Care Act, more than 4,500 lobbyists swarmed the Capitol. That's eight lobbyists for every member of Congress. 1.2 billion dollars was spent overall.
Richard Master: Pharma alone spent $266 million to make sure that the Affordable Care Act would not include any controls on drug prices. The return on investment to influence Congress whether by lobbying, campaign funding or PR ads is immense. The Sunlight Foundation did a several year study to track the payoff on lobbying and campaign finance investment. They found that while big pharma spent tens of millions of dollars lobbying to prevent Medicare from negotiating drug prices, it got pharma tens of billions of dollars in profits in return. Across the board, lobbying investments pay off in massive profits or massive tax cuts, while working people and small businesses pay the price.
Lawrence Lessig: The current political system denies citizens equal representation inside of a representative government.
Tim Roemer: Our democracy is at stake with this issue; what our Founding Fathers had in mind about the principles and the integrity of our system.
Trevor Potter: The founders in creating a new country rebelling against Britain were rebelling against what they thought of as a fundamentally corrupt system. The reason it was corrupt is that you had a aristocracy of wealth and power, which was able to buy government action and control government.
Nick Penniman: The country was founded basically out of a concept of the common good. What the founders were most concerned about was the distortion of governing by the special interests.
Wendell Potter: The founders' ideal of the common good essentially broke down.
Reporter: Theodore Roosevelt returned from—
Wendell Potter: From the time of the founders to Teddy Roosevelt's presidency, powerful money gradually took over and corrupted the system and the will the people was disregarded. We had reached a tipping point of monopolies and corruption, so it was clear that something had to be done.
Nick Penniman: When Teddy Roosevelt came into office, he knew that he had to take on the big monopolies, the major corporate power, but he knew he would first have to take on their political power, which meant taking on campaign finance reform because those corporations were making contributions directly to members of Congress and he knew that to be able to get antitrust laws passed through Congress, he would first have to break the link between the corporations in Congress, which meant breaking the link between their money and the candidates campaigns. So one of his first acts was to pass the Tillman Act in 1907, which banned corporate contributions to political campaigns.
Wendell Potter: The history of the US is a history of the ebb and flow of corruption and money that infiltrates our system, leading up to the 1970s when massive campaign contributions were once again corrupting the system.
Richard Nixon: Because people have got to know whether or not their presidents are crook. Well, I'm not a crook.
Nick Penniman: With the Watergate Scandal and the corrupting influence of money on our politics, the public was pushed to the tipping point and amended reform.
Joseph Biden: The question is how long is the American public going to put up with a small group of men and organizations determining the political process by deciding who can run and who can't run?
Trevor Potter: Congress passed a series of reform laws that were designed to make elections less expensive and prevent members of Congress candidates, the president, which was at issue there, from raising literally million dollar contributions.
Wendell Potter: The Watergate Scandal resulted in some very important reforms.
Charles Lewis: Most Americans wanted to clean up politics right after Watergate. Our Republican president said The times demand this legislation. Now most of those safeguards and those rules after Watergate have eroded and been disregarded completely by the political class.
Wendell Potter: We thought we had corruption into control, but again, corrupting money flowed back into our system.
Trevor Potter: I would've thought we'd learned our lessons from the Watergate Scandal that having huge sums of money contributed to groups control by candidates or to political parties is simply a danger sign for a democracy.
Nick Penniman: Citizens United was a Supreme Court case that was handed down in 2010. What the majority argued in that decision is that corporate spending in a political context was an act of speech and therefore should be unregulated. It should be limitless.
Trevor Potter: The court in the Citizens United case has said a whole lot of things that I would think appear corrupt, most citizens would think appear corrupt, are not in fact as a legal matter going to qualify as corruption.
Senator John McCain: I'm afraid, at least for the time being, that's going to be the case because of the most misguided, naive, uninformed, egregious decision of the United States Supreme Court, I think, in the 21st century.
Lawrence Lessig: When Richard Nixon was drawn into legal trouble because of the influence that was pedaled inside the White House where people would bring suitcases filled with $250,000, that won't happen today because nobody needs to do it in such a crude way today. All you need to do is to wire money to a super PAC, and that's perfectly legal even though it has exactly the same effect on the President or on the member of Congress. All those things we were worried about, that never happens anymore. What happens is the equivalent in legal form ratified by the structures that the Supreme Court has forced onto our political system, such as Super PACs.
Wendell Potter: Super PACs by law are not supposed to be coordinating in any way with a candidate's campaign, but it happens all the time and it does because the FEC is just paying no attention to this.
Richard Master: What is a super PAC? It raises and spends money making public ads that impact individual campaigns.
Reporter #2: Single payer healthcare, sanctuary cities, job crushing taxes, and big cuts to our military. Pelosi's San Francisco values are wrong for America.
Sheila Krumholz: There is money that is surging in hundreds of millions of dollars that wasn't there the day before The Citizens United decision. Longtime political operatives realize the opportunity to gain the system by setting up these patriotic sounding organizations that were ostensibly to benefit society but were in fact political organizations through which they could raise and spend tens of millions, ultimately hundreds of millions of dollars with no transparency about where the money was coming from.
Richard Master: It's just a fraud perpetrated on our democracy. By federal law, there's a legal limit on the amount an individual can directly donate to a candidate for Congress. The current maximum is $2,700 per election. The law was passed by Congress to minimize the influence by an individual on the political process. The very idea of campaign donation limits has been undermined by Super PACs. Super PACs can funnel unlimited amounts of money that support the candidate but technically are not coordinating with the candidate's campaign, and the money can be given anonymously. Super PACs pump in millions of dollars running negative ads, often spending more than the candidate's official campaign. Unlimited and anonymous money in campaigns is fundamentally undermining the democracy. It's against the expressed intent of Congress.
Wendell Potter: The Citizens' United Supreme Court decision opened the floodgates to unlimited dark money.
Speaker 9: Big oil polluters, they have a friend in Pennsylvania; millionaire Pat Toomey.
Speaker 10: What's the truth? Katie McGinty helps steer millions of our tax dollars to favored contracts.
Richard Master: Toomey versus McGinty in 2016 in Pennsylvania, the most expensive senatorial race in the history of Pennsylvania. 70% of the money raised by outside groups.
Speaker 11: Katie McGinty has no shame. Club for Growth Action is responsible for the content of this advertising.
Speaker 9: He's helping big oil polluters and millionaires, not the rest of us. LCV Victory Fund is responsible for the content of this advertising.
Richard Master: 20,000 TV ads over a two three month period in the Philadelphia region alone, drowning out the natural discourse that we would expect between the candidates so that we could properly evaluate the worth of one candidate versus the other. It undermines the fundamental intentions and purpose of an election.
Lawrence Lessig: If you step back and you ask, well, how much did the people learn? Nobody is understanding anything. All they're getting is reasons to hate one side or the other. Politics of hate is quite fruitful.
Speaker 12: In just the Missouri race for us, Senate incumbent Republican Senator Roy Blunt and Democratic Challenger, Secretary of State, Jason Kander have raised around 14 million dollars. Most of that money comes from sources outside of Missouri. Now, many people in the US have negative feelings about so-called dark money.
Jacob Hacker: It's the money that gets spent, that never gets reported, that never goes into an FED report, that never gets discussed in the news. What we know is that when something is hidden, people behave very differently.
Speaker 13: Quist has a long pattern of failing to pay his bills. He's even faced multiple warrants for not paying his taxes.
Tim Roemer: You don't know when those negative ads are going to be pouring into your district. It could be the last 30 days. The dark money, the secret money, the super PAC money that's flowing in, are all these snakes now under the rock, but when you lift that rock up for our electoral system, you know it's poisonous. It's negative. It is not good for the system.
Speaker 14: John Ossoff really wants you to think he's ready to be in Congress.
Jon Ossoff: I'm Han Solo, captain of Millennium Falcon.
Speaker 14: Sorry, Jonny, but the Truth Strikes back. Congressional Leadership Fund is responsible for the content of this advertising.
John Pudner: The problems the third party, you pretty much can be as negative as you want, say anything you want with nothing to back it up. Short of something that's going to put you in prison, you're free to hit as hard as you want.
Speaker 15: Our fiscal conservative leaders, men we admire, aspire to be. Men like Tom Campbell, who would never lead us astray. His pedestal, so high.
Speaker 16: Leaving but one way to fall.
Jacob Hacker: The way Washington works, it's not based just on quid pro quos like I'll do something for you. It's also based on the opposite, which is if you cross us, I will destroy you.
John Pudner: What they're being told is we happen to have this super PAC that has millions of dollars that destroys people, and by the way, we've got this one little provision we need in the budget and it's really important to us and our constituents. It'll create a lot of jobs after it gives us a lot of money. Back to that other unrelated thing. We have this super PAC that destroys people who oppose us.
Richard Master: Dark money has an insidious impact on our politics, but lobbyists bundling and donating money directly to congressional candidates is an even more blatant example of corruption.
Jack Abramoff: The leadership of both parties generally tells them that losing a freshman seat is a disaster for them, so they tell them your focus needs to be on getting reelected. Therefore, we're going to introduce you in essence to a bunch of people who have ready money who can help you pay off your debt. Now, where's the easiest source of money for these people? The folks hanging around two blocks away, the lobbyists. They have their checkbooks out. They're dripping in money. They want to give you the money. It starts even before they're inaugurated.
Meredith McGehee: I've been a registered lobbyist since 1987. The role of lobbyists in Washington is vastly misunderstood. Most people apply their trade very much above board. You're trying to provide accurate information to members and staff. There's a very small part of the lobbying community, however, that plays this transactional game, the pay to play.
Jack Abramoff: Most lobbyists, and I'd say 90 plus percent of them, are absolutely fine, absolutely decent, not giving resources because either they don't have them or they don't want to do it, and are trying to make their case on the merits. However, when a lobbyist like that runs up against a lobbyist like I was, they're dead. In essence that's the problem.
Richard Master: Members of Congress face massive pressure from lobbyists. Lobbyists need powerful members to push their particular agendas. Faced with hundreds of competing interests, the member has to choose what legislation they're going to fight for or fight against. Lobbyists who raise campaign funds know that money will give them an inside track in pushing their agenda. They'll have a big advantage over lobbyists that don't put up money. It's good old-fashioned pay to play. Money is a clear corrupting influence. Fueled by the power of campaign contributions, members of Congress go to work for their donors, maneuvering legislation through Congress or fighting to stop bills their donors don't want. Lobbyists should not be allowed to give anything of value to a member or to his or her campaign or to a political party. By law, lobbyists can't buy dinner and drinks for a member of Congress, but they are allowed to host campaign fundraising events and bundle hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign donations for that same congressman.
Lawrence Lessig: No other system yet anything other than a Banana Republic is as corrupted as ours. I was speaking to the Swedish Parliament and I had dinner with some Swed representatives afterwards and they literally could not believe that members raised money. This guy said to me, I've been in Parliament for 20 years. I've never once asked anybody for money. He said, I can't even imagine how I could do my job if I had to be asking people for money.
Tim Roemer: What we can do and what the South Carolina Court has done, they have upheld a law passed by the state legislature in South Carolina that says you cannot be a lobbyist and directly give a check to a sitting legislator.
John Pudner: Take the lobbyist giving out of the equation, I think that solves a lot of the pay per play issues we have with government.
Wendell Potter: If we stop the money bundling by lobbyists, much of the pressure would be off the politicians. They don't like the money game. The relentless push to raise money has nothing to do with why most of them ran for office in the first place.
Nick Penniman: It's really almost a vicious thing that we do to members of Congress. They come in because they want to serve.
Richard Master: Members of Congress spend extraordinary amounts of time raising campaign funds. Both parties expect their members to spend at least four hours a day dialing for dollars. They work out of small cubicles in call centers, especially set up by the parties. It's literally a telemarketing operation. House members are expected to raise over $2,500 a day, senators $15,000 a day. There is precious little time to effectively do their real job. Many don't read bills, don't attend hearings, and don't participate deeply in the legislative process. Their time is chewed up asking wealthy donors for money. They are pressured to follow the agenda set by their donors while ignoring the majority of their back home constituents. The voice of the people and the common good is drowned out by the voice of the big money agenda.
John Pudner: They do not like having an intern come over from their respective party, take them over for call time, make them sit in a little cubicle, feed them Twinkies and soda to keep them going and call people and ask for money all day. That's not why anyone ran for Congress.
Lawrence Lessig: You're simply on the phone dialing wealthy individuals, and they have an agenda. There's no doubt about it. They're not taking your call to be nice to you. They want to tell you what their agenda is.
Tim Roemer: No longer are you focused on your voters. You are focused on your economic constituents, the people who are making your election or reelection possible.
Sheila Krumholz: They are on the hamster wheel of dialing for dollars day in day out in order to be able to be a viable candidate in the next election. We hope they're squeezing in time for briefings, for study, for careful consideration of the weighty issues that we've asked them to grapple with on our behalf.
Tim Roemer: Now we have a best situation where many people don't even read the bills, let alone partake in crafting them. When they're raising money on the phone and they're dialing for dollars, you are not doing your committee work, you're not doing your oversight work. You're not the watchdog of the taxpayer funds and making government accountable.
Trevor Potter: They're not reaching across the aisle. They're not formulating positions with their fellow colleagues in their own parties because they're so busy focusing on fundraising in their next election.
Nick Penniman: Probably more than half the people on Capitol Hill are always looking around the corner to figure out how they can cash out as a result of their public service, and it's absolutely disgraceful. In 1974, 3% of members of Congress went from Capitol Hill to K Street to become lobbyists. Today that number's 50%.
Jack Abramoff: You have members of Congress or public servants who work for the public and they cash in and become lobbyists. By the way, they're very effective lobbyists, at least initially because they had the best contacts.
Sheila Krumholz: If it's a very important bill, a very important piece of legislation, potentially offering great rewards or a great threat to their bottom line, they're going to hire a former committee member or a former member who can meet with their colleagues on an almost one-to-one basis.
Nick Penniman: One of the many reasons why it's so attractive for members of Congress to leave office and become a lobbyist is because they make 10 to 20 times as a lobbyist what they could make as a member of Congress.
Wendell Potter: Pharma has an especially strong revolving door. It has nearly 1,,400 registered lobbyists and 65% of them came through the revolving door. Billy Tauzin pushed through the Medicare Part D prescription drug bill that meant billions of dollars in profits for pharma. He left Congress and went to work for pharma as their chief lobbyist. He made more than $19 million between 2006 and 2010, so there needs to be a longer period of time before a member of Congress can go into a lobbying job.
Trevor Potter: If you had a five-year period before you could lobby Congress, that it seems to me might change what is now being seen as a tryout for being a lobbyist.
Speaker 17: Now, Mr. Senator Cotton, listen to this. You work for us.
Tim Roemer: The American people across the board are saying, enough is enough. This system stinks to high heaven. Tear it all down.
Richard Master: The politicians who are in the game right now really understand how deeply screwed up it is.
Speaker 18: We haven't even begun. I'm not done with you yet. I got the mic and I'm not going anywhere. Turn off the power. I've got a very loud voice. This ain't over yet.
Reporter #3: California's Tom McClintock had to be escorted out by police.
Trevor Potter: When I move around the country and talk to Republicans, when I look at polls of what Republicans are thinking, the people who are out of step here is the party leadership in Washington; the ideologues who are saying no regulation, the people in Congress who think they have a temporary partisan advantage.
Wendell Potter: Both parties get money, especially when it comes to the pharmaceutical industry where they've got lobbying teams covering both parties. They want to make sure that they've got control regardless of which party is in power. Data from Open Secret shows that for 2017, pharma contributed to 127 Democratic and 126 Republican congressional campaigns and they contributed to 44 Democratic Senate races and 30 Republican Senate races. They have strategically spent money to maximize their influence over both parties.
Nick Penniman: Neither party is doing this any better than the other party.
John Pudner: Campaign. Finance reform has become a top of mind issue for conservatives.
Speaker 19: When you give, they do whatever the hell you want them to do.
Donald Trump: You better believe it, and you know what? When I need something from them, two years later, three years later, I call them, they are there for me.
Speaker 20: I think money corrupts the process.
Martin O'Malley:
Concentrated wealth has concentrated power in Washington and that we can't get things done anymore.Speaker 21: The system we have, I agree, it's totally broken.
Bernie Sanders: Candidates are increasingly dependent on the very, very wealthy.
Speaker 22: The public, I think, over time is going to rebel against this.
Senator John McCain: We need a level playing field and we need to go back to the realization that Teddy Roosevelt had; that we have to have a limit on the flow of money and that corporations are not people.
Nick Penniman: I think that what you're seeing is actually the emergence of a right left cross partisan movement to attack the hyper concentration of wealth and power in this country.
John Pudner: I'm all for this tax credit. For me that's keeping $200 you're going to give the IRS and instead picking a candidate who will be a good steward of your money. Once someone gives a contribution, they get invested in their government, they start paying attention, they start talking to friends, they start getting friends to vote. They start having faith in the system again.
Trevor Potter: We need to give citizens a stake back in their campaign finance system and local voters a stake back.
John Pudner: I think if you can create this alternate funding that focuses as the candidate back on their district, you fundamentally change how candidates run, how they're picked and how they represent once they're in.
Trevor Potter: I think it would be very helpful to find a way to encourage local contributors, such as saying, if you raise money from inside your district or state, that is subject to a federal match to give candidates an office holders and incentive to go back home and raise money, which is another way of connecting with voters, which is another way or leads to voters feeling that they're important again.
Richard Master: We can reclaim our democracy with campaign finance reform. Limiting contributions to smaller amounts would increase the power of the common citizen and limit the power of big money. Combining small donations with a four to one match of public funding encourages candidates to raise money locally. A candidate that receives a $200 contribution would receive an $800 match from the government. A $200 contribution is worth $1,000 to the campaign. It reduces the influence of out-of-state money. Candidates become more responsive to their constituents. It moves the power back to the local voters.
Lawrence Lessig: What we need is an amendment or a bill in Congress that publicly funds public elections, and if you require public funding of elections through the Constitution or if you paid for it through Congress, then all of these corrupting dependencies can fall away.
Robert Weissman: It's a certainty that if we spent the money on public financing of elections matching small dollar contributions, we would save many times over what's being spent.
Richard Master: As a business person, it makes total economic sense to publicly finance our campaigns. The tens of billions of dollars we could save through federally negotiating Medicare drug prices would save way more than we would spend on federally financing congressional elections.
Lawrence Lessig: Connecticut, when they adopted their version of small dollar funded elections, in the first year, 78% of the elected representatives opted into that system voluntarily because their campaign managers told them, look, it makes more sense for us to go out there and get votes than to spend all our time in cocktail parties raising money from rich cats. If they opted into the system, they would no longer be spending all of their time focused on what the tiniest fraction or the 1% care about and they would have more time to try to figure out what the vast majority of Americans care about. That would be the way to deal with the problem of inequality caused by the way we fund campaigns, and Congress could pass that tomorrow and the Supreme Court would not touch it.
Wendell Potter: There have been a number of court rulings that have upheld the constitutionality of public financing of campaigns so long as candidates are not required to participate that it's a voluntary program.
Tim Roemer:
Nick Penniman: It comes down to a question of our own soul as a country and whether or not we're ready to fight back and force our elected officials to pass the kinds of laws necessary to clean up this mess. Lawrence Lessig: The biggest challenge we face in reform is to convince the public there's a reason to believe we could actually succeed in reform. Nobody in the public is against the idea of reform. They just don't believe there's anything you can do about it. Hendrick Smith: There's this visceral and understandable anger on the part of tens of millions of Americans, which they're expressing in opinion polls saying, hey, Washington, wake up. Stop this game. We want it stopped. We're prepared to take action. Stop ignoring us. Meredith McGehee: The only way you fight back against money is to go and organize and to become involved in that system and to hold your elected representatives accountable. Speaker 17: You want to stand there, expect us to be calm, cool and collective. Wow. What kind of insurance do you have? Hendrick Smith: We have to just simply say, we are powerful and start acting that way. That changes the public mood, it changes the political dynamics, and it changes the power leverage in our political system. If you look back at the civil rights movement, if you look back at the women's movement, then the environmental movements, and even if you look back at the Tea Party movement, there's pretty good evidence then when people speak up and get organized, we know reform can be done. People have got to be willing to invest the time, the energy, their bodies themselves and their passion. Speaker 23: There is a movement in opposition of the big money agenda rising up across the country. We need to join these national organizations that exist and are actively pursuing legislation to stop this. The business community must participate in this movement. Wendell Potter: There is growing support for an amendment to the Constitution that would address many of the problems created by the Supreme Court's decisions on Citizens United and other court cases, and many states and cities around the country have passed resolutions calling for an amendment. Jack Abramoff: Since the Citizens United decision was handed down, we've had states pass resolutions calling for a constitutional amendment. Hendrick Smith: In Colorado in 2012 when they voted for an amendment to the US Constitution to get back to controlling political money, there was virtually no difference between Republicans, independents and Democrats. They all voted within 70 to 75% and they carried every single county in the state. Wendell Potter: We don't have to wait on Washington to address all the problems associated with money and politics, but lawmakers in Washington should look to see what is happening in the States. A lot of states and cities have passed laws that address money in politics, and many of them have created public financing of campaigns locally and at the state level. Richard Master: The solutions are straightforward. We need a constitutional amendment that gives Congress the authority to regulate the raising and spending of all money impacting federal elections. We need to overturn the Citizens United decision and not allow unlimited contributions to bogus nonprofits. No money should be dark, no source hidden. We need to require 100% transparency for all campaign spending. Lobbyists must be prohibited from raising campaign dollars. After leaving Congress, members must have at least a five-year waiting before being allowed to work as a lobbyist. We need to fund campaigns with small donor contributions. These locally generated small donations would then be supplemented with public funds. If we can accomplish these things, healthcare reform and other reforms are feasible. Let's remove the taint on our democracy and open the doors of reform for the common good.