The Kochs Ride Again

POLITICO

It was interesting while it lasted, but the 2016 election is now officially “bought.”

The purchasers are the Koch brothers, and the price, a cool $889 million.

The news that the network organized by David and Charles Koch plans to spend roughly $900 million in the 2016 cycle has freaked out Democrats, outraged so-called campaign-finance reformers and inspired hand-wringing about the future of Earth. (Literally: A piece in Salon warned the spending is bad news “for anyone who plans to keep living on this planet.”)

The despair is misplaced. One sign it is still a free country is that a band of like-minded people, devoted to principles they consider essential to the country’s thriving, can get together and try to effect them in public policy.

My only quibble with the Kochs’ announcement is that they didn’t nail a nice, round $1 billion, as the most eloquent possible rejoinder to erstwhile Majority Leader Harry Reid’s campaign of vilification, which he forlornly hoped would help him hold the Senate last year.

For all that campaign reformers hate the Kochs, the brothers’ network is, in part, their creation. “This is the natural consequence,” campaign-finance reformer Lawrence Lessig griped to POLITICO about the $889 million, “of a regime with essentially no contribution limits.”

Actually, it is the inevitable — and long-ago predicted — consequence of contribution limits. The campaign-finance reformers knee-capped the political parties with malice aforethought and then are stunned that, in a free country, political activity has found other outlets.

If Reince Priebus and Debbie Wasserman Schultz are limited to raising $32,400 per donor annually, they will inevitably lose ground to outside groups.

But perverse consequences are a specialty of the campaign-finance reformers. They made it so difficult for candidates to raise money ($2,600 per donor per election) that politicians have to spend an inordinate amount of time raising money. The soul-deadening fundraising grind that afflicts almost every federal officeholder is a bitter fruit of campaign-finance regulations.

Advocates of greater regulation want to spread the pain by making it as difficult, or perhaps even impossible, for everyone else to raise and spend money on politics. The only obstacle to this ambition is — damn you, George Mason — the Bill of Rights, specifically the First Amendment.

Years ago, then-House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt, a stalwart of more campaign regulation, said that we have “two important values in direct conflict: freedom of speech and our desire for healthy campaigns in a healthy democracy. You can’t have both.”

On his terms, no, you can’t. Which is precisely why Democrats like current House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi hope to amend the First Amendment to allow the government the latitude to further limit political speech.

Until such time (and may it never arrive), the Kochs and their allies get to run free.

Paul Waldman of The Washington Post bitterly complained that the news about the intended Koch spending “didn’t require any secret meetings with anonymous sources to unearth.”

Old complaint about the Koch network: It was a shadowy organization. New complaint about the Koch network: It is too open and blatant about its political designs.

The Kochs must be the best-known secret network on the planet. The New York Times is obsessed with them. Harry Reid routinely attacks them. Everyone knows the groups funded by them and the media report extensively on them, including their TV ads and other political activities.

In the abstract, there is a case for more disclosure of donations to the likes of the Koch network. In a political climate in which intimidation to try to shut people down is increasingly the norm, though, the reality is that disclosure would just put targets on donors’ backs.

The left always wants to paint the brothers as self-interested, to better fit the stereotype of the robber baron distorting government for his own ends.

But the Koch brothers are the rare breed of businessmen who don’t seek special favors from government, who in fact oppose them on principle. They are capitalists who hate crony capitalism.

The libertarian paradise that they seek would put out of business the government affairs offices of major corporations and be the worst thing to happen to lobbyists who make a living on obscure but valuable changes in Washington’s byzantine tax and regulatory system.

The Kochs would be freer of government regulation — but so would everyone else.

The $889 million figure has shock value, although it’s not quite what it seems. It is inclusive of all the Koch spending, which is much more varied them simply launching TV ads and get-out-the-vote campaigns. It includes support for academic programs and think tanks in an effort to influence the intellectual climate beyond one election cycle.

Nor are the political parties going away. They would be much more consequential if they weren’t hamstrung, yet they still spent more than outside groups in the 2014 election, according to the projection of OpenSecrets.org, as of last October.

Nor is “buying” an election all it is cracked up to be. The Kochs spent some $400 million on the 2012 election, and came up empty.

The brothers will remain arch-villains, regardless. The left is so invested in trying to find a way to squeeze them out of the political process, because it instinctively hates anything being unregulated, including political activity in a free society.

Also, its attitude is “influence for me, but not for thee.” The left, by and large, owns the media, academia, the big foundations, and Hollywood. Compared with all of that priceless political and cultural influence, the spending of the Koch network is a pittance. Nonetheless, the left would never consider stripping any of those institutions of the protections of the First Amendment.

It is the Koch brothers who are the target. So they will remain as long as they continue to so prominently represent and advocate for a free society.

Rich Lowry is editor of National Review.