In 1997, when Democrats had tried to pass a constitutional amendment restricting political speech, thankfully, eleven Democrats voted no (Bumpers, Durbin, Feingold, Kennedy, Kerrey, Kohl, Leahy, Moseley-Braun, Moynihan, Rockefeller, and Torricelli). In 2001, when Democrats again tried to pass a constitutional amendment repealing the political speech protections of the First Amendment, a different collection of eleven Democrats voted no (Corzine, Edwards, Feingold, Johnson of South Dakota, Kennedy, Kohl, Leahy, Nelson of Florida, Nelson of Nebraska, Torricelli, and Wellstone).
Sadly, this last time that Democrats had the majority, in 2014, when it came to a vote on the Senate floor, every single Senate Democrat—100 percent of them—voted to repeal the free speech provisions of the First Amendment. Each and every one of them should be embarrassed and ashamed that they did so.
On Constitution Day of that year, the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, invited me to come debate this proposed attempt to amend the Constitution. I readily accepted. They invited Dick Durbin to come debate the other side. Senator Durbin declined. They invited Chuck Schumer. Senator Schumer declined.
At the end of the day, the National Constitution Center could not find even a single elected Democrat willing to come argue the other side of the argument. They wanted to exercise brute power, engage in partisan posturing, without actually having to defend their proposals on the merits. So I decided to proceed alone. The National Constitution Center assembled a gathering of some 600 to 700 people in Independence Hall and, for over an hour, I proceeded to, in effect, debate myself. I endeavored, as much as I could, to at least lay out the arguments that Democratic senators had made in favor of their proposed amendment. And then I laid out the counterarguments. (I’ll confess, I may have been more vigorous in the latter than the former.)
When it comes to campaign finance reform, a great many people who seek to do good in the world say that there is too much money in politics and, accordingly, we should prevent the spending of money on elections. They argue that elections would be better (or more pure or more truthful or more accountable) if we simply banned citizen groups from spending money on political speech. I don’t doubt that many of them are sincere, but doing so would have precisely the opposite effect on our democracy.
In any given election, there are typically three major categories of speakers—three categories of those who contribute to the discourse surrounding an election. There are, of course, incumbent politicians and the candidates who may be challenging them. There are the press. And there are individual citizens.
Campaign finance reforms, inevitably, when drafted and filed in Congress, are drafted by incumbent politicians. And, almost without exception, these so-called campaign finance reforms serve to protect those same incumbent politicians. It is in the interest—at least the narrow electoral interest—of every incumbent politician to make it as difficult as possible for anyone else to criticize them. The press, likewise, is complicit in these efforts to silence the third category of speakers: individual citizens and citizens gathered collectively through various organizations.
Every day of the year, the press—whether ABC, CBS, NBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Fox News, or CNN—engages in spending millions of dollars to influence elections and to praise or criticize politicians. If citizens are silenced, the press will have even more of a monopoly on political speech.
Likewise, incumbent politicians have massive structural advantages in elections. In big states, like my home state of Texas, today with 29 million people, it is absurdly difficult and expensive to communicate a message that is heard by even a small percentage of the voters. Incumbent politicians have vast advantages: widespread name identification, organizations and structures, lobbyists and special interests who will fund their campaigns, and an army of bundlers who can raise money for any given campaign. A new challenger typically lacks access to any of those resources. If incumbent politicians were to be successful in prohibiting the expenditure of money on elections, it would mean that, as a practical matter, incumbents could almost never be beaten. That is, quite frankly, un-American.
I’m an incumbent now. But I didn’t start off that way. And I share the overwhelming frustration the American people have with career politicians of both parties who are captured by Washington special interests and who don’t do what they said they would do. If I could push a button and throw out of office every incumbent politician in D.C., myself included, I would happily push that button. In the meantime, I’m passionately opposed to incumbent-protection schemes, of which campaign finance reform proposals are the biggest example.
In 2019, media observers were shocked when I retweeted Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and enthusiastically agreed with her suggestion to ban former members of Congress from becoming lobbyists. Although she didn’t know it at the time, AOC was agreeing with me; in 2016, while campaigning for president, I had already advocated a permanent lifetime ban on former members of Congress ever becoming lobbyists.
When I first ran for Senate in Texas in 2012, I saw firsthand the challenges of taking on a powerful incumbent. At the time, I was an upstart challenger taking on an incumbent statewide officeholder with vast personal wealth. My opponent, having been in statewide office for over a decade, had universal name
