Each year that I’ve been in the Senate, I’ve introduced legislation called the “Super PAC Elimination Act.” The Super PAC Elimination Act would not prohibit super PACs, or any other citizen groups, from speaking. Rather, it would make two very simple changes. One, it would allow unlimited individual donations directly to a political candidate’s campaign. No corporate donations, and no union donations, just individuals. And two, it would require immediate, twenty-four-hour disclosure of any such donations.
Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and political speech is no different. As Chief Justice Roberts said in the campaign finance case of McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, “Disclosure of contributions minimizes the potential for abuse of the campaign finance system.”
As a practical matter, passing the Super PAC Elimination Act would functionally eliminate super PACs because every candidate would much rather control his or her own message—what he or she is saying. And with immediate disclosure, if a particular donor wrote a massive check to a particular candidate—for example, the tens of millions of dollars spent every cycle by Democratic super-donors like George Soros and Mike Bloomberg and Tom Steyer—then those donations would be disclosed immediately and could be the subject of public debate, with the electorate deciding whether the acceptance of those contributions affected their votes at the ballot box.
The system I proposed is, in fact, very similar to the system that operates in the State of Texas for state elections. Candidates for state elections in Texas can accept unlimited donations from individuals but cannot accept any donations from corporations or from labor unions. And those contributions are all exposed for public scrutiny.
Although I had never been elected to office before the Senate, for about a year, I did run as a state candidate in Texas for attorney general. In 2009, then-U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison had announced she was going to resign from the Senate in order to run for governor of Texas against the incumbent, Governor Rick Perry. As a result, Texas Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst was expected to run for Senate, and Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott was expected to run for lieutenant governor. So I decided to launch my own run to replace my old boss as Texas attorney general.
I spent most of 2009 campaigning for AG, against four other Republicans who were expected to run: two elected State Supreme Court justices (both Abbott and his predecessor as AG, John Cornyn, had previously been elected Supreme Court justices), a state representative who was supported by many of the wealthiest business owners in Dallas, and a member of Congress who was personally worth several hundred million dollars). In contrast, I’d been SG—an appointed position—but had never run for anything.
All that year, I crisscrossed the state working to earn the support of conservative leaders, Republican women, and grassroots activists across Texas. I didn’t come from money and didn’t have massive personal money to put in the race. But, because Texas allowed unlimited individual donations, I was able to raise much more than anyone expected. When we filed our first campaign finance disclosure, our AG campaign had raised over $1 million—a sum that sent shock waves through the political world. Unknown, non-elected, non-wealthy candidates simply weren’t supposed to be able to do that.
My biggest donor for the AG race was Peter Thiel—the billionaire former CEO of PayPal who had been the first major outside investor in Facebook. Peter and I had been friends since long before he had money. We met in the mid-90s, when I was clerking for the Court and he was a young lawyer practicing corporate law. Peter is brilliant, eccentric, and one of the most innovative thinkers in the country. He’s also gay and very libertarian politically.
Peter gave $250,000 to my AG campaign; without that contribution, we never would have crossed the $1 million threshold on the first filing. And raising $1 million had real significance; I joked that $1 million in politics is ten times greater than $900,000—the “-illion” just captures people’s attention (think Dr. Evil in Austin Powers with his pinkie to his cheek, saying “one meee-lion dollars). It drives credibility and press coverage.
All of that together—the fundraising, conservative leaders uniting, the overwhelming grassroots support—convinced all four of my potential opponents not to run. Each made that announcement, and suddenly, we had gone from nothing to effectively clearing the Republican field, which at the time meant we had basically won the AG race in Texas.
And then it disappeared. In the fall of 2009, Senator Hutchison changed her mind and announced she was not going to resign her Senate seat after all. Unable to run for Senate, David Dewhurst promptly announced he was running for re-election as lieutenant governor, and that left Greg Abbott with no place to go but to announce he was running for re-election as attorney general. Within hours, I suspended my campaign for AG. I was never going to run against my friend and former boss; the plan had always been to succeed him.
At the time, I was unbelievably frustrated with Kay. When she changed her mind on resigning, it made all the work we had done for the past year disappear. But then she lost badly to Rick Perry in the gubernatorial primary and announced she was not going to run for re-election to Senate two years later.
And so we contemplated an even more audacious move. In considering whether to run for Senate, the biggest initial barrier was fundraising. To run a campaign that had even a chance to be heard statewide in Texas, I assessed that we’d need a minimum of $5 million. If we couldn’t raise that, we’d lose. Period. If we could raise closer to $10 million, we would have enough to really communicate effectively, and I believed we’d
