Political actions committees (PACs) are entities organized for the purpose of raising and spending money to elect and defeat candidates. Most PACs represent businesses, labor, politicians or ideological interests. PACs can be established by anyone. Right now, we have more than 4,500 PACs. There are limitations on how much a candidate can receive from a PAC, but there is no limitation on how many PACs a candidate can receive money from.
Again, PACs serve special interests by raising and spending money in politics directly and indirectly. They are Unelected Groups. They represent interests of fraction of the population but they have more influence on our politics than the rest of the people.
Hijacking Democracy
Besides the fact that the limitations on PACs spending cannot stop the unlimited contributions to candidates, and the fact that the most effective factor in winning races is raising money (YES it isn’t about POLICIES or Views), PACs hijacks democracy.
Democracy means that every citizen has the right to participate in ruling the country. But, with regards to the size and the population of our country, direct participation is impossible. However, indirect participation in the ruling was possible through a representation system: the congress. The congress members are elected and selected by the people because they trust them and that they will represent their voices and views. The constitution grants every citizen an equal right to choose, select, elect and support candidates. No one can have more or less of this right regardless of his race, belief, sex, age and financial class. It follows that regardless of your ability to financially support a specific candidate, you cannot have more advantage or influence than any other citizen.
The candidate wins the race when he gets the majority of votes, this means that the majority of an equal influence and support was given to a specific candidate to represent them. But, since raising money is the most effective factor in winning races, politicians are not influenced equally by the people. Our system has allowed special interests groups, who have more money than the majority of the people, to form what we call a PAC. Therefore, we allowed small groups of people with more money, to be able to spend more money in politics, thus to have more influence than the others. This bribery system does not protect our equal right of influencing and choosing our representatives in ruling the country. It does not protect our DEMOCRACY.
The sad reality is that all of our elected officials take PACs money. PACs are funded by different sources (Corporations- Ideologies- Issues) of money and each one of them has different agendas, but on the other hand, all of them are unelected groups of people that bypass the people and ignore our rights of ruling ourselves and accordingly kidnap our democracy.
One comment
John Andrews
June 10, 2020 at 6:33 pm
Thank you for identifying money in politics as a real problem. But I think you should focus on “SuperPACS” and big money donors and not conventional PACs. A conventional PAC can only give $500 to any one candidate whereas a wealthy individual can give $2750 with one check. And Hillary Clinton used a money laundering scheme to take donations of over $300,000 from an individual. Conventional PACs were designed to let less wealthy donors pool their small contributions. The real solution, of course, is public campaign financing.