From The Watergate Era’s “Suitcases Filled With Cash” To Today’s Billions In Secret Campaign Money
“If money is buying influence and results over government policies, then most Americans are shut out, because the campaign finance system is dominated by people who are putting up very large sums of money.” – D21 President Fred Wertheimer
There’s a corner of the 1970s Watergate scandal with far-reaching impact, according to National Public Radio’s Planet Money in an episode that features an in-depth interview with Democracy 21 President Fred Wertheimer who has been fighting for campaign finance reforms since the early days of Watergate.
In the episode, Wertheimer discusses corporate executives flying to Washington carrying “suitcases filled with cash” – secret donations for the Nixon reelection campaign – in April 1972, the week before the Federal Election Campaign Act and its disclosure laws took effect.
When Wertheimer “learned the [Watergate] burglars were paid in part by secret donations to the Nixon campaign, he launched a hunt for answers,” Planet Money reports. “His work helped make huge changes in how we pay for elections.”
Wertheimer explains how Common Cause, the public interest group he was working at, sued and ultimately forced the Nixon reelection campaign to turn over the names of those secret donors, and, with the help of a team of volunteers, quickly turned that raw data into detailed campaign finance studies. Those studies provided reporters with the donation data and, importantly, information on who the donors were and what companies they represented.
“No one could figure out how we did it,” Wertheimer says about how quickly they turned around the information for the press.
(How they did it – long nights, stick-on labels, and lots of Wite-Out.)
The piece discusses Watergate – what Wertheimer calls “the biggest campaign finance scandal of the century” – and its direct line to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010 which opened the campaign money floodgates, allowing billions of dollars in secret, influence-seeking contributions to pour into today’s campaigns.
This episode first aired in 2022, but, as we head into another multibillion-dollar campaign season that will be dominated by Super PACs and secret donors to “dark money” groups, it’s still timely.
It’s important that we remember the Watergate scandal and why we must never give up the fight to reform our campaign financing system.
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