Column: Representative Democracy, Part 3

By Scott Walker, M.D.

Dear Neighbors,

I recently wrote about two of the factors that have weakened our representative democracy.  The first was the erosion of the connection between the voters and the people they elect.  Elected officials are on the whole wealthier and better educated than the average person in their District.  As our population grows, while the number of representatives is held constant, our representatives have the job of representing a greater number of people and a greater diversity of opinion.  

I suggested an increase in the size of the State Assembly, so that more people would personally know a state representative and would feel comfortable contacting that person when they have a question or an issue.

The second change to degrade the trust in our democracy was the “Citizens United” decision at the U.S. Supreme Court, holding that money equals speech for political purposes.  

The decision started a rapid increase in the amount of “dark money” entering politics.  Since we can’t know who is talking (i.e., spending), we can hold no one accountable for using dark money to spread lies.  

“Truth is the first of all virtues,” wrote Plato.  

“Truth is the first casualty of conflict,” wrote his contemporary Aeschylus.  

Bad information leads to bad decisions. Several methods have been considered and tried to control the money that goes into politics.  Our own former U.S. Senator, Russ Feingold, was the co-author with John McCain of a set of laws for raising and spending money on federal elections. 

In their opinion, shining the light of public scrutiny on a complete list of donors to an organization would preclude outsize contributions or money laundering.  The U.S. Supreme Court struck down McCain-Feingold with its ruling that money equals speech and therefore cannot be “infringed upon.”  

Another Wisconsin solution for state legislative races was to set limits on total spending, and have the state contribute that amount to both major party candidates in each legislative race. This prevented the appearance of conflicts of interests and took lobbyists’ contributions off the table. No such court ruling as “Citizen United” ended the period of spending limits in Wisconsin. It was simply the wish of the governor and Republican majorities in the Legislature to make the change that brought us to the current system.  It’s worth re-opening that debate.

Let’s bring back public campaign financing, to prevent billionaires from buying a functional majority in our State Legislature.  

Let’s make the Legislature accessible to those who don’t have wealth, or connections among the wealthy of our State. 

Just as importantly, let’s do whatever we can to make political ads, currently the cheapest TV time you can buy, more expensive so that we are forced to see fewer of them. Maybe the low rates should only apply for the six weeks before an election.  And why not require TV stations that are found to have broadcast misinformation to run an equal number of ads setting the record straight?  The maligned candidate or issue should not have to spend its own money to correct the record! This would certainly enlist the broadcasters’ help in screening ads for accuracy.  Our democracy would be better for it.