In Defense of Political Anonymity

Former FEC Chief Bradley Smith has a good article in the winter issue of City Journal on the problems with campaign finance disclosure.

Imagine if the George W. Bush administration, in its waning days, had introduced something called the Patriot II Act. To prevent terrorists and foreign agents from influencing American governments and political parties, the act would require political campaigns and other groups to report the names, addresses, and employers of their supporters to the federal government, which would enter the information into a database. The act would also give businesses access to this database, enabling them to make hiring decisions, credit determinations, and other choices based on political activity. Can anyone doubt that Patriot II would be widely considered a gross violation of civil liberties? …

Federal and state laws would still set the threshold for disclosure far too low. People who donate $20 to a Michigan candidate, or even $200 to a federal one, will exercise zero influence on the candidate if he’s elected. That their contributions—and addresses and employers—need to be publicly disclosed to prevent corruption is a proposition that can scarcely be stated with a straight face.  …

As one understandably anonymous lobbyist told the Wall Street Journal in 2007, Democrats quickly put out the word that “if you have an issue on trade, taxes, or regulation, you’d better be a donor and you’d better not be part of any effort to run ads against our freshmen incumbents.” Disclosure is what makes the threats work.  …

After last year’s passage in California of Proposition 8, which amended the state’s constitution to ban same-sex marriage, the proposition’s financial backers found themselves subjected to a wide range of retaliatory measures. Richard Raddon, director of the Los Angeles Film Festival, had contributed $1,500 in support of Prop 8; he was forced to step down after opponents of the proposition threatened to boycott the Festival. El Coyote, a popular restaurant in Los Angeles, faced weeks of protests and boycotts because the owner’s daughter had contributed $100 to support Prop 8; police were eventually called to control the protesters, and the daughter left town. Scott Eckhern, the longtime artistic director of Sacramento’s California Musical Theatre, was forced to resign because he’d contributed $1,000 to the campaign. The Cinemark movie-theater chain suffered boycotts because its CEO, Alan Stock, had donated $9,999.