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35 Harv. J. on Legis. 377 (1998)
Representative Democracy versus Corporate Democracy: How Soft Money Erodes the Principle of One Person, One Vote

handle is hein.journals/hjl35 and id is 383 raw text is: POLICY ESSAY
REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY VERSUS
CORPORATE DEMOCRACY:
HOW SOFT MONEY ERODES THE
PRINCIPLE OF ONE PERSON, ONE VOTE
SENATOR RUSSELL D. FEINGOLD*
The costs of political campaigns have spiraled in the past decade.
Individuals and groups have seized on this ever-increasing need to spend
money by purchasing access to politicians and influence over policymak-
ing. In this Essay, Senator Feingold explains how the explosion of soft
money, unlimited contributions to political parties from corporations,
labor unions, and wealthy individuals, has tilted the electoral playing
field away from ordinary Americans. A representative democracy is
thus being displaced by what the author calls a corporate democracy,
in which a person or group's influence over the political process is in
proportion to the amount of money they put into the process. The author
concludes by describing how legislation he has proposed, the McCain-
Feingold bill, would ban soft money and still be constitutional under the
Supreme Court's Buckley v. Valeo decision.
America's electoral process is rooted in the principle of one
person, one vote, but that principle is drowning in a flood of
unlimited political campaign contributions that are, through their
ability to secure privileged access to lawmakers, undermining
the integrity of both our elections and the legislative process.'
As candidates and parties battle to win elections, they are
forced to raise ever-greater sums of money.2 The current cam-
* United States Senator (D-Wis.). B.A., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1975;
Rhodes Scholar, Oxford University, Magdalen College, School of Jurisprudence, 1977;
J.D., Harvard Law School, 1979. Senator Feingold was elected to the Senate in 1992.
He serves on the Senate Judiciary, Foreign Relations, and Budget Committees, and on
the Special Committee on Aging. He is the ranking Democratic member on the
Constitution, Federalism and Property Rights Subcommittee of the Judiciary Commit-
tee. He also serves on the Democratic Policy Committee and on the Commission on
Security and Cooperation in Europe, also known as the Helsinki Commission.
The concept of one person, one vote has been exhaustively examined both in case
law and in scholarly articles. Many commentators trace the phrase to Justice William
Douglas's majority opinion in Gray v. Sanders. See 372 U.S. 368, 381 (1963) (The
conception of political equality from the Declaration of Independence, to Lincoln's
Gettysburg Address, to the Fifteenth, Seventeenth, and Nineteenth Amendments can
mean only one thing-one person, one vote.).
2 Congressional candidates raised a total of $790.5 million in the 1996 election cycle,
a 20% increase from the $659.3 million raised in 1992. See FEDERAL ELECTION
COmMISSION, Congressional Fundraising and Spending Up Again in 1996, Apr. 14,
1997 (visited Apr. 27, 1998) <http://www.fec.gov/press/canye96.htm>. The Demo-
cratic and Republican parties raised $638.1 million combined in the 1996 election

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