Unveiling the Influence of Money in Politics: The Partisan Divide and Impact on Legislation

Let’s talk about money in politics. So, first off, the reason that there’s dark money in politics is because of the Citizens United decision, which was from the Supreme Court. And when you look at the votes by each Supreme Court justice and the party that nominated them, it’s very clear that only one party wanted big money in politics. If you look at legislation for campaign finance reform, for instance, the disclose act of 2022, which would require political candidates to disclose where all of their money comes from, only one party wanted to vote that Bill into law, and the Republican Party voted against it. If your biggest concern is campaign finance, there’s only one party that you should be voting for. And spoiler alert, it’s not the Republicans, the Green Party, or the Libertarian Party. Secondly, I’ve said this 100 times. Money does not buy election votes. Money buys attention for specific candidates. It does not buy votes for those candidates. Money can, however, through lobbying, influence candidates decisions on behalf of legislation. But that’s only if we get candidates in office who are willing to listen to those corporations. I don’t know how many times I need to mention this, but I keep rack of all of that stuff, and I also keep track of what bills they vote for and against. I made a spreadsheet calculator for house representatives that lets you define your own parameters and rules, and it will give every single member of The house of representatives. A grade based on what you set. If you don’t like money from somewhere, put that down there and it will grade them on that. If you don’t like a specific Bill, put that on there and it will grade them on that. And if you actually go and look at it, you’ll find that there are plenty of house representatives that you align closely with. And if people did their own research, they could vote out the people who take corporate money in the primaries. People get voted out in the primaries all the time. But lastly, these candidates don’t get money from the same places either. There’s a non profit called Open secrets.org who tracks all of the money in politics. While the two parties do technically share some funding sources, their overall funding sources are very different from one another. You look at the industries that pay the highest percentage to democratic campaigns, you’ll see that they’re filled with abortion rights organization, LGBTQIA, rights and issues organizations, teachers unions, gun control organization, industrial unions, building trade unions, environmental organizations, public sector unions, labor unions. We look at industries that donate most of their money to Republicans. We do get education, technology, which is great, but mainly we get stuff like coal mining, gun rights, for profit prisons. That’s 92% going to Republicans, oil and gas, natural gas mining, etcetera. These donors are not the same donors. Even if money was the only thing That these politicians based their opinions off of the money is actually dividing them even more.