Alongside the affluent angels who back Broadway shows and the horse fanciers who invest fortunes to own a stakes winner lies a new class of American mogul — ultra-rich political donors buying a sense of power by giving unlimited money to the single-candidate super PACs that are already dominating and undermining the 2016 presidential campaign. Single-candidate super PACs are proving irresistible because they can legally accept open-ended donations while inventing elaborate fictions to pretend they are independent of a candidate, even as they plainly are not.
New faces have appeared on the scene as the super PACs fuel what will be the costliest election ever — instant heavyweights in the political casino like Norman Braman, a Florida billionaire who has long bolstered the career and personal finances of Senator Marco Rubio, a Republican, and is reported ready to invest $10 million or more for the senator’s presidential bid. Mr. Braman would do this through a dedicated super PAC, supportive but avowedly independent of the Rubio campaign. This pretext would circumvent far smaller limits of a few thousand dollars per donor that Mr. Rubio’s formal campaign must observe.
A striking aspect of the early free-for-all for the Republican nomination is how uncontroversial Mr. Rubio’s reliance on Mr. Braman’s powerful fortune and friendship has been. Mr. Braman has bankrolled the senator’s past campaigns and legislative agenda, subsidized his salary teaching at a university, and employed his wife in the Braman philanthropy. As a statehouse leader in Florida, Mr. Rubio steered taxpayer funds to Mr. Braman’s favored causes, insisting merit was the only standard.
Yet none of the other candidates are asking whether the senator fears being compromised, or at least seen to be compromised, by his debt to such a singular patron should he win the White House. None warns of the corrupting risks of patronage through big-money politics. Such forbearances arise from a simple reality: Mr. Rubio’s rivals are themselves searching for super PAC sugar daddies, even as they dispatch campaign proxies to manage these “independent” money operations.
There is a desperately needed solution already at hand in Congress that would stop super PACs in their tracks. It would ban the cynical coordination now underway with candidates’ political machines as an obvious violation of campaign law. This would leave them, like other political committees, with donors limited to $5,000 a year, not the seven-figure checks now being written.
The measure, the Empowering Citizens Act sponsored by two Democratic representatives, David Price and Chris Van Hollen, has drawn little support from Congress. Lawmakers are more interested in protecting their own fat-cat donors, not the voters’ best interests. As for the presidential candidates, who should be the first to endorse this legislation for cleaner campaigning, they already are too deeply into the trough of the super PAC donors.
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