Naming and Shaming Trump’s Big Donors Is Fair Game

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Joaquin Castro, member of the House from San Antonio and chairman for his twin brother’s presidential campaign, kicked up some dirt on Tuesday by tweeting out a list of prominent San Antonio residents who donated to Donald Trump. A bunch of Republicans, and quite a few others, think he did something wrong; most Democrats are defending him. I’m in the mushy middle on this one.

The basic question is: Why should we have disclosure laws that make political donations public? It’s mostly because of what that reveals about politicians, not about donors.

For one thing, disclosure gives valuable information to voters about what a politician intends to do if elected. In fact, political scientist Adam Bonica has found that donations can be used to predict a politician’s general ideological orientation and position on specific public policy issues. That’s highly useful information for voters! But that’s not all. Many people argue that disclosure is the best weapon against quid-pro-quo corruption; politicians will be less likely, perhaps, to give private benefits to supporters if voters (or at least the news media) is aware of who those supporters are.  

Indeed, given the pattern of Supreme Court decisions, strong disclosure laws may eventually be the only form of campaign finance law that can be at all effective and legal, at least if the court eventually eliminates contribution limits. As someone who isn’t a big fan of those limits (although I do think they’re constitutional), I’ve argued that meaningful disclosure would be easier without limits, because reporters could more easily identify and report on big donors.

This suggests that one reason for the reaction against Castro’s action was that the point of campaign finance disclosure is as a check against politicians, not donors – which means politicians should be shamed for accepting donations, but donors wouldn’t be shamed for making them. At least not unless donors have corrupt intent, and in this case Castro is accusing them of malignant political action, not corruption. One might even say that to the extent that people use disclosure to go after donors (even in a relatively mild way), it’s a misuse of the data, and undermines the case for strict and strong disclosure. If disclosure is used to go after individual donors, it probably is bad for the cause of campaign finance reform.

But I think the other reason people are upset with Castro is less justifiable.  There’s a strain of the U.S. political culture that wants to treat politics as essentially a personal, private activity. That’s part of what gives us the secret ballot (something unknown in the first hundred years or so of the republic). It’s also related to rhetoric against party politics and against interest groups. The vision of privacy goes with the idea that autonomous citizens should vote based on careful study of individual candidates and their policy positions, rather than with one’s party or political group. It’s a fundamentally anti-political view of politics, which is very much a public activity.

And to be clear, privatized politics doesn’t create some neutral ideal. It helps those groups and individuals who have abundant individual politically relevant resources, and hurts those individuals and groups who have fewer individual resources, but are part of potentially powerful groups. 

So where does that leave us? First, let’s not overdo it. This was public information, thanks to campaign finance disclosure laws. Castro didn’t publish personal addresses or phone numbers. He’s hardly the first person to publicly discuss campaign supporters, including donors, by name. He stuck to those in his own community. They were also people who had donated the maximum amount allowed by law. These are not folks without resources.

But if we want to encourage participation in politics, we want to discourage politicians from shaming ordinary citizens for participating. That’s where Castro really straddled the line.

To the extent that his list contains people who are easily bullied out of participation, it’s not so good – but to the extent that these are people with plenty of resources and very public presences in the community, it’s the people on his list who are, either directly or indirectly through their political actions, doing the bullying, and Castro is merely standing up for their victims and for decency in the public square.

I’d put it this way: If the San Antonio Express-News were to do a story on prominent local Trump supporters, would the journalists have included the names on Castro’s list? If so, he did nothing wrong. If not, he probably erred to some extent. I live in San Antonio and recognized some of the names, but not all of them, which puts me, as I said at the top, right in the mushy middle. Politicians shouldn’t bully the powerless – but if the powerful participate in politics, then they are taking public action and can quite fairly be criticized.

It's not entirely clear that supporting the public policy preferences of campaign supporters is corrupt at all; some argue that it's exactly how democracy is supposed to work. Campaign donations are a bit tricky in this regard. Everyone agrees that bribes paid directly to a member of Congress in exchange for, say, changing a vote on the House floor would be corrupt. At the other extreme, almost everyone would agree that it's okay for politicians to align their policy choices with the preferences of voters, and most people would say that it's fine if, say, a politician adopts the positions of campaign volunteers and party activists. Campaign donations are a middle ground; they're a form of support, and they don't go directly into the politician's pocket, and yet some believe that they are inherently more corrupting than volunteer time would be.

This is assuming, by the way that the objections are in good faith, which is a bit hard to take seriously from Trump and Trump-supporting Republicans given that he's used the presidency to attack individual private citizens for their political activity. However, that some Republicans may just be working the refs here doesn't mean we shouldn't take the question seriously.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Philip Gray at philipgray@bloomberg.net

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics and policy. He taught political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio and DePauw University and wrote A Plain Blog About Politics.

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