Since taking the editorial helm at Mother Jones in late 2006, Clara and her co-editor, Monika Bauerlein, have won two National Magazine Awards for general excellence, relaunched MotherJones.com, founded an nine-person Washington bureau, given birth, and forgotten what it's like to sleep. It probably doesn't help she's on Twitter so much.
Clara Jeffery is co-editor of Mother Jones, where, together with Monika Bauerlein, she has spearheaded an era of editorial growth and innovation, marked by the addition of an eight-person Washington bureau, an overhaul of the organization's digital strategy and a corresponding tripling of traffic, and the winning of two National Magazine Awards for general excellence. Before joining the staff of Mother Jones, she was a senior editor of Harper's magazine. Ten pieces that she personally edited have been finalists for National Magazine Awards, in the categories of essay, profile, reporting, public interest, feature, and fiction. Works she edited have also been selected to appear in various editions of Best American Essays, Best American Travel Writing, Best American Sports Writing, and Best American Science Writing. Clara cut her journalistic teeth at Washington City Paper, where she wrote and edited political, investigative, and narrative features, and was a columnist. Jeffery is a graduate of Carleton College and Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism. Born in Baltimore and raised in Arlington, Virginia, she now resides in the Mission District of San Francisco with her partner Chris Baum and their three-year-old son, Milo. Their burrito joint of choice is El Metate.
As we sat in horror Friday morning watching the details of the Newtown school shootings emerge, one question kept pushing through the anger, the grief, the ache to go hug our own kids: What would it take? What, after Columbine, Virginia Tech, Aurora, the Sikh temple shooting, and so many others, what would it take for the nation to grapple with the fact that our gun policy is the equivalent of leaving your gun cabinet unlocked with a "Murderers Help Yourself" sign on it? President Obama is right: We can't say we’re powerless in the face of such carnage, or that the politics are too hard, or that such violence visited on our children year after year after year is somehow the price of our freedom. But what then must we do?
Gun control may be famously intractable, but it doesn't take a genius to spot a few key correlations:
There are a lot of people with mental-health problems, and services have been cut.
We have seen a record number of mass shootings this year—more than twice as many victims as in any previous year.
Even if you don't want to stipulate that 1 and 2 are causally related to 3, making it harder for dangerous people to get lethal weapons can only help.
Many Americans are in agreement, in principle, on point 4. So what would it take for that agreement to translate into action in the face of one of the most powerful lobbies the world has ever seen? What has it taken in the past to change the seemingly unchangeable, from slavery and child labor to the disenfranchisement of women and minorities?
Climate change's single appearance in the presidential debates was, well, anticlimactic. At the end of the second bout, after the candidates sparred interminably over whose love for fossil fuels was greater, moderator Candy Crowley said she'd decided not to call on an audience member who wanted to ask about global warming. "I had that question, all you climate change people," she said. "We just, you know, we knew that the economy was still the main thing."
Can Obama and Congress fix the climate? Come to our Climate Desk Live event in Washington, DC, on Tuesday, December 4 to find out. More info and RSVP here.
And there it is, everything you need to know about the Beltway mindset in one compact little diss. Climate change has been demoted to special, you-people interest on the order of, oh, animal testing or nuclear disarmament. Important, sure, but not like the things that grown-ups care about, like whether America can afford another nickel at the pump. Or, for that matter, whether Joe Biden played dirty pool in the VP debate by blinding Paul Ryan with his 500-watt smile. In November, the liberal media watchdog Media Matters took the trouble to count up how much time the major networks (minus MSNBC) had devoted to the vice presidential grin: 91 minutes. Climate change, on those same networks, had taken up a grand total of 51 minutes in the preceding three months.
Now that the question of Mitt Romney's departure from Bain Capital has blown up into a major subplot of the campaign season, it's worth reviewing how the controversy initially evolved—in part because, even as journalists (starting with MoJo's David Corn) have continued to uncover questions about the timing of Romney's retirement, professional fact-checking shops continue to maintain it's unfair to tie Romney to Bain's outsourcing investments.
June 20:The Washington Post's"Fact Checker" column gives the Obama campaign four Pinocchios—its worst rating—for an ad calling Mitt Romney a "corporate raider [who] shipped jobs to China and Mexico." WaPo notes that it is dinging the ad because two of the three outsourcing instances cited took place after Romney "stepped down from Bain to manage the Salt Lake City Olympics."
June 21: The Washington Post's Tom Hamburger reports that during Romney's tenure at Bain, the company "invested in a series of firms that specialized in relocating jobs done by American workers to new facilities in low-wage countries like China and India."
June 29: Factcheck.org publishes its own analysis of Obama's outsourcing ads. It also takes the Obama campaign to task for "stretching" the truth; Hamburger's story, it argues, "revealed that Bain invested in companies that did outsourcing. But the outsourcing resulted in the creation of jobs here and abroad." Obama campaign spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter responds with a six-page letter defending the campaign's assertions.
July 2: Mother Jonespublishes the first story reporting that Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings indicate Romney was involved with Bain beyond the point when he claims to have departed the firm, in 1999. In a piece on Bain's investments in a medical waste company that disposed of aborted fetuses, David Corn points out that there are
"…questions regarding the timing of Romney's departure from the private equity firm he founded…The SEC documents [reviewed by MoJo] undercut that defense, indicating that Romney still played a role in Bain investments until at least the end of 1999."
Justice John Paul Stevens had seen a lot of precedent overturned by the time the Supreme Court ruled on Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission in January 2010. Appointed to the court by Gerald Ford after a career as a distinguished Republican jurist, he'd been there for contentious cases on abortion, the death penalty, Gitmo, you name it. But none had prepared him for the way the court's new conservative majority, led by John Roberts, seized on an obscure campaign finance case expected to produce a narrow ruling and used it to shred nearly four decades of federal law.
The majority opinion in Citizens United takes up 57 pages, but it's pretty efficiently boiled down as follows: (1) Money is speech; (2) corporations are people; (3) therefore, under the First Amendment, the government can't stop corporations from spending money on politics pretty much however they choose.
Stevens penned an impassioned 90-page dissent lambasting the "glittering generality" of this construction. "Although they make enormous contributions to our society, corporations are not actually members of it," he wrote. "Our lawmakers have a compelling constitutional basis, if not also a democratic duty, to take measures designed to guard against the potentially deleterious effects of corporate spending in local and national races."
Stevens wasn't the only one appalled. Citizens United set off a torrent of outrage, culminating in the high drama of the president (a constitutional law professor, lest we forget) condemning the court in the State of the Union for opening "the floodgates for special interests—including foreign corporations—to spend without limit in our elections." Anger spanned the political spectrum (80 percent were opposed shortly after the ruling, 65 percent "strongly") and helped spark the Occupy movement.
The right "recognizes something that few on the left recognize: that campaign finance law underlies all other substantive law."
But Americans' disgust didn't stop the bagmen, on both sides of the aisle, from seizing the opportunity. Just ask Dan Maffei, a Democrat in upstate New York's 25th District who led Ann Marie Buerkle, a pro-life activist with scant political experience, by 12 points two weeks before the election. Then Karl Rove's American Crossroads buried himwith $400,000 worth of attack ads—and Buerkle won by a mere 648 votes.
So how to put elections back in the hands of voters? Here are the four options:
Constitutional amendment: Okay, it takes two-thirds majorities in both houses of Congress and ratification by three-fourths of the state legislatures. Nevertheless, we did just that to bring about Prohibition in 1919 and then to overturn it in 1933, and to lower the voting age to 18 in 1971. That last one wrapped in a mere five months; then again, the 27th Amendment, which regulated congressional raises, was in the works for 203 years. And recall the Equal Rights Amendment: "Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States." No-brainer, right? The ERA passed Congress in a landslide in '72 (354 to 24 in the House, 84 to 8 in the Senate). It was endorsed by Richard Nixon, included in the Republican Party platform, and ratified by 30 state legislatures within another year. And then Phyllis "Stop Unisex Bathrooms!" Schlafly whipped up a major froth, got enough culture war firebrands elected to state legislatures, and stopped it cold.
So yes, it's technically possible to pass an amendment clarifying that corporations are not quite the same as people and money is not quite the same as speech. (Several organizations, including People for the American Way and a new outfit called Move to Amend, are pushing for this.) But there's also a lot of dark-money groups waiting to underwrite a Schlafly-like play.
SCOTUS deathwatch: How about waiting for a conservative justice or two to die while Democrats hold the White House and the Senate? Yeeaah. Absent the plot devices of a John Grisham thriller, don't hold your breath. Then again, know who's been the master of this kind of waiting game? The folks who brought you Citizens United. When he started flooding the docket with anti-campaign-finance-regulation cases in the 1980s, conservative lawyer James Bopp Jr. was facing a hostile court. But he kept at it until the majority shifted—and slammed the ball he'd teed up.
Let the sun shine in: In the nearer term, there's the option the Roberts court expressly invited in Citizens United—full-monty disclosure. Not long after the ruling, Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) introduced the DISCLOSE Act with 114 cosponsors, just two of them Republicans. It would have banned most secret donations, forced companies to report their giving to shareholders, and shut foreign corporations out of electioneering. The bill's life was brief and full of ironies (among the clauses tacked on in the House was one exempting the NRA); it passed the House in an anemic 219-206 vote—36 Dems voted nay—and died, as all good legislation must, when the Senate fell one vote short (RIP Ted Kennedy) of a filibuster-proof 60 votes. Van Hollen has reintroduced the legislation, and with Sen. John McCain back in the reform business, it might just stand a chance.
But Congress is not the only game in town. Court after court has come down squarely on the side of disclosure, and in May, the DC court of appeals ruled that nonprofits like Rove's Crossroads GPS and the US Chamber of Commerce must reveal their donors' names. In another promising step, the IRS has made noises about revoking the tax exemption of dark-money groups.
Taxpayer-financed campaigns: No one likes big money in politics—least of all, perhaps, members of Congress who toil in the Hill's drab call centers, dialing donors to beg for cash. That's why public financing was key to the post-Watergate reforms, and until billionaire Steve Forbes opted out in 1996, every major presidential candidate took it. But the system failed to keep up with the cost of elections; this year, candidates could hope to get about $90 million in public financing, whereas Obama expects to raise up to $1 billion. Nevertheless, public financing can still make a big difference in down-ballot races, from the statehouse all the way to obscure but critical judicial elections. And keep in mind, today's state legislator is tomorrow's US senator.
As the rich get richer, throwing six-figure sums at presidential campaigns is just like tipping for good service.
In the end, all these avenues need to be pursued, and here's why: As Paul S. Ryan of the Campaign Legal Center told MoJo's Andy Kroll, the right "recognizes something that few on the left recognize: that campaign finance law underlies all other substantive law." In other words, no matter what you care about—climate change, abortion, taxes, net neutrality—it all comes back to who pays for our elections. Need a more selfish reason? Because the 1 percent have bent the system to their advantage, America's median household income—your income—is $40,000 lower than it would have been had incomes continued to keep pace with economic growth. Conversely, as the rich get richer, throwing six-figure sums at presidential campaigns is just like tipping for good service. Snake, meet tail.
So yes, we might agree with Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), no stranger to campaign rainmaking, that Citizens Unitedis the court's worst decision since it upheld segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson. But bad law is not without redress—if voters shame reluctant representatives into getting off the dark-money teat. "At bottom," wrote Justice Stevens, the court's opinion is "a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self-government since the founding…While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics."
Ready to explore for yourself? Here's choose-your-own adventure guide to the options, with plenty of links to more resources.
Bill Moyers invited us to come on his show this week to chat about dark money, the undisclosed, often untraceable political spending made possible by the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision. In a wide-ranging (and incredibly gracious) interview, he asked us about everything from the latest super-PAC machinations to the nexus between political money and income inequality. Watch:
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