Washington Examiner: Dark political spending? Try unions

Washington Examiner Editorial Published

February 12, 2016

Despite early hiccups, Hillary Clinton remains the odds-on favorite to be the Democratic nominee. Democrats are preparing to line up behind a presidential candidate who, along with her husband, took millions of dollars for giving short speeches. That money often came from parties that had current or future interests in front of the federal government and the agency she ran as secretary of state.

Somehow, they rationalize this, despite simultaneously believing that money spent to express and disseminate political opinions, the campaign finance system, is corrupting America and represents one of the nation's biggest problems.

Progressives were so upset by the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling of 2010 that they proposed and voted on a constitutional amendment repealing the First Amendment protections of political speech that undergirded the ruling. Yet even here, the left wants the public to overlook the darkest of dark money — the political money spent by labor unions.

Much of this spending does not even have to be disclosed to the Federal Election Commission, and it was being spent in large, secret amounts long before Citizens United came along. But the hundreds of millions that unions spend allow a very small minority of the population, namely the bosses of a few small and shrinking labor organizations, to wield disproportionate influence in a number of states.

Take the AFL-CIO, for example. According to disclosures from the Department of Labor, the nation's largest federation of unions spends nearly twice as much on political campaigning and lobbying ($47 million in 2013) as it does on representing union members in the workplace (only $26 million, or less than 14 percent of its budget). More than 90 percent of the political spending helps elect Democrats.

That's just one major union. On aggregate, union money really makes a difference. For all the left's hue and cry over the Koch Brothers' political spending in the 2014 cycle, seven unions spent more. The chief reason the left so hates the Citizens United decision is that it has nearly leveled the playing field between unions and all other kinds of for-profit and nonprofit corporations.

There is a compelling moral argument that labor unions should actually be held to a higher legal standard of transparency and disclosure than other organizations, rather than the lower one they enjoy today. Unions, unlike candidates, politically oriented nonprofits and super PACs, are granted monopoly representation privileges under federal law. They control the careers of their own captive donor class in the 25 non right-to-work states.

More than 11 million workers must pay into union coffers as a condition of their continued employment. Unions strenuously resist honoring workers' wishes to opt out of political contributions, which has led to many court cases. They also work hard to keep public disclosure requirements as lax as possible, so that union members remain in the dark along with everyone else.

The result is that union members have no real say over how this political money is spent. For example, even though 38 percent of union members voted for George W. Bush in the 2004 election, more than 95 percent of union political money in the race went to support his Democratic opponent, John Kerry.

An even more extreme case came up in 2002, when Democratic California Gov. Gray Davis was recalled from office. According to exit polls, a majority of California union members voted for the recall and supported one of the two main Republican candidates for governor (Arnold Schwarzenegger and Tom McClintock). California unions, however, spent nearly $33 million of their money to prevent the recall and keep Davis in office.

There is an important moral difference between the way unions spend on politics, out of captive members' paychecks, and the way that other political groups spend purely voluntary donations. People give to those other groups freely, because they support a cause. They can always stop giving if their interests diverge from the group's.

Not so with labor unions. Because of the monopoly privileges that unions are given under federal law, Big Labor's political spending should require more, not less transparency. And union political spending disclosures should be more, not less frequent than those of candidates, who cannot compel others to support their campaigns.

— Washington Examiner