Money in politics

Ask citizens what is wrong with Washington and this is the first answer, in almost the same words behind every party door: money in politics. It is also the easiest form of capture to establish, because most of it is filed, dated and public. The problem was never finding it. The problem was that nobody put the filings next to the roll calls and did the arithmetic.

The pipeline, end to end

Money reaches a vote through a chain, and each link is separately documented:

• Campaign contributions — who funded the seat, and in what proportion from inside the district versus outside it.
• Leadership PACs and party committees — money that moves between members, which buys standing inside the body rather than votes outside it.
• Independent expenditure — spending that is legally not coordinated and practically decisive, the shape Citizens United made routine.
• Lobbying — the paid, professional presence in the room where text is written, which is a different and larger industry than campaign money.
• The job on the other side — the position waiting after the last term. This is the most valuable item in the chain and the least reported, because it is legal and it arrives after anyone stopped watching.

The test

Legality is not the question. Almost all of this is legal; that is the complaint, not the defence. The test this site applies is narrower and it can fail:

Does the vote track the money rather than the district?

Which means, concretely: take a member's recorded votes on an instrument, take the funding record around it, and take the district's own stated position. When the vote lines up with the funding and away from the district, repeatedly, on instruments where the two point in different directions, that is a finding. When it does not, there is no finding, and we publish that too.

What we never do with it

• We never say a member was bribed. That is a crime, and unless a court has established it we do not state it as fact. We publish the funding record, the voting record, and the arithmetic between them, and let the reader draw the conclusion the record supports.
• We never treat a donation as proof on its own. A contribution is a fact about a donor, not yet a fact about a vote.
• We never publish a total without its sources. Every figure links to the filing it came from.

Where the numbers come from

Federal filings, the official roll-call record, lobbying disclosures and the contract record — downloaded, versioned and republished so a stranger can clone the whole thing and redo the work without asking us for anything. See Open Data and the sourcing discipline in Evidence.

What it feeds

A member's voting record feeds the Monkey Award and the Llama Award, and nothing else — see The Wall. Money is context around the vote; it never enters an award by itself.

The statutes that make this pipeline legal are catalogued in Problem Laws, and the bill text that would close them is in Fixing the Law.

Also in this area

• A globalist deep state — the route that survives elections.
• Intelligence service capture — the route that runs through what a member is allowed to know.
• Exposing the hijack — what publishing a proven finding requires.
• Removing the hijack — the ballot, and nothing else.