The progressive catechism teaches that there is “too much money” in politics. A codicil to this tenet, written in fine print, is that the term “money” does not apply to money from George Soros, government employees unions, private-sector unions, trial lawyers, Democratic-oriented private-equity firms and white-shoe law firms, Silicon Valley executives or entertainment celebrities.
The catechism does not include the truism that the way to reduce the amount of money in politics is to reduce the amount of politics in the allocation of money and of opportunities for making it. This would eviscerate the progressive agenda, which involves government, aka politics, redistributing wealth, regulating the creation of it, and rescuing “fairness” from “market failure,” aka markets producing results that progressives dislike. Now comes a strange proposal from one of the stranger Democratic presidential campaigns, that of New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand.
As a congresswoman representing a moderate upstate district, she earned a 100 percent score from the NRA. She supported repeal of D.C.’s gun restrictions and said she kept rifles under her bed. She also opposed driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants, and was a member of the Blue Dog Coalition of occasionally conservative Democrats. When, however, in 2009 she was appointed to the Senate to replace Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Gillibrand discovered her inner progressive, even opposing repeal of D.C.’s gun-control regime.
Arriving in the Senate, Gillibrand decided that she should take her talents 16 blocks west on Pennsylvania Avenue. Seeking a lane of her own in the Democrats’ congested nomination scramble, her signature proposal is to purify politics using “democracy dollars.”
