(soft piano music) Lemonade. - Thanks for listening to Hussam Minhaj Doesn't Know. Listen to and follow, Hussam Minhaj Doesn't Know, add free on Amazon Music, or just ask Alexa. Alexa, play the podcast, Hussam Minhaj Doesn't Know on Amazon Music. Also, with Amazon Music Unlimited, you can now listen to your favorite music, podcasts, and audiobooks, all in the Amazon Music app. Listen to Hussam Minhaj Doesn't Know on Amazon Music. - The US military almost launched a strike on a Chinese vessel due to an erroneous AI report, a military report produced with the help of artificial intelligence incorrectly deduced. The Chinese boat was carrying components for nuclear weapons. I read about what was almost World War Three on ground news, which is today's sponsor and HMDK's favorite independent news source. Ground news is a platform that shows a breakdown of publications reporting on a story, evaluating potential biases, and the factuality of these publishers. It's not about eliminating bias. We've all got biases, right? It's about being a more informed consumer of the news. If you look up the story on ground news, you will see that publications from the left, right, and center are all pretty equally reporting on this story, which just shows this was concerning across the board. The takeaway is, without scrutinization by human beings, we could have started a war. It is important to analyze the details ourselves go to ground news.com/hussam to subscribing at 40% off the Unlimited Axis Vantage Plan, which breaks down to just five bucks a month with my discount. That's ground news.com/hussam. We should all be thinking critically. Ground news can help, so subscribe today. A record high 89% of Americans agree that corruption is widespread in their government. Trump pulled in at least $2 billion in his first year back in the White House and made more stock trades than all members of Congress combined, who by the way, they're still allowed to make stock trades, which is fucking crazy. A sitting senator was convicted a couple years ago for having a closet full of gold bars from Egypt, like a goddamn Mediterranean pirate, and the president's son-in-law is playing Lawrence of Arabia in the Middle East, but rather than focus on the Chris Nolan, IMAX, 70 millimeter spectacle of Washington corruption. This episode, I wanna focus on boring, every day, completely legal political corruption, the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet of corruption. Campaign financing. The 2020 and 2024 election cycles each cost about $15 billion, over five billion on each presidential race alone, and in this 2026 mid-term cycle, political ads are projected to hit a record of nearly $12 billion, with at least a billion from anonymous donors. Now, in America, there is one Supreme Court case that is usually cited as being the source of all these problems with money and politics. - We gotta get rid of the citizens united, Supreme Court decision, so billionaires do not continue to buy elections. - Ending citizens united is wildly popular on both sides of the aisle. - We will overturn citizens united and bring democracy back to the people. - But this problem goes back way longer than citizens united back to the 1700s, when the problem wasn't money and politics. It was booze. I'm serious. When George Washington ran for the Virginia House in 1757, he literally bribed voters with alcohol, 47 gallons of beer, 35 gallons of wine, and 70 gallons of rum punch. That is how our democracy started, black out drunk, voting for a guy with wooden slave teeth. Over the next century, America tried to sober up and build a system of regulation around campaign finance. It shifted between tight restrictions, like bands on corporate cash, disclosure requirements, and spending caps, and Supreme Court decisions that struck those down. But in 1971, the Federal Election Campaign Act laid the groundwork for the system that we have today. It created a legal framework for corporations and unions to form political action committees or PACs. Now you might think that allowing giant pools of money to influence elections led immediately to corruption. But that is not true. It took four months. - Democratic National Committee is trying to solve a spy mystery. It began before dawn Saturday when five intruders were captured by police inside the offices of the committee in Washington. At its core, Watergate was essentially a campaign finance scandal. A $25,000 check intended for Nixon's reelection campaign had ended up in the bank account of one of the burglars. And a lot of the money from Nixon's reelection campaign funds turned out to be from illegal corporate donations. - Watergate investigators learned that right before a disclosure deadline, the Nixon campaign had received tens of millions in confidential donations. It included corporations, which were legally barred from any political giving. - This money bought results. The president of the United States was exchanging government policy for money. - I just love how scandalized they were by this. They were just like the president was exchanging policy for money. He would never do that. The president is America's pop pop. Watergate brought about a wave of reforms that in 1974, the Federal Election Commission or FEC was created to enforce new limits on money and politics. And for a good 10 minutes, it seemed like the system was working. But in a pattern that would happen again. And again, and again, the Supreme Court intervened and said, actually corruption is totally fine. I mean, well, they technically didn't say corruption is fine, but in 1976, they did say that spending money to express political ideas is protected speech. So, money equaled speech, which meant having more money gave you more speech. Setting up a situation 50 years later where the richest person in the world won't shut the f*** up. And we all have to listen to it. Once the court made it clear that money was speech, money started talking a lot. In the 1980s and 1990s, elections were flooded with soft money donations to political parties instead of candidates. Soft money got so out of control that at one point Bill Clinton was letting big democratic donors have sleepovers in the White House in the Lincoln bedroom. It's called the Lincoln bedroom. And while Lincoln never actually slept there, a lot of other people did, including big money contributors to the Democratic Party. The president's overnight guest contributed at least $7 million to the Democrats. Oh, that's how you know the money was good. Good old Bill, pump and dump Clinton. Let them stay the night. The 1976 presidential election cost about $114 million. But by 2000, fueled by soft money, that cost had gone up to $1.4 billion. Again, Congress stepped in and tried to fix the system, limiting soft money with the 2002 bipartisan campaign reform act. But again, the Supreme Court stepped in and shut it down. The sharply divided justices declared that the law violates the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech for all, even corporations. In Citizens United, the court basically reason since money is free speech, and people have free speech, and corporations are essentially people, corporations should be free to spend as much money as they want on elections, which is f*cking crazy. You don't get to treat corporations as people only for the good stuff. Free speech, full rights, everything they want, but no diarrhea. How is that fair? If you're a person, you have to get diarrhea, but giving corporations a soul. Wasn't the only crazy thing from that decision. The court also decided that independent money couldn't have a corrupting influence on politicians. Only quid pro quo corruption could do that. So if you say-- Hello, sir. Can you please do a corruption for me in return for this bag of money? And they say, thank you. Absolutely, my good man. I will take that bag of money and give you this receipt, or one corruption. Unless it's that cartoonishly evil, monopoly man, obviously evil, it's technically not corruption. Citizens United is infamous because it helped open the door to what we now call super PACs, PACs that can raise and spend unlimited money independent of candidates. To maintain their status as independent, super PACs are not allowed to coordinate with candidates. And they don't coordinate. They simply engage in a process of organizing people or groups so that they work together properly and well. For example, take Red Boxing. This is a technique where candidates feature information on their websites, sometimes in a red box like this. In that box, they describe what they would want and add to emphasize hypothetically. For anyone who happens to be doing that, then when super PACs run ads supporting these candidates, the bullet points from the candidate's website are often the same ones emphasized in the super PAC ads. They just control C control V, that entire campaign, like a sophomore with ADHD. So look, this is obvious. We know this. At this point, you're all cynical about this issue, and so am I. The corruption is so brazen. And the Supreme Court is so cool with it that the whole concept of dark money buying elections has become quaint. Billionaires don't even need to hide the ball anymore. In 2024, Elon Musk alone spent $290 million to elect Donald Trump and other Republicans. And when they later disobeyed him, Elon tweeted, "Without me, Trump would have lost the election. Dems would control the house, and the Republicans would be $5149 in the Senate, such in gratitude." You know how you feel when you buy a hot latte and they hand you a nice latte? It's kind of how Elon Musk feels about Trump. In the current midterm cycle, the 20 biggest mega donors have poured $1.2 billion into races so far. Mark Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, $115 million. Elon Musk's $90 million. Miriam Adelson's $67 million. Charles Hawley had McDollar of the fourth, $88 million. Okay, just to be real, Charles Holleyhann McDollar, the fourth, isn't real, but in a deeper sense.
He is, you know what I mean? Along with billionaires, direct corporate political spending has more than tripled since the last midterms with over half of spending coming from crypto, online betting, big tech, and AI companies. Basically, if you're watching an ad and screaming at the TV, why is my favorite athlete and/or actor endorsing this shit? Those companies that you're mad at? Those companies are the lifeblood of our democracy, this midterm cycle, but maybe the only pack more hated than those industries is one that doesn't represent an industry at all. It represents a country, A-PAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or as it's known in my YouTube comment section, "Boom!" Now, A-PAC has been around since the 1950s, working as a lobby group to maintain bipartisan support for Israel. And goddamn, they have done an incredible job. But by 2022, opinion on Israel started to shift. For some reason, I don't know why. So in January of that year, A-PAC's new pack made its first donations to federal candidates. - Washington is changing, and we needed a new political model to adapt and stay effective. So 11 months ago, we launched the A-PAC pack and its political portal to reassert our role of defining who in Congress is pro-Israel and to give us a tool to raise significant resources for our friends running for the House and Senate. I love how she says our friends. I mean, any friend group that includes Ted Cruz, Akim Jeffries, and John Federman is pretty terrifying. I mean, what do they even do for fun, genocide? In just a few years, A-PAC has become one of the biggest spenders in American political campaigns. In the 2024 election cycle, A-PAC affiliated groups spent about $46 million in ads, including $14.5 million, just to defeat New York Congressman Jamal Bowman in the Democratic primary. And they openly advertise the strategy. And we take the political fight to our opponents, helping defeat anti-Israel candidates running for the House or Senate. As of early August, A-PAC affiliated groups had spent over $67 million on the 2026 midterms, including over $30 million in Michigan alone to oppose Abil Al-Sayed in his primary unsuccessfully. And those numbers are just ads. Overall spending has already topped $100 million, but part of why A-PAC needs to spend more is because their opposition is growing stronger. A Gallup poll earlier this year found that Democrats now sympathize far more with Palestinians than Israelis. So much so that some Democratic candidates started making A-PAC spending against them part of their campaign message. I'm not taking corporate PAC money. I'm not taking A-PAC money. And I'm not going to pretend that's a small thing. You know, if Congressman Stevens makes it, or Mike Rogers wins, either way, Israel will win. A-PAC is perfectly fine with either of my two opponents because they know that they will have a comfortable, reliable vote in the US Senate. - I think what A-PAC is doing is corrosive for American democracy is bad for Israel, is bad for Palestinians, is bad for the world. - To chat about all this, I sat down with someone who's been following money and politics for almost 20 years, Michael Bechel. He has been a reporter for the Center for Public Integrity and Open Secrets. And since 2017, he has been the director of Money and Politics Reform at issue one, a pro-democracy nonprofit, working to reduce the influence of money and politics. We talked about how fundraising dominates the time of members of Congress. - If you are in one of the most competitive Senate districts, you might be raising more than $100,000 a day. - A day? - A day. The rising influence of A-PAC. - It's become a much more highly charged issue than it was even just a few years ago. - In his organization's plan to turn it around in a post-Trump America. - Our campaign is now called The Great Reset. - A little chairman, mal-coded, but I get the idea. I'm Hossam Inhach and I approve this message, except for the diarrhea joke. I was bullied into that one. ♪ Hurry right away, lonely days don't fit ♪ - Guys, life is expensive. You got groceries, gas rent. They're all getting insane. Inflation is making me feel every business I enter is trying to extort me. Just buying a latte is putting me into fight or flight. With all these expenses, we can't afford for our banks to be our biggest ops. In this economy? No, that's why I recommend you bank with chime. Chime is changing the way people bank. They're not like traditional old banks who pile on hidden fees in gatekeep. They're perks. Chime offers the most rewarding fee-free banking for real. You got no overdraft fees, no monthly fees, no minimum balance fees, as for rewards. Oh, you can get 5% cashback on chime card in a category of choice, like gas or groceries, all while building credit through regular everyday spending, no credit check. And if you're ever in a pinch, spot me, let's you overdraft up to 200 bucks. Fee-free. Join the millions who are already banking fee-free with America's number one choice for banking. Head to chime.com/husson. That is chime.com/husson. Sign up now. It only takes a few minutes. - Chime is a fintech, not a bank. Banking services for my pay and chime card provided by Chime's bank partners. Optional products and services may have fees or charges. Stateed annual percentage yield and cashback for chime prime only. No minimum balance required. Checking account ranking based on the JD Power Survey published October 20th, 2025. For more information on APY rates, my pay, spot me, and travel perks. Go to chime.com/disclosures. - I'm a health conscious guy. And as you may have clocked from my Instagram, I have been traveling. This presents me with a unique problem. I want supplements to help me stay healthy, but I can't go through TSA sounding like a rainstick from my kids' music class. I mean, I could, but I'd rather not. Can I have a shred of dignity, please? It's just too much to pack up a gazillion different supplement pills, keep them organized and labeled. And then remember to take them on the go. IAMate has completely fixed this entire issue for me. IAMate is the way to simplify supplements once and for all. It includes 16 different supplements that replace 90 ingredients across nine major organ systems and one drink. The problem with supplements is you can easily accumulate a cabinet full of them, but you don't need to. IAMate covers them all for just $2.61 a day. According to a clinical trial conducted by the San Francisco Research Institute 95% of people who tried IAMate for 12 weeks felt more energy. Thanks to IAMate now, I just worry about one sachet a day and I can move in silence like my heroes. Shout out to Leonardo Donatello, Raphael and Michelangelo. Go to IAMatehealth.com/husson right now or click on the link in the description and use code "husson" for a free welcome kit. Five free travel sachets, plus 10% off your order. That is code "husson" at IAMatehealth.com/husson. Code "husson" at IAMatehealth.com/husson. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. I was on What Not Vibing last night, picking out some vintage shirts and jackets. You guys gotta try it. I love thrifting, but as a working father of two, my free time is pretty limited. And I am definitely not free during normal store hours. What not is like thrifting, but better. Sellers are live answering questions about the pieces and showcasing each item individually. So you don't accidentally pass something over like you might in the racks. That's why I think sellers, especially, should check out What Not. What Not is where sellers shine because they can connect with customers personally, which keeps them coming back. Now you might be saying this sounds cool, but what is What Not exactly? So What Not is the largest dedicated live shopping platform, whether it's cosmetics, collectibles, electronics, or even luxury fashion, sellers are building real-thriving businesses. Anyone can sell on What Not, no matter how large or small your business is. People selling on What Not sell 10 times more than on other major marketplaces. Across What Not, the number of sellers making over $1 million a year has doubled. That's because you're not just listing products, you are building real connections with buyers. What Not buyers spend more than an hour a day in the app. They're not just browsing, they are engaged, they're buying, they're coming back. As I was thrifting, I watched the seller go through their inventory crazy fast, way quicker than a brick and mortar store. So this is wild stuff. Search What Not, wh-a-t-n-o-t in the app store, download, and you can start selling right away. Can we reframe this as just corruption, all caps? Absolutely. This is essentially legalized corruption, and there's huge stakes of money involved. I have felt the same way. You're basically just giving politicians a ton of money to do what you want. Is that essentially what this is? That's what a lot of special interests are hoping is the case. I think there's a lot of us who like to say we get the government that they pay for, and we need reforms to dramatically change that equation. Otherwise, we've got the oligarchs, we've got the billionaires, we've got the corporate special interests, who just continue to pump in huge sums of money while trying to set the agenda in Washington. So we're speaking several weeks before the 2026 midterms. You've been covering campaign finance aka corruption for now several decades. Would you say, I mean, it's as bad as it's ever been? 120 years ago, you saw the excesses of the gilded age lead to huge amounts of corporate money in politics. There was a famous Republican operative at the time who like to say there's two things that are important in politics. The first one is money, and I don't remember what the second one is. And that led to ultimately Republican president, Theodore Roosevelt, signing into law the first major campaign finance reform act in 1907, something called the Tillman Act that prevented direct corporate contributions to candidates and parties. And that was the foundation for a whole bunch of progressive error reforms. Fast forward to 2010, the Supreme Court citizen
united decision essentially rolls back that regulation. So technically at the federal level corporations can't give directly to a candidate or a party committee, but they can give to these super PACs. They can spend in ways that are tantamount to direct support for a candidate. Well, let's double click on this. Let's focus on this. Let's talk about patient zero. The citizens united decision. Now, what did citizens united specifically change? That made it uniquely bad. Yes, citizens united made things uniquely bad by allowing direct corporate, independent expenditures and politics to use the legal jargon. That basically means corporations can spend on ads that say vote for or vote against a candidate. You don't like somebody, like you're the crypto industry, you're the AI industry. Now you can tap your corporate treasuries to the tune of tens of millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars, and start unleashing ads. And we're literally seeing it. This election cycle, specifically with groups like crypto companies and AI companies that are running this playbook on a whole new level. But in addition to that, where we sometimes know that this is crypto money or this is AI money or this is money from some other corporate or labor union donor, there's a whole bunch of money now coming into the system through dark money groups. That basically means the public is kept in the dark about who's bankrolling these ads. So you've got nonprofits that are often sort of pop up, fly by night organizations, they come in, they brand themselves with something uniquely patriotic or colloquial, who doesn't like freedom or fairness or freedom now. Exactly, I mean, and amazing. Cool. Yeah. And so you've got these groups that the public doesn't know who's funding them, that are spending huge amounts of money on ads to support a candidate. And the candidates most likely do know who is the corporate master behind those types of dark money groups. And those big donors, those wealthy special interests, those mega donors and corporations are able to put a thumb on the scale without any public accountability without us being able to follow the money without voters knowing who's trying to buy access and influence. And we went from basically not seeing any secret spending in election before Citizens United to this last election cycle in the 2024 federal elections, $1.9 billion. It's billion with a B up from one billion in 2020. So this like trend line is just going off the charts. Let's talk about dark money, right? Yeah. I wanted to sit down with an expert. I think you can help us break this down. There are three forms that dark money takes. There's 501 c4s. Those are not profits, correct? Correct. Okay. You have donations to super PACs. Is that correct? Sure. Okay. And then you have pop up super PACs. Take me through those. Yeah. Yeah. And I want to say number one, number two, are pretty related also. There's certain types of legal entities that because of Citizens United can spend freely in elections as long as it's not their primary purpose. If it's their primary purpose, guess what? You're supposed to register as a super PAC, report all your donors, and you get the green light to spend all the money in the world on politics, on direct advocacy that says vote for vote against a candidate. But for people who are trying to game the system, you might start a 501 c4 nonprofit, which are those groups that are for social welfare, for lobbying, expenditures. You might even start a 501 c6 trade association or a limited liability company trying to shield your identity from the public. And you, as one of these entities, can run ads directly. If you've got a good lawyer, an aggressive lawyer, they might even say you could spend like 49% of your money on ads and say vote for vote against a candidate and that other 51%. Well, you can spend that on ads that say, call your congressman and tell them not to, you know, murder puppies or, you know, support this, you know, great legislation that your industry backs in Congress. So there's a lot of painting of politicians that technically non-political ads spending even gets, gets counted for. And if, if that's to front facing for you, you don't want your group's name out there on any of those ads. You can give money to a super PAC, which in turn will run those same types of ads, you know, they can run those direct hard hitting ads that say vote for vote against a candidate. They'll take your money. A person like me will pour over these obscure government filings and say, oh, look, this super PAC, which is supposed to disclose all its donors, disclose a bunch of money from a dark money organization. Democratic groups do this, Republican groups do this. It makes it very frustrating for the public to actually understand who's trying to buy influence and curry favor with our politicians. And the third way that you sort of see gaming of the system is if you've got a window right before the election, like right now, as a lot of people are listening to this interview. Within the final couple weeks of the election, a group can pop up, start running ads. And because our election laws, our campaign finance laws are so antiquated, they're not going to have to disclose their donors until after election day. And there is legislation in Congress that would actually fix this, candidates when they're raising money. In the final weeks of an election, they actually have to report things in almost real time to say, hey, I just got another $1,000, $5,000. Super PACs could play by those same rules. If Congress passed new rules for them to say this. And we wouldn't have these sneaky shady groups popping up, you know, sort of like mushrooms after the rain and then immediately disappearing after election day. So in Citizens United, the court basically said that money in politics is fine if it is disclosed. Is that correct? That is correct. Okay. So if I, Hassan Minhaj, create a 501c4 called tech psychos for America. Yes. Right? That donates to a super PAC called monarchy is cool. Okay. Monarchy is cool has to disclose that tech psychos for America donated, but we don't know who donated to tech psychos for America. And in graphics, we can just show all these arrows coming in into tech cycles for America, but we can just put question marks there because we don't know who donated. Is that cool? That is very cool. That summarizes what's going on here. If you wanted to be active in the final couple weeks of an election, your super PAC wouldn't even have to disclose that it was funded by tech psychos for America until after election day instead of before election day. And that's if you were a pop-up super PAC. So it's basically created a middleman to get your money into what you wanted to do. Yeah. It was just middleman super PAC. It's a little, it's like a shell game. And so you're going to see all these new ads from this new group. And they have a legal requirement to tell you who paid for them, but it's not going to be until after election day, although there is really solid legislation at the federal level that would change that and make those groups have to disclose their donors beforehand and not just after the game clock has run out. So super PACs can also name themselves anything they want, right? Yeah. As long as they don't use the name of a candidate in their group. So so hypothetically, Republicans can fund something like we stand abortion pack and then run attack ads against Democrats in the primaries. Is that correct? Correct. So it can be something as insane as that. Yeah. In 2024, Elon Musk funded a group called RBG pack, which was very successful in Pennsylvania had a little website about how former justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg would have agreed with Trump on abortion. And Elon's Elon Musk's name wasn't anywhere close to the disclosures that viewers were seeing when they saw the ads or went to the website and really should be. I mean, that message hits differently if you know that it's funded by Democrats or funded by Republicans or funded by, you know, a tech trillionaire. So explain this to me. 501c4s can't technically make politics their primary activity. Yes. What's with that? How do they kind of justify the shadiness here? What's what's what are the other things they're doing? Yeah. They can do a little dance that sort of takes them up to a limit. And if you've got a really aggressive lawyer that limit might even be 49% of your spending on ads that say vote for vote against. And that other 51% they're going to say is our real primary purpose. Some groups, they engage in a lot of lobbying, you know, they hire lobbyists or they run ads that say vote for vote against this legislation that we're considering in Congress. Yes. But they can also run a lot of ads that paint a candidate in a certain light, you know, they can praise and keep praises on somebody or they can tarnish the reputation of somebody by running all of these ads sort of really in the in the cycle. Some political operatives call this battlefield preparation. You're really trying to keep somebody's negatives as high as possible and their positives as low as possible. All election long, you know, two years before election day, people already know which seats are going to be the most competitive or which ones are likely to be the most competitive races. So anything you can do to keep that pressure on and define those candidates in a certain way,
Uh, all of that is technically non-political spending in the eyes of the IRS. Why isn't more done to stop the shady activity? Like, isn't that the FEC's job to stop the stuff? The FEC is broken and it has been broken for a long time. Uh, it's particularly broken right now because it's a six-member commission that only has two members on it and it needs four people to agree on anything, to find somebody to investigate somebody to issue new rules. Right now, President Donald Trump may or may not nominate new people to serve on the FEC. Senate leadership may or may not have confirmation hearings for the people that they want in these roles. And with just two members, the FEC is on autopilot as a disclosure agency. So we still know how much money is coming in. We still see all of the candidate and super PAC campaign finance filings so we can follow the money. But there's nobody, you know, blown the whistle at the game. You know, we have a very broken system right now. I mean, this always just seems pretty much like a joke. I'm going to be candid with you. This all seems really wack. Dark money is essentially just coordinating with candidates. Is the Roberts court basically just okay with corruption, then? The Roberts court has been very okay with the loosening of these rules. And decision after decision after decision has made it more favorable for big money to come into the system and corrupt the process. And it's been harder and harder and harder for the rest of us to have equal footing. Are they doing it the same way kind of the way they did with racism? Where you essentially legalize it by defining it out of existence? I think that's a very acute parallel. Yes, that's what's happening here. So this feels really funny to me because people talk about like Richard Nixon and Watergate is this very dark chapter in American history. Can you believe what happened at Watergate? And there's like a eight-part Hulu series that I'm definitely not going to watch. But at this point has the court basically taken what Nixon did and just make it legal? There are so many things going on in our campaign finance system right now that would have made the people involved in the Nixon scandals blush. We are talking about amounts of money then in the 1970s, even adjusted for inflation, that are so quaint compared to what is going on now. Give me an example of the delta. Give me an example. You can approximate it. Yeah. I mean, you're talking about super PACs now that are funded by AI companies, by crypto companies that at a minimum are talking $100 million in politics. In 1970, Nixon was talking about awarding ambassadors to people who had given a quarter of a million dollars then. And the milk men, the policy changes that the milk industry was getting was for far smaller dollar amounts than what crypto and AI are pumping in right now. It's just really astronomically different. And if this isn't rock bottom, I don't know what is. Yeah, it's just really funny that can you believe Richard Nixon took money from corporations and then did with those corporations wanted. I mean, it would feel very quaint today. He'd almost feel like kind of like a moderate now, like Joe Manchin. Yeah. I mean, this is just such a different world. Right out of Watergate, we've got a slew of reforms. And honestly, at issue one, we think we are probably poised for a similar slew of reforms that will have to come in this post-Trump era. People can learn more on our website at issueone.org/darkmoney. But basically, you get the creation of the federal election commission. You get limits on how much money people can give. You've got transparency about where that money is coming from. You've got ethics reform. You've got a public financing system created that works for decades, electing both Democrats and Republicans. Ronald Reagan used the public financing system. George H.W. Bush used the public financing system. You know, it is just a totally different world today, where people are out there now, raising essentially a billion dollars to run for president between their campaign and their allied super PACs and dark money groups. And it's just a record number that continues to shatter itself. My friends, I would like to take a moment to complain if you're down to listen. I've been a wee bit over-committed lately. I'm not sure if you noticed, but I put out a movie on Netflix. While I'm super duper grateful for the opportunity, all the press that we did for the movie left your boy exhausted. I realized I was so tired because I wasn't eating. I was running on empty. Y'all should have seen my schedule. It was packed. And obviously, I didn't pack a lunch. This all could have been prevented if I had just brought my Huel Black Edition powder. That's Huel. H-U-E-L-Huel. Huel is a complete meal ready in seconds to shake it up with water or the milk of your choice. It has 40 grams of protein, 27 essential vitamins and minerals, and no artificial sweeteners, colors, or flavors. It also has seven grams of fiber. Because ya boy needs to stay snatched on the red carpet. The Black Edition powder clocks in around three bucks a meal. Super affordable. So after my assistant, perhaps mine, I will usually let him have one as well. We have fun around here. Huel also comes in ready to drink bottle, the grab and go version. That also has a lot of protein, 35 grams of bottle, as well as seven grams of fiber and cost less than five bucks a meal. Don't get caught unprepared. Get Huel today with code
[email protected]/hussin15. That is H-U-E-L-Huel. New customers only. Thank you to Huel for partnering and supporting our show. We appreciate you. Hey, it's Julia Louis-Dreyfus from The Weiser, the meat podcast, among other things. And I've got a little holiday wisdom for you. Hosting during the holidays means lots of cooking, and that means your trash is going to be full of smelly, rotting, food, yuck. So here's the wisdom. Get a mill food recycler. I did. We've had ours for years, and it is totally transformed our kitchen. It's unbelievable how much cleaner everything is now. Plus, it's so easy to use. You toss in basically any food you don't eat. Peels, pits, meat, dairy bones. Last year we put in a whole turkey carcass, really. While you sleep, mill automatically dries and grinds all your food waste down to about a fifth of its size. That means at night you can fill it after a big elaborate dinner, and by morning they'll be room for breakfast. Nothing rots, nothing stinks, no fruit flies. And my favorite part, no more of those gross, drippy, mid-dinner garbage runs. If you want a cleaner, calmer kitchen this holiday season, go to mill.com/weiser for an exclusive offer. That's mill.com/weiser. Happy hosting. Clearly, look, the Overton window has now shifted since Citizens United. And now the flex by a lot of Democratic candidates are, hey guys, I don't take any corporate pack money. But what does that even mean? Well, on the one hand, I think it's a flex that matters. I mean, it's an important gesture, somewhat symbolic. There's a lot less corporate pack money than there is say super pack money in elections. But what other money does it leave on the table? Yeah. Is my follow-up. Yeah, it leaves a lot of different types of money on the table, but it does signal to voters that hey, I want to work to change this broken campaign finance system. And this is a debate I think that's been raging for the last 15, 16 years. And we'll probably continue to be a big driver and a lot of primary elections and general elections is, you know, do we fight fire with fire or do we fight fire with water? And so there's people out there who've been pushing pledges of various sorts, the no corporate pack pledge, no lobbyist money pledge, that kind of stuff. And those are, you know, small buckets of money that still allow corporate executives to give directly to a candidate, still allows a company to potentially fund super pack or dark money group favoring that candidate. But there's a lot of operatives out there who say, you know, we need every arrow in our quiver, that every weapon available to us, you know, we don't want to fight with one hand tied behind our back. And then there's other politicians and you've had some of them on the show who have been trying to paint a different picture to say, no, we have to do this, you know, with the moral high road or else we lose all credibility. I've been hearing this idea about APAC being the new NRA. What is the difference between the two? Are they both essentially lobbyists for different causes? They are both lobbyists for different causes. And big organizations like the NRA or APAC can flex their muscles in a lot of different ways. You've got the ability to have a pack that makes direct campaign contributions to candidates. You've got the ability to fund
a super pack that can go out and air these ads. It's a vote for, vote against a candidate. You can also do something called bundling, which harkens back to a day when you would literally ask all of your friends for a physical check and then you'd wrap that in a bundle and take it to a candidate in question. And APAC has been wildly successful in bundling. Huge amounts of money to candidates for a number of years. It actually didn't form. It's own political action committee until a few years ago. But in these last two election cycles, APAC has now invested more than $100 million in this midterm election cycle and in the 2024 election cycle as well. Huge amounts of money that they can pump into the process. - Doesn't it feel a little bit weird that there's basically a lobby group for a foreign country that's putting that much money into American elections? I mean, is there any precedent for this type of behavior? Like I know that the United States, we do that to other countries, but that doesn't count. - Well, I think one of the things that we're seeing right now is a lot of people asking that same question. It's become a much more highly charged issue than it was even just a few years ago. Going back to the 1930s, we've had rules on the books for foreign agents that are representing foreign countries. These come out of a whole series of scandals related to the rise of Nazism in Germany and the way that the Nazi party was trying to influence American politicians. But at the end of the day, the US has long held a special relationship with Israel, but the way that this moment is unfolding, having money from APAC spent on your behalf isn't always a political upside for a candidate. We've seen voters in certain democratic primaries reject the candidate, even if tens of millions of dollars are being spent on political ads. I think as much money as some special interest groups pump into the process at the end of the day, money doesn't decide elections, voters decide elections, and that's one way that we can all continue to fight back. - So let's walk the audience through this. Let's talk about how this actually looks on the ground. How much money do members of Congress need to raise for their elections if they want to stay in Congress? - Yeah, yeah. Your typical member of the US House of Representatives is raising about $3,000 a day for two years. Just typical baseline. If you-- - That's their burn. - If you are in one of the most competitive house races, you are probably raising three times that much money. - That's about 10 G's. - 10 G's a day. - Okay. - A day. - Now let's go ahead, you wait fighter, let's take Senator. - Yeah. And if you are in one of the most competitive Senate districts, you might be raising more than $100,000 a day. - A day? - A day. And there's a lot of senators that are raising a lot of that money through very robust-- - South Dakota. - Digital. - 100 G's a day for the South Dakota. - My talk is-- - My talk is-- - I'm talking about heavy weights in the most competitive elections. So Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, this cycle for sure. California's got a ton of expensive media markets, so maybe to win the Democratic primary there, or to win the primary as a Democrat there, would require huge sums of money. Maybe a little bit easier when you get to the general election. Maybe not. I mean, South Dakota same thing. It could cost a lot of money to win, you know, in a primary there. This general election might be a little bit easier, but what we're seeing right now is a lot of states becoming in play in places that voted for Donald Trump, maybe the last two, three times. And when you've got so much money in your war chest, you can make a lot of places on the map. You know, if you've got more money than God, you can invest that out there in so many places, take this fight to all of the terrains that you wanna take it to. So if you're APAC, if you're the AI companies, if you're the crypto industry, when you've got deep pockets, you can take this fight almost anywhere. And that threat of being under the tsunami wave of spending also makes almost any member of Congress quiver in their shoes because they don't want to be at the receiving end of that type of onslaught. How many hours a day does a member of Congress have to spend on the phone? - Yeah, if you are in one of those most competitive seats, you're typically talking at least 30 hours a week, funding fundraising calls, dialing for dollars. You've got a second job as a telemarketer. - You have to be on it, they can't even robo voice. - They can't even robo voice that. It is you often sitting in these little cubicle farms just off of Capitol Hill, the Democrats have a building, the Republicans have a building. - You saw the 60 minutes piece, right? - I have seen the 60 minutes piece. - So let's just show the audience the 60 minutes piece. So this is basically hidden camera footage of these call center boots. They literally just have to sit here and read off of a telemarketing script. - They do, they've got a little binder with some key information about who that donor is, what you might have talked about them with the last time you called them. And even if you are not in one of the most competitive seats, you might have to do the same thing because you have ambitions of being the leader or a subcommittee chairman on one of these really robust committees. - This just feels not only stupid. The fact that you have to raise this much money and not actually just help the constituents of your respective district, it also feels super humiliating. It's so humiliating. - And think about it. Just think about it. Take Roger Krishnamurt, the representative for Illinois's eighth congressional district, Born in New Delhi, went to Princeton, and Harvard, then got elected to Congress. And now he's just working in a call center. - And now he's working in a call center on top of his day job that he is looking to do. - It's not even his job, it's not even his job. He just works at a call center. That's super fucked up. - Yeah, for an extra three, four hours a day to be able to help his team and his party. These are the pressures that so many members of Congress hate. They don't like being on a fundraising treadmill, but nobody wants to be the first actor to make things better for us all. - How would you sell that to the youth now? You know, there's that thing. No, seriously, to Gen Z and Gen Alpha, they're like, you should run for Congress. Be the change you wish to be. But there's no way I can look at an Indian kid and be like, work your ass off. Your parents immigrated all the way from India to America so you could run for Congress and then work in a call center near where you live. - A very difficult thing for idealists who are motivated to go be a public servant in Washington. - Yes. - You know, you see some of the most outspoken conservatives and progressives saying, hey, the system of dialing for dollars is really messed up and there shouldn't be a price of power to serve on the best committees in Congress. - Well, shouldn't there be, this is a rare moment where there could be some bipartisan agreement. Shouldn't there be this moment where both sides of the aisle go, we should just unilaterally try to disarm this whole thing. This is a waste of time. - You would think, I would think, I would hope that there's more frustration on both sides of the aisle. There certainly is amongst voters all across the aisle and you've seen a few proposals over the years from lawmakers who say, hey, in some states it's illegal for state legislatures to solicit campaign contributions while the legislator is in session. Maybe we should do the same thing at the federal level. Maybe members of Congress shouldn't be able to solicit campaign cash or maybe, you know, we should stop taking the corporate pack money or the lobbyist money, try to break the chain, try to break the wheel, you know, in so many ways. - Well, let's talk about the solution. - Yeah, I think there's a solution here. Let's talk about how public financing could actually help with this issue. What is the public financing system in the United States right now and how does it protect against corruption? - The aspiration of public financing systems is that it reduces dependence on wealthy mega donors and special interests. It tries to break that wheel between private money that wants something out of politics and politicians who need a certain amount of money to get their name out there, to campaign. And at the federal level in the wake of the Watergate scandals, there was a public financing system created for the presidency. There has never been a public financing system created for members of Congress, although there is legislation that would create a voluntary system for members of Congress that has almost passed a couple of times and then many cities across the country have started experimenting with different public financing systems. - So here's what's interesting. Barack Obama was the first presidential candidate from a major party not to take public financing for the general election in '08. Why did he wave that? Isn't it basically free money? - It was free money that a lot of politicians before him had been using. And this might surprise a lot of your listeners, but yes, Barack Obama was the first candidate in the general election from a major party to say, no, I don't want to participate in this system.
I want to use private money instead. Well, what was the play? What was the strategy there? The strategy there was saying I can raise so much more money than that big block grant would have provided. And because of that, he was able to outspend Republican John McCain who was participating in that block grant public financing system. What was the cap on the block grant public financing system? I believe that it was a few hundred million dollars at the time. I don't know if your show notes have that. The show notes that I have is that it would have capped his campaign spending at about $84 million. 84 million? I mean, this is like, he was basically from the Democratic Party. He's like, look, he was like a ball player. He's like, I can totally beat that. I can get the super max contract. And that's what he did. Why would I just get a regular max? He was able to raise so much money that at one point in time, he had a satellite TV channel that was like all commercials all the time. You know, he was able to run up the score in blue states. He was able to have field organizers and TV ads on the ground in a lot of red leaning states. When you have a lot of money, you are able to make fewer tough decisions about how to spend those resources. But what that does is it blows open the floodgates and no major party nominee since then has participated in this system because everybody now says, I need to raise a billion dollars to run for president. And some of that's going to be direct campaign contributions. Some of that's going to be super PAC money or dark money. And that genie isn't going back in that bottle except for creative thinkers who are trying to say, how do we come up with systems that give people enough money to run credible campaigns? Let's get creative. How much money would you need to make public financing be a meaningful counterweight to private funding? I mean, these are the numbers that a billion dollars we're seeing, you know, you're being for real. I'm being for real. You're telling me if AOC runs in 2028, which she will, she's going to need a billion dollars. She's going to guys, this is a small upstart campaign. I need that marvel Avengers endgame money just to run. That is the reality. When you think about it as a 12 month commitment or more, you know, those numbers get broken down in different ways, like you don't necessarily need a billion dollars to win a primary on one side or the other. Although, you know, if you're trying to compete in 50 states and 50 primaries, things get very pricey very quickly in 2024. Vice president Kamala Harris comes in. She has a super pack, pops up relatively quickly in the campaign world, raises $600 million, $300 million of it is from dark money that we have no idea who was funding it. Who do you think it was? Well, I think the New York Times was able to identify that some of it came from George Soros. There's probably a few other billionaires that people could guess. But at the end of the day, to run a competitive general election campaign, you need more than just the block grants that haven't been updated since the 1970s. There's some real modernization of those programs that we need to be thinking about doing. Some states, especially for local elections, you don't need that huge, same big pot of money. You know, you've got some places that are experimenting with matching programs. You've got some places that are experimenting with vouchers. They call them democracy dollars in Seattle, where, you know, you get mailed these $425 vouchers and city council candidates actually come to do events in your community and ask you for one of these vouchers. And these are people who are trying to experiment with different ways to bring candidates back to the people that they're trying to represent and serve and not just make them responsive to the wealthiest Americans, the out-of-state billionaires. Well, what's interesting here is that history always has these moments in time where something crazy happens and society kind of wakes up. After Watergate, there was this huge anti-corruption movement in the American public consciousness. Do you think a similar type of movement will happen post-Trump if he decides to not run for a third term? Yeah. He is constitutionally prohibited from running for a third term. And I think that we are seeing- That's just paperwork though. It is paperwork that matters. And I think that we will see that same enthusiasm from the American people for similar reforms. I mean, big problems like we are experiencing now require big solutions. And we at Issue One are part of an ecosystem that is pushing for real changes to this system. And what's the name of the movement? I mean, the- Issue One, you're pushing for a particular type of campaign. Yeah, our campaign is now called the Great Reset. We believe that- A little chairman malcoated, but I get the idea. Yeah. I think that it's like our democracy is like operating system on a computer. You need to have regular upgrades to be able to have that functioning to get rid of those bugs. We've seen so much corrosive influence of big money coming in on checked in our politics, of gerrymandered congressional districts making members of Congress responsive to the most extreme elements in their primary electorates. We've seen toxic online information environment all warping instead of buttressing our democracy. And that's why all of these things really need attention. And what we're posed to be active in that fight. So jokes aside, because I actually do believe in what you guys are doing. So let's just go through it beat by beat, okay, with some of the reforms that you're pitching. Reform number one, cap super PAC contributions. So how is main challenging citizens united right now? Yeah, the good people in Maine two years ago passed a ballot measure to cap super PAC contributions because they've said, "Hey, 16 years after the speech now, court case, we actually think there is a risk of corruption and the appearance of corruption with large super PAC contributions." 75% of Maynors voted for this ballot measure. It's inspired federal legislation. Any member of Congress today could co-sponsor that legislation, could fight for that legislation for being able to mutually de-escalate the situation that has become a political fundraising arms race. We could all take that temperature down together and we could recognize what the American people keep telling us over and over and over again that our large political contributions do have an inherent risk of corruption and the appearance of corruption. Let's talk about reform number two. Forget campaign finance laws and let's talk about regulating corporations directly. How would that work? One of the key things in that question is that there is a movement of foot that really gets at the heart of what powers corporations have even before they're regulated. There's a ballot measure on the ballot this fall in Montana, deep in Trump country, deep in the American West, where they are rejecting corporate and dark money power in elections. People have posited. Smart lawyers have said that companies only have the powers that are granted to them by the state and we don't need to let artificial companies, artificial persons, like companies are called, have all of the powers that natural real people have and this ballot measure is the tip of a spear of a movement. It's already inspired legislation in Hawaii that was supported in a bipartisan fashion, legislators, every Democrat and all but one Republican voted for it earlier this year. It was signed into law by the governor. There's legislation that similar in other places and it comes back to the heart of what powers do we give companies in the first place and maybe we shouldn't give them the power to spend unlimited amounts of money in our elections. Let's talk about reform number three, amending the constitution. This is virtually impossible. You want to give Congress and states the authority to regulate money in politics. That's just insane. It is something that has been very difficult for us to do historically but there's actually a movement of foot right now that's been quietly happening in the background to the point where there are now 25 states that's half of the country that has said we think that legislators should be able to pass common sense rules about money in our campaigns and elections and we call on Congress to do something about this. The last three states to do this, Oklahoma and Idaho and Utah. This is happening in some deep red parts of the country and Sapphire where blue parts of the country and everywhere in between earlier this summer.
You know, Democrats in Congress have been talking about this reform idea for a while. But earlier this summer, there was Republican Congressman from Michigan, Tom Barrett, who introduced, for the very first time, a Republican-led ballot constitutional amendment initiative, very first time that a Republican congressman has led on a campaign finance constitutional amendment. And this could be the moment of a sea change to say there are some real disagreements that people may have about issues, but nobody likes being bullied by big out-of-state money, by the tech industry coming in, and Republican and Democratic legislators legislatures across the country are really starting to realize that they can do something about this. I mean, this fight. This is really inspiring. I'm really inspired by this. I'm going to go through with this. Here's just my last question. This isn't about campaign finance, but it is about Congress trading stocks. Yes, that's illegal. Isn't that crazy? That is crazy. You would think that this is something that so many politicians realize looks so bad for them. This is something that so many Americans, and you know, polls that we've done, polls that are out there, people don't want their public servants profiting from that elected office. People want them to be there for the right reasons, making decisions with insider information and being able to profit off it isn't the right reason. Michael, this has been a deeply moving conversation, a very educational conversation. I think our viewers will really appreciate it. I feel kind of bad that I brought you to our studio, and I got you to basically just talk about something that's very maddening for the American public. Let's just take politics off the table for a second. Is there anything else that's making you really mad right now that you just want to get off your chest before we get out of here? Oh my gosh. I think what I want to say is that we are in a moment that gives me deep hope because of these reforms that we're seeing. People in Maine, people in Montana, people in other places like Arizona and Alaska, they've passed real reforms that say another way as possible, and we have a responsibility to scale those ideas up in Washington. I really believe this, and I kind of see it similar to the movement for rank-choice voting, which is another really great thing that I think would be very additive to American politics. But I was just really opening this question up so you could get something off your chest king. I'll start with me. Let's get politics off the table. Frankly, politics sometimes just annoys me and I just want to live my life and be human. And energy is finite. I only have so much time with my kids, and I probably only have so much time to actually have an active functioning memory. Here's what's really pissing me off right now. The fact that blueberries are giving you diarrhea, really fucking sucks because I love blueberries. Yeah, that really sucks, and we should live in a system where the government regulators are able to do their job and keep you from having diarrhea when you eat your favorite foods. Hey folks, you can now watch HMDK on Spotify. If you're subscribed to Spotify Premium, you don't get any Spotify ads on my video.
PodcastTranscript AI