After the so called Sheldon primary, when four potential candidates for the Republican presidential nomination went to Las Vegas to court the casino owner Sheldon Adelson, it took a heavy dose of audacity on the part of Chief Justice John Roberts to claim on April 2 that “ingratiation and access . . . are not corruption.” …
Nathaniel Persily of Stanford Law School analyzed public opinion polls filed by plaintiffs and defendants in the 2003 Supreme Court campaign finance case, McConnell v. F.E.C. Persily found that “the public perceives a great deal of corruption arising from campaign contributions” and that “the American public believes that contributors exert undue influence over the decisions of members of Congress.”
Persily cited one opinion survey, jointly conducted by the pollsters Mark Mellman and Richard Wirthlin, which posed the question: “How much impact do you think big contributions to political parties have on decisions made by the federal government in Washington, D.C?” Fifty-five percent of respondents said “a great deal”; 23 percent said “some”; five percent said “not too much”; and one percent said “none at all” (16 percent had no opinion). In the same poll, just over two thirds of respondents agreed with the statement, “big contributors to political parties sometimes block decisions by the federal government that could improve people’s everyday lives.” CONT.
Tom Edsall (Columbia U.), New York Times