Although super PACs cannot coordinate with campaigns, they can use publicly available information, such as a candidate’s schedule, talking points, and even video, to mold into ads. People interested in the health of our political system should watch Ted Cruz on YouTube coaching his children to recite grace for the camera, soliciting compliments from his mother, and walking through cornfields for hours on end—all distributed by the Cruz campaign in 2016 to enable allied super PACs to download the clips and turn them into ads indistinguishable from anything his own campaign would produce. In 2016, the Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina created a Google calendar publicizing her schedule weeks in advance, allowing an associated super PAC, Carly for America, to rent venues, hire organizers, and register voters—effectively assuming core functions of the campaign.9 Increasingly, super PACs are becoming bolder, skirting even the modest disclosure requirements. It is now routine for them to drop millions in ads mere days before an election, knowing they will not have to disclose their donors until long after the voters’ ballots have been cast. Some super PACs don’t report their donors at all, in open violation of federal law.
As a politician, I have known only the system created by Citizens United. In 2010, during my first campaign for the Senate, super PACs and other outside groups spent $21 million in my race alone—more than in any other Senate race in the country. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, four years later, total outside spending on Senate campaigns climbed to $411 million—more than double the figure for the previous midterms. When I ran again in 2016, total outside spending on the Senate reached $571 million, and the figure topped $1.4 billion for federal races nationwide.
Citizens United, quite simply, has warped the character of our political system: independent expenditures rose dramatically; super PACs proliferated; outside groups made up a larger share of all political advertising; and that advertising grew more frequent and more negative in tone.
The Supreme Court had agreed to hear Citizens United without a trial court’s developing a factual record, out of concern that any delay would unconstitutionally restrain corporate speech. The flood of political spending after Citizens United, however, has not come mainly from corporations. (Generally, corporations have preferred to invest in lobbyists rather than super PACs as vehicles for political influence.) Instead, some of the wealthiest people on the planet have used super PACs to try to bend politics in their direction. The New York Times reported that in the 2016 election, a mere 158 families gave almost half of the early money to Republican and Democratic presidential candidates. Most of the $176 million in early contributions from these families went to super PACs.
During that cycle, Sheldon Adelson, a casino owner in Las Vegas, donated $78 million to super PACs. To any of us, this is a staggering amount of money. To him, it was trivial, given his net worth of tens of billions. The power of megadonors in this new environment has distorted the behavior of candidates in troubling ways. Candidates for public office routinely engage in an elaborate courtship with a handful of billionaires hoping they will bankroll a friendly super PAC (or, at the very least, spare them from millions in negative ads). In the 2018 election cycle, just 0.1 percent of all super PAC donors accounted for nearly 80 percent of all super PAC donations. Since Citizens United, just ten donors have given more than $1 billion to outside groups, with six of the ten supporting Democrats. Outside spending has warped behavior across the political spectrum.10
And it has corrupted Congress. This corruption looks nothing like the relatively benign image that worried the court in Buckley. That was low-dollar, quid pro quo corruption defined by palpable action—bad enough, to be sure. The corruption we actually face is a corruption of inaction; corruption that arises when billionaires threaten to spend unlimited sums if a politician strays from their wishes.11
Quiet intimidation paralyzes Congress across vast areas of policy—from immigration to guns to taxes. It is difficult to detect because it is invisible. But, as with a black hole in space, we can see it through the gravitational force it exerts, pulling politicians away from hard choices we do not make; from tough votes we never take; from committee hearings we fail to hold; from bills we can’t pass despite an urgent need; and from scientific facts we willfully ignore.
III. Out for Blood
On January 20, 2009, the day of his inauguration, President Obama stood before the country and promised to “roll back the specter of a warming planet.” I imagine that among those listening to Obama, along with the 38 million other Americans who watched the ceremony, were Charles and David Koch, billionaire brothers and co-owners of Koch Industries, the nation’s largest privately owned oil company. By some estimates, its refineries, pipelines, and chemical processors emit 300 million tons of carbon dioxide each year.
The Koch brothers have showered millions of dollars on advocacy groups and think tanks, all with the purpose of undermining environmental protections.12 With a Koch Industries executive, they founded an entity called Citizens for a Sound Economy that labeled acid rain a hoax and fought regulations to reduce it. Later, as the Kochs extended their political reach, Citizens for a Sound Economy split itself into two new groups: FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity. In 2007, Americans for Prosperity took a page from Grover Norquist’s “no tax” pledge by introducing a No Climate Tax Pledge for members of Congress to sign. Between 1997 and 2010, the Kochs gave some $48 million to groups that actively denied climate science or opposed climate action.13
Although the campaign created more doubt and less urgency about climate change, especially on the political right, it did not stop Republicans from nominating John McCain as their presidential candidate.14 It did not stop Americans from electing Barack Obama in 2008. And it did not stop the House of Representatives from moving forward in the spring of 2009 on a cap-and-trade bill known as Waxman-Markey, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. That spring the Tea Party emerged almost overnight as a new center of gravity in the Republican Party. Its origins were mostly spontaneous and driven by taxes, health care, and the national debt, but the Koch brothers immediately recognized the Tea Party as a useful vehicle for their anti-climate agenda. With donations to Tea Party candidates and causes, the Kochs stoked the movement’s climate-denial potential and deployed its grassroots activists against elected Republicans who refused to toe the line.
As Waxman-Markey progressed in the House, Americans for Prosperity leveraged the Tea Party’s national Tax Day rallies, handing out shirts and placards and framing the bill as “the largest excise tax in American history.” The group dressed up staffers as fake EPA “carbon cops” who threatened to ban barbecues and confiscate lawn mowers. It launched a “hot air tour,” featuring a giant balloon, warning that cap-and-trade meant “lost jobs, higher taxes, less freedom.” Although Waxman-Markey narrowly passed the House, the Koch-led campaign sharply politicized the climate debate. Confronted by this stifling political force, the Senate never took up the bill.
At this moment, the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Citizens United. The Tea Party was already out for blood. Now it gained the advantage of unlimited spending. I saw this firsthand in Colorado, where my opponent, Congressman Ken Buck, defeated former lieutenant governor Jane Norton in the Republican primary with backing from the Tea Party and from FreedomWorks. At a campaign event in Longmont, Buck stood next to Oklahoma senator Jim Inhofe, one of Washington’s earliest and most vociferous climate deniers, and praised him for calling global warming “the greatest hoax that has been perpetrated.”15
These dynamics played out across the country. As a member of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, Robert Inglis, a Republican from South Carolina, had seen polar ice cores that conclusively demonstrated the spike in atmospheric carbon dioxide over the past century. For refusing to deny what science demonstrated, he lost to the Tea Party–backed candidate, Trey Gowdy, by forty-two points. Inglis knew why: he had “gone to Satan’s side on climate change.”
/> In Michigan, Congressman Fred Upton had long been considered a Republican moderate on the environment. At one time, Upton’s website avowed that “everything must be on the table as we seek to reduce carbon emissions.” As Mother Jones discovered, after FreedomWorks launched a “down with Upton” petition, such language on the website mysteriously vanished.
In Arizona, John McCain faced the first serious primary challenge of his career. His opponent, J. D. Hayworth, was a television and radio personality turned congressman with strong Tea Party backing. As Waxman-Markey advanced in the House, McCain had begun drafting a parallel climate bill in the Senate. As pressure from the Tea Party mounted, McCain quietly backed away from his own initiative.
Having flexed their muscles in the 2010 Republican primaries, Koch-backed groups now set out to pummel Democrats in the general election. Americans for Prosperity and other groups hammered Democrats who had voted for Waxman-Markey, reviving their playbook pitting the environment against the economy. They targeted Democratic congressmen like Rick Boucher and Tom Perriello, who represented rural districts in central and southwest Virginia. One Americans for Prosperity ad excoriated Boucher for playing “a key role” in passing a cap-and-trade energy tax that “is expected to kill 56,000 Virginia coal and manufacturing jobs”—a highly improbable scenario, according to the independent fact-checking group PolitiFact. In November, both Perriello and Boucher lost their seats in an electoral rout of Democrats. Republicans picked up five Senate seats and took control of the House.16
I barely survived my own race, scraping out a narrow victory against Ken Buck. As I stood for my oath of office the following January, I was joined by new Republican senators like Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Pat Toomey, and Mike Lee. All had prevailed in primary fights against establishment Republicans thanks to backing from the Tea Party and FreedomWorks. None had publicly embraced the science of climate change.
One week later, NASA issued a press release confirming that 2010 had tied for the warmest year on record.
IV. The Wrong Target
By the end of Barack Obama’s first term, many environmentalists were expressing disappointment with his record. Although Obama had gone further than any predecessor to limit carbon emissions—regulating carbon emissions for vehicles and preparing to do the same for power plants—a comprehensive climate bill remained elusive.
For the tens of millions of Americans who believe we have a moral responsibility to act on climate change, this was an especially challenging moment. Faced with Republicans’ denial on the one hand and diminishing opportunity to act on the other, they had no obvious path forward in Congress. President Obama’s approach was to make what progress he could in the absence of legislation, through his executive authority. At home, he directed the government to set rules for fuel-efficiency standards for cars and light trucks, increase investment in renewable energy, and promote energy efficiency. Abroad, he pursued a comprehensive global treaty to set binding limits on carbon pollution. Although environmental groups cheered these steps, they hungered for a symbol that could energize the grass roots and build a powerful coalition to break Washington’s paralysis.
In this context, America learned about the Keystone XL pipeline. In 2008, a company called TransCanada had proposed a pipeline system, known as Keystone, to transport heavy crude from the oil sands of Alberta to Gulf Coast refineries. The final phase, a twelve-hundred-mile pipeline from Alberta to Nebraska, was called Keystone XL. The controversy over the pipeline boiled down to whether we should allow the Alberta oil sands to move in a pipeline through US territory. Unlike the silky black crude of Texas or Saudi Arabia, oil sands are a thick, viscous mixture of sand, water, clay, and a heavy black oil called bitumen with a higher concentration of carbon dioxide.
In 2011, NASA’s James Hansen wrote an open letter arguing that “exploitation of the tar sands would make it implausible to stabilize the climate and avoid disastrous global impacts.” Hansen’s words reached Bill McKibben, the environmental activist and founder of a grassroots group called 350.org. To McKibben, the pipeline proved irresistible. It offered a tangible manifestation of our fossil-fuel dependence and because it crossed an international border its fate lay with the State Department. Unlike stalled climate legislation, on which Congress needed to act, the fate of Keystone XL was entirely in President Obama’s hands.
It is not generally the job of Congress to approve of any pipeline in America. Even so, Republicans on the Hill took it upon themselves to manufacture opportunities to weigh in and make more difficult the politics of the administration’s decision-making process. Republicans relished training attention on Keystone XL. Reviving lines of attack that had devastated Democrats like Boucher and Perriello, Republicans falsely argued that by opposing the pipeline Democrats opposed American jobs and infrastructure. The facts told a different story. According to the State Department in 2014, Keystone XL would create just thirty-five permanent jobs. It also represented less than a thousandth of America’s 2.5 million miles of pipe. The most relevant finding in the State Department analysis was that regardless of whether the pipeline was built, the oil sands in Alberta would still be developed. The exploitation of the tar sands that Dr. Hansen warned against would occur anyway.17 If the United States did not permit the pipeline, the oil would be transported by railcars, which were arguably worse than a pipeline in terms of environmental and safety consequences.
In order to wound vulnerable Democratic incumbents, Republicans seized the opportunity to bring resolutions to the Senate floor demanding that the State Department approve the pipeline. Democrats, sensing political jeopardy, took cover under alternative versions aimed at creating votes against the pipeline.18 Among the mountain of pointless votes during my two terms in the Senate, the ones on Keystone XL stood out for their particular inanity. The pipeline would not have created thousands of permanent jobs; it would not have made America energy independent; and, because the oil sands would reach the market anyway by other means, it would make no substantial difference for our net carbon emissions.
Although Keystone was an effective and visceral symbol that activated the environmental movement, it had marginal effect on climate. There might have been good reasons to defeat the pipeline. I often said, for example, that if the tar sands were in Colorado instead of Canada, I would chain myself to a fence to avoid the environmental degradation that would occur. Canada had made a different decision. I also am sympathetic to Oklahomans who might not want the pipeline to cross their territory. This, however, was not an issue before Congress. And as the State Department and Congressional Budget Office reports demonstrated, concern about climate change was not a sound reason to oppose the pipeline. I was keenly aware that I would soon be defending President Obama’s Clean Power Plan on the basis of facts and science. I believed that opposing Keystone on the basis of climate change would destroy my credibility as I argued for the much more significant Clean Power Plan. It was not just my credibility; the credibility of the entire climate science movement was at stake. I have seldom felt this alone in my public life. I voted to build the pipeline when the issue came to the Senate floor several times over the next three years. I took no comfort or satisfaction in these votes and accepted the understandable beating from my allies in the environmental community.19 Approving a single piece of infrastructure—one we had no business meddling with in the first place—was far from how I once imagined Congress spent its time. I would have much preferred that we debate and ultimately approve a comprehensive climate and energy bill.
It was not to be. Recognizing that Congress would prove unable to act, President Obama moved ahead in June 2013 by issuing his own Climate Action Plan, a comprehensive policy to reduce America’s carbon pollution. The following year, the EPA announced the Clean Power Plan, which laid down a deadline of the year 2030 for slashing carbon emissions from the electricity sector by 32 percent. Combined, these were among the biggest steps America had ever taken on climate change. Compared with the emissions
associated with Keystone XL, President Obama’s Clean Power Plan, when fully implemented, would be up to 247 times more consequential.
All of this nuance was lost in our political debate as the 2014 elections neared. As chair of the DSCC during that cycle, I saw debate over Keystone XL effectively hijack what should have been a real discussion about the country’s challenges on energy and climate. As far as I could tell, the Republican energy policy amounted to little more than: approve Keystone XL, close the EPA, and deny climate change. In North Carolina, when a moderator asked all four Republican Senate candidates whether climate change was a “fact,” three of them burst into laughter. (And the answer was no.)
On the Democratic side, Keystone XL had become the sole proxy for whether you cared about climate change. At a town hall in Frisco, Colorado, I faced a storm of questions about my support for Keystone XL from angry constituents. Not a single person asked me about the Clean Power Plan. I had to bring it up myself at the meeting’s end. Later that day, I met with the national board of Earthjustice (my wife’s former employer and an organization where we have many friends), which happened to be meeting in Grand County, Colorado. Someone asked whether I thought it was possible to enact a bipartisan version of the Clean Power Plan into law. I said that depended not just on Republicans but also on what Democrats could do. I wondered out loud whether Keystone could be traded as part of a deal or whether it had become such an ominous symbol of climate destruction that we could never explain to supporters why we would back a deal that contained it.
As the 2014 elections drew near, I spent almost all of my time dialing donors to keep pace with the tide of outside spending. With the floodgates open after Citizens United, Americans for Prosperity spent over $125 million nationwide during that cycle. Along with other groups, it ran ads flaying Democratic incumbents across the country on energy and jobs. In the end, Democrats lost nine seats, paving the way for Senator Mitch McConnell to take the reins as majority leader. In January 2015, McConnell scheduled our first vote of the year. It was not to tackle our national debt, then standing at $13 trillion. Nor was it to address a festering opioid crisis that would claim nearly forty-eight thousand American lives in 2017. It was to approve Keystone XL.
The Land of Flickering Lights Page 10