Al Franken, Giant of the Senate

by Al Franken

  Of course, the influence of special interests is now greater than ever, thanks to the Supreme Court’s 5–4 decision in Citizens United—and the Republicans’ refusal to let us do anything to bring some transparency and accountability back to our elections.

  In the Court’s majority opinion, Justice Kennedy tried to reassure people that allowing corporations, unions, and wealthy individuals to spend unlimited money in elections is really nothing to worry about. “With the advent of the Internet,” Kennedy wrote, “prompt disclosure of expenditures can provide shareholders and citizens with the information needed to hold corporations and elected officials accountable for their positions and supporters.”

  Well, in theory. Except that under Citizens United, there was no requirement that these expenditures actually be disclosed. Which made it kind of hard for anyone to be held accountable.

  Now, we Democrats tried to pass a law that would actually mandate “prompt disclosure of expenditures” by the new groups that sprung up like weeds after Citizens United, so that “shareholders and citizens could use that information to hold corporations and elected officials accountable for their positions and supporters.” We called it the Democracy Is Strengthened by Casting Light On Spending in Elections Act, which by happy coincidence we later discovered could be shortened to the DISCLOSE Act.

  Like any bill, the DISCLOSE Act would need sixty votes to pass the Senate. And at the time, we only had fifty-nine.

  Which shouldn’t have been a problem: Given their past statements about the importance of disclosure, you’d have thought that Republicans would have been lining up to cosponsor the DISCLOSE Act. In a floor speech, I quoted my colleagues who had voted against the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law that passed in 2002 on the grounds that we didn’t need limits on campaign donations if we only had disclosure.

  For example, there was Chuck Grassley: “We can try to regulate ethical behavior by politicians, but the surest way to cleanse the system is to let the sun shine in.”

  There was Lamar Alexander: “I support campaign finance reform, but to me that means individual contributions, free speech, and full disclosure.”

  There was Orrin Hatch: “The issue is expenditures, expenditures, expenditures; and the issue, the real issue, if we really want to do something about campaign finance reform, is disclosure, disclosure, disclosure.”

  Even Mitch McConnell had said, “Public disclosure of campaign contributions and spending should be expedited so voters can judge for themselves what is appropriate.”

  But as much as my Republican colleagues had sung the praises of disclosure and hailed Justice Kennedy’s decision in Citizens United as wise jurisprudence, Senate Republicans secretly knew they had been handed a huge advantage thanks to the most outrageous act of judicial activism in a generation, and they weren’t about to look this gift horse in the mouth.

  The day of the DISCLOSE vote, it was clear that the Republican filibuster would hold. I was a bit peeved at the hypocrisy, and after casting my own futile vote to move the bill forward, I stood in the well during the rest of the vote to give my good friends a bit of friendly crap. This led to the single dumbest thing a colleague has ever said to me. Which is quite a high bar.

  After watching one of the Republicans who had spoken about the importance of disclosure eight years earlier vote no on the DISCLOSE Act, I asked him, rather churlishly, “What happened to ‘sunshine is the best disinfectant’?”

  “I’m protecting the Constitution,” he replied, equally churlishly, then moved on. Another Republican, however, felt the need to defend him, also churlishly.

  “There are parts of the bill we’re not comfortable with,” he said.

  “Okay,” I replied. “Name one thing in the bill you have a problem with.” My colleague blanked and, without responding, turned to the clerk, voting no.

  Another Republican colleague, having overheard the last two exchanges, said to me, civilly, I admit, though I thought I could still detect a hint of churlishness, “Well, the bill treats different entities differently.” This was a line of argument Republicans used often, usually claiming that Democrats wanted to place new obstacles on the political power of corporations while further empowering labor unions.

  “No it doesn’t,” I said, having had plenty of practice knocking down this bogus claim. “It treats unions the same as corporations and the same as individuals.”

  Now, here it comes: the single dumbest thing a colleague has ever said to me.

  “Well, let’s say the New York Times prints an editorial. It doesn’t have to disclose.”

  My jaw dropped. I gave my colleague a second to figure out why that had been a spectacularly stupid argument, but it didn’t seem like he was getting it. “It’s in the New York Times!” I explained, as unchurlishly as I could manage.

  “Oh,” he realized. “Right.” Then he turned to the clerk and voted no.

  The proliferation of money in politics is a huge problem, and as I’ll explain in the next chapter, it has some pretty terrible consequences. But does this mean that elected officials are all bought and paid for? The truth, I’ve discovered, is a little more complicated. Campaign contributions don’t buy votes. What they buy is access.

  That’s why lobbyists write campaign checks. They’re not bribes. They’re grease. They enable those lobbyists to come to fund-raisers, where they get to talk to you while you’re trying to remember their names.

  Gross, right? And it is! I hear from a lot of lobbyists. And, yes, some of them are every bit as transactional as you’re imagining. But others, often the more effective ones, are actually passionate about the issue they’re representing. And while lobbying—and all the money associated with it—offers lots of opportunities for corruption, lobbying itself isn’t inherently corrupt.

  Many lobbyists represent good causes, like solar energy or Alzheimer’s research or a woman’s reproductive rights. They may have donated to you not in order to buy your support going forward, but because you’ve been supporting their good cause all along. And more often than not, you’re not meeting with them because of a check they wrote, but rather because you’re on the same team. You’re strategizing together about how to move the ball forward, and trading useful information about how to achieve a shared goal.

  That doesn’t mean I’m pro-lobbyist—in fact, during my first campaign, I called for a lifetime lobbying ban on former members of Congress. It didn’t seem right to me that after holding the high honor of public service, you could just cash out and make millions off your access to former colleagues. And it still doesn’t. I still want to ban former members of Congress from becoming lobbyists. And for that matter, I still want public financing for elections so current and prospective members of Congress don’t have to spend so much time fund-raising.

  But the issue looks different from the inside than it did from the outside.

  In 2005, Norm Coleman voted for an energy bill that gave subsidies to the oil and gas industry. It was easy to draw a direct line between those votes and the money he got from Big Oil. And during the campaign, I drew that line with great enthusiasm.

  Norm’s response was always that the same bill created the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), which includes the ethanol mandate. Now, the oil and gas industry doesn’t have a big presence in Minnesota, but we grow a lot of corn and soybeans. And corn ethanol and other biofuels like biodiesel produced from soybean oil have been extremely important to the economy of rural Minnesota.

  In other words, the RFS is good for my state. The oil and gas subsidies in the bill were bad for everyone (except the oil and gas industry and oil and gas states). But while I’m sure Norm was less bothered by those subsidies than I would have been, the truth is that, on balance, I might well have wound up casting the same vote he did.

  Was it unfair for me to say that Norm was in the pocket of Big Oil? Nah. But was it entirely accurate to say that he only voted for this bill because he’d been bought off? Probably not.


  In 2010, I took a trip to Israel and met with some members of the Knesset. I had never given it any thought before, but every member of the Knesset represents all of Israel. There’s no member representing the northern suburbs of Tel Aviv. Our system is different. House members in Congress represent their districts. Senators represent our states. I was elected to represent the people of Minnesota.

  When I’m trying to decide how to vote on a bill, whether or not something is good for my state is always at the top of my mind. But of course, it’s not even close to the only consideration. Does the stuff in this bill I like outweigh the stuff I don’t like? If I vote for it, can I get the senator who sponsored it to vote for something of mine? If I vote against it, can we get a better deal later? What does my staff think? What do the experts I trust say? Has Atul Gawande weighed in at all?

  Every so often, we have to pass what’s known as a “continuing resolution,” which extends current levels of funding so we can keep the government open and functioning until we can agree on an actual budget.

  Often this is a big end-of-the-year package, and may contain any number of things that are just awful—and also any number of things that are great, including one or two pieces of legislation that I myself have authored and have been fighting to pass for several years. Also, if the thing doesn’t pass, the government shuts down.

  Obviously, there’s a point at which a continuing resolution could be so bad that I’d have to vote against it even it meant voting against stuff I liked (or even authored), or even shutting the government down. But where is that point? I mean, it would have to be a really bad continuing resolution in order for me to vote against it—unless I knew it was going to pass even without my vote, in which case maybe I could vote against it as a protest of the stuff I didn’t like. Then again, on principle, shouldn’t you always vote as if you were the deciding vote? I used to think that. But I gave up a while ago, and I can’t even remember what the hell that was about.

  The point is, there are all sorts of reasons why someone might vote for something imperfect (or worse) that have absolutely nothing to do with campaign contributions.

  Former Massachusetts congressman Barney Frank once said, “I only voted once for someone who believes in 100 percent of what I believe. And that’s when I voted for myself—the first time.”

  The fact is that being in the institution changes the way you look at how Washington works. And you have to work hard to make sure that it doesn’t change who you are, something a constituent warned me about after I had been in the Senate for a year or so. The woman, who was about my age, with salt-and-pepper hair, approached me after I spoke at a reception honoring the year’s best in Twin Cities theater. As she stared at me for a while, I could see concern growing in her eyes.

  “I can see out of physical reality,” she informed me.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You’ve seen corruption and it’s affected you. It puts cracks in your soul.”

  That’s not the kind of thing you like to hear about your soul. But she assured me that I was a loving person with a great soul. It’s just that it had been badly wounded since I’d been in Washington. She wanted me to heal my soul, so it could “become green and clean and good.”

  I told her that I was going to get a massage the next day, and she thought that was a good start.

  The massage helped. But normally what helps my soul is getting something done for people—improving people’s lives, as Paul Wellstone would say.

  There are plenty of potentially soul-destroying aspects of running for office and serving in the Senate. Fund-raising can certainly be one of them. But you keep your eye on the prize. And it’s all worth every phone call, every plane ride, every thank-you note if you can get health insurance for twenty million people. If you meet a mom whose child is alive because you helped to make sure that people with preexisting conditions can get insured. If you can get mental health care treated the same as medical care. If you can prevent an undocumented mother from being deported and separated from her American citizen children. If you can preserve net neutrality. If you can keep a family in their home.

  It’s a privilege to be a United States senator. Not only because you get to make this stuff happen, but because you get to work with people who are working every day themselves to make this stuff happen: Americans of goodwill, Democrats and Republicans, affluent and struggling, of every color and every faith (and nonbelievers), who are working to improve our country and our world.

  Now give me some money!

  Chapter 40

  The Koch Brothers Hate Your Grandchildren

  Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day.

  Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.

  Unless there are no fish.*

  —Maimonides (and Al Franken)

  In my 2008 campaign, we raised $23 million, which was widely (and accurately) seen as an insane amount of money. But it pales in comparison to the nearly ONE BILLION DOLLARS that Siegfried and Roy Koch, often referred to just as “the Koch brothers,” pledged to spend (personally and through their fund-raising network) on federal, state, and local elections in the 2016 cycle.

  A billion dollars isn’t really that much to the Koch brothers. You can find that much in change going through their couch. Between them, they are worth more than $87 billion, much of it from fossil fuel.

  And all that money didn’t just buy them an invitation to a nice fund-raiser or make it so that members of Congress would take their calls. Because of the Koch brothers and their ilk, the entire Republican Party has become a party of climate denial. In the last presidential primary race, not one Republican candidate was willing to support any federal action to combat climate change.

  This is, of course, nuts. In December 2015, I traveled with nine of my Democratic Senate colleagues to the COP21 Climate Conference in Paris where 196 countries signed on to an ambitious and unprecedented agreement to tackle climate change as a global community by setting limits on greenhouse gases. Before the conference, we met with a delegation from the British Parliament. Every member we met with, including the Conservatives, knew that climate change is an existential threat. Virtually everyone in the world believes that climate change is real and is caused by human beings, except Republicans in the United States. Especially the people who would know best: 97 percent of climate scientists agree that climate change is real and caused by human activity, and I suspect the other 3 percent are being paid by the fossil fuel industry.

  Let’s do a little thought experiment here. Let’s say you went to your doctor for a checkup, and he told you this: “Okay. You’ve got to go on a diet and stop smoking. You’re fifty years old. You’re very overweight. And your father died of a heart attack at age fifty-one. You’ve really got to cut down on the carbs and start exercising.”

  Sounds bad. But you want a second opinion. So you go to another doctor.

  “Oh, boy!” says the second doctor. “I see here your father died of a heart attack at about your age. You’d be insane not to go on a diet and start working out. And for godsakes, quit smoking!”

  Not what you wanted to hear. So you schedule another appointment.

  “Oh my God!” says the third doctor. “It’s amazing you’re still alive! It would be irresponsible of me not to send you right away to this well-being center at Duke for a ninety-day stay!”

  Well, that certainly seems like a drag. So you schedule another appointment, and then another, and then another. After thirty-two opinions, you’re still not happy.

  But then you see the thirty-third doctor. It’s taken a while to schedule all these appointments, so by now you’ve gained so much weight that you have to go around in one of those motorized carts.

  “It’s a good thing you came to me,” the thirty-third doctor says. “I’m sure other doctors have been telling you to do all kinds of ridiculous stuff. Well, I’m here to tell you to keep doing exactly what you’ve been doing. Keep smoking! Watch a little more TV. And e
at more fast food! Did you see Carl’s Jr. now has this sandwich where the entire bun is made out of cheese? You see, those other doctors are in the pocket of Big Fresh Fruits and Vegetables.”

  Republicans know that if they concede what climate scientists, the Defense Department, the Muppets, and virtually every other country in the world know—that global warming is real, that it is man-made, and that it is the greatest current threat to global prosperity and stability—the Koch brothers will spend money against them to fund a primary challenge. This goes double for Republicans from conservative states. They know from the experience of their defeated colleagues that the Koch brothers will primary them if they stray from climate denial orthodoxy, and that the biggest threat to their reelection comes not from Democrats, but from being outflanked to the right by their own party.

  A Republican friend once said to me, “The easiest person to fool is yourself.” I know that there are a few of my friends on the other side of the aisle who do sincerely believe that climate change is somehow a hoax, that God wouldn’t let us destroy our planet, or some such nonsense. But I think the rest of them know that sea level is rising for a reason other than God’s benign and fundamentally incomprehensible whim.

  That’s why during hearings in the Energy Committee, when Energy Secretary Ernie Moniz would testify about research on renewable energy, energy efficiency, and energy storage technologies, my Republican friends didn’t yell at him, “Why are you wasting so much money on this renewable stuff when we’re the Saudi Arabia of coal?!”

  No. I watched my colleagues closely, and behind their eyes, I could see them thinking, “Oh, thank God somebody’s doing this!”

  One of the reasons I was so hoping that Hillary Clinton would win the election, aside from, you know, all the other ones, is that the clearest path to combating climate change ran through the Supreme Court. Overturning Citizens United would help break the Koch brothers’ stranglehold on the Republican Party, and without that threat, some of them might be convinced to join the rest of the Senate and the rest of the world in trying to actually address climate change.