Principle #1. Every citizen has an equal political voice

If any principle could claim to be foundational to democracy, this would be it. The word itself, coined in ancient Athens, joined dēmos (the people) with kratos (rule). Democracy was defined, from the beginning, by what it was not: it was not oligarchy, the rule of the wealthy few, and it was not tyranny, the rule of one. This political framework was specifically built to ensure that no citizen's voice carried disproportionate weight in the governance of the whole.

When the United States declared its independence from Great Britain, the drafters wrote that "governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." When the Constitution was written, it opened with "We the People of the United States," not "We the Rulers of the United States." And over the past 250 years, the country has repeatedly amended that document to widen who counts among "the People." The 15th Amendment established that race could not be used to deny the vote; the 19th Amendment did the same for sex. The 24th Amendment prohibited poll taxes, establishing that wealth could not be used as a barrier to political participation. The 26th Amendment lowered the voting age to 18, ensuring that young adults sent to fight the country's wars could also vote on the policies that decided them.

The Supreme Court has affirmed the same principle. By the mid-twentieth century, many state legislatures had become imbalanced. Some districts had remained unchanged for decades despite massive population shifts, with a vote in some districts worth many times a vote in others. In Reynolds v. Sims (1964), the Court held that this was constitutionally intolerable, and legislative districts would need to be drawn so that no citizen's vote carries more weight than another's. "Legislators represent people, not trees or acres," Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote, establishing what has become known as "one person, one vote."

Taken together, all of this amounts to a single claim: that whether you are a citizen without a dollar to your name or a Wall Street financier, a rural farmer whose nearest neighbor lives miles down the road or a city resident whose apartment building holds more people than many American towns, you should count equally in the decisions that govern you.

That is the principle, established and reaffirmed across nearly 250 years of American history. The question is whether we have lived up to it.

Most Americans have already answered, and they have been answering the same way for half a century. When the American National Election Studies first put the question to a national sample in 1964, nearly two-thirds of Americans said the government was run for the benefit of all the people. Just 29 percent said it was run by a few big interests looking out for themselves. By the mid-1970s, the country had inverted, and the "few big interests" answer has held a clear majority in nearly every survey since. If anything, the gap has widened. In 2024, more than four in five Americans said the country is run by a few big interests.

If we merely had a single data point, this wouldn't be as telling. People can be wrong about their government. But when a majority of Americans, sustained across half a century, keep reaching the same conclusion, something is going on that has very little to do with which party is in power. Republicans said it under Obama, Democrats said it under Trump, and both said it under each other's predecessors. So the question worth asking is not who they blame, but what they are responding to. And the natural place to start is with the most visible piece of the system, the apparatus through which "big interests" crowd out the voices of "the People."

Heads: I Win

In 2024, organized interests spent $4.4 billion on federal lobbying, money paid to professional advocates working to shape legislation and regulation, separate from any spending on elections themselves.¹ To put that number into perspective, it exceeds the annual profit of Starbucks.² Every store, every drink, every customer, across roughly 40,000 locations serving tens of millions of customers every week, produces less in net earnings each year than is spent in Washington trying to shape what the federal government does.³ Put another way, over the past 15 years, more than $53 billion has been spent on lobbying, an amount that has held steady through recessions and pandemics and surged to record highs in recent years, regardless of which party controlled the White House.⁴ That same sum, redirected to the federal food assistance program, could have provided a full year of grocery support to 24 million Americans, more than the population of Florida.⁵

If lobbying did not work, it would not be a multi-billion dollar industry. The firms paying for it are not in the habit of paying for things that do not produce returns. The economic literature confirms what the spending implies. A 2014 study in the American Economic Review found that while both issue expertise and political connections drive what lobbyists are paid, the monetary premium for connections is more consistent than the premium for expertise.⁶ When their connected members move to new committees, lobbyists follow them, regardless of subject matter. A separate study, examining a tax provision passed in 2004, calculated that firms received roughly $220 in tax savings for every dollar they spent lobbying for it.⁷ To match that sort of return in a casino, you would have to win eight blackjack hands in a row, doubling your stake each time, with the odds of doing so roughly one in 250. Returns of that magnitude are unusual. The more general finding is that lobbying is, in the strict economic sense, a profitable allocation of resources.

The pattern isn't unique to corporations. The National Association of Realtors (NAR) spent $86.3 million on federal lobbying in 2024, which was more than any other single organization in Washington.⁸ The reason for the surge is not difficult to find. In late 2023, a federal jury found NAR liable for an antitrust conspiracy to inflate real estate commissions, and the case would be settled in 2024 for $418 million.⁹ The settlement required NAR to change the rules governing how its 1.5 million members are paid for their work. The trade group was, in effect, lobbying to shape the legislative and regulatory response to its own legal defeat.

One could reasonably argue that an organization representing realtors will naturally lobby for realtors, and that this is what trade associations are designed to do. The point is not that NAR shouldn't lobby. The point is the scale at which it does, and the asymmetry that this scale represents. The AFL-CIO, a federation of American unions representing roughly 12.5 million workers across virtually every sector of the economy, spent $5.2 million on federal lobbying in 2024.¹⁰ The National Education Association, the country's largest single union, representing about 3 million public school teachers and education staff, spent $2.8 million.¹¹ The Service Employees International Union, representing about 1.85 million workers in healthcare, public services, and property services, spent under $1 million.¹² NAR alone outspent these three organizations combined by more than tenfold, even though they represent, collectively, more than ten times as many Americans.

The natural question is why this is allowed.

The short answer is that it has always been protected. The First Amendment guarantees "the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." Lobbyists, in the strict legal sense, are citizens exercising that right on behalf of clients who pay them to do so.

James Madison, one of the Founding Fathers, anticipated this. Writing in Federalist No. 10, he called organized interests "factions" and argued they were inevitable in any free society. People hold different views and form competing groups around their interests. Madison thought a free country could not eliminate factions without eliminating freedom itself. The remedy, he wrote, was to be found "in the means of controlling its effects."¹³ So the system the Founders designed accepted that factions would form, and worked instead to keep any one of them from dominating. The country would be a large republic, with the people's views filtered through elected representatives, and with so many varied factions across the territory that no single one could easily assemble a stable majority. Power would be split between the national government and the states, and within the national government among three branches that could check one another. This design would, ideally, lead to a country where factions would have to compete. Madison's design assumed factions would compete. It did not assume that the cost of competing would rise to a point where most citizens could not afford to participate.

Tails: You Lose

Before every American football game, a coin is tossed. The winner chooses how the game begins. In American politics, citizens like to think that at least one side of the coin might land in their favor; that one of the two great mechanisms of political influence might serve the people rather than the few. In practice, both sides have come to serve big interests. Heads or tails, the same names choose how the game begins, how it is played, and how it ends. If lobbying calls the plays, campaign finance picks the players. And no Supreme Court decision has shaped how players are picked more than Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.¹⁴

In 2008, a conservative nonprofit called Citizens United produced a ninety-minute documentary critical of Hillary Clinton, who was then running for the Democratic presidential nomination. The group wanted to distribute the film through video-on-demand during the primary season. The Federal Election Commission held that doing so would violate a provision of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, which prohibited corporations and unions from using their general funds to pay for "electioneering communications" close to a federal election. Citizens United sued, and the case worked its way to the Supreme Court, which heard oral arguments twice and issued its decision on January 21, 2010.

By a vote of five to four, the Court held that the law violated the First Amendment. The majority opinion, written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, held that political speech sits at the core of what the First Amendment protects, and that the government cannot suppress political speech based on the identity of the speaker. But what happens when that speaker is a corporation or a union?

The Court's answer was that corporations and unions are associations of citizens, and the political speech they fund deserves the same constitutional protection as the speech of an individual. A 1990 precedent that had upheld restrictions on corporate political spending was overturned, along with the portion of a 2003 ruling that had upheld the same restriction in the McCain-Feingold law.¹⁵ After the decision, corporations and unions could spend unlimited amounts of their general funds on independent political communications, as long as they did not coordinate directly with a candidate's campaign.

And spend they did. In 2008, the last election cycle before the decision, outside groups spent $574 million attempting to influence federal elections. In 2024, that figure was $4.5 billion. Outside spending grew nearly eightfold in fifteen years, faster than any other category of political money.¹⁶

If "We the People" are the quarterback in this game, calling the plays and reading the field, Citizens United was the sack that rocked the quarterback. And the play that followed made it even harder to get up. Within months of Citizens United, a federal appeals court extended the ruling's logic to political action committees, holding in SpeechNow.org v. FEC that if independent expenditures could not be limited, then contributions to committees making only independent expenditures could not be limited either.¹⁷

The result was a new kind of political organization, the super PAC. Super PACs can accept unlimited contributions from individuals, corporations, and unions, and spend unlimited amounts on political activity, as long as they do not coordinate directly with a candidate's campaign. They emerged in 2010 and have grown into the dominant vehicle for outside spending in federal elections. By 2024, super PACs were spending more on individual races than the candidates' own campaigns.¹⁸

For example, the most expensive House primary in American history took place that year in New York's 16th Congressional District, where the American Israel Public Affairs Committee's (AIPAC) affiliated super PAC, the United Democracy Project, spent $14.5 million to defeat Representative Jamaal Bowman.¹⁹ The contributors funding that spending lived largely outside the district, and the issue motivating their effort was U.S. policy toward a country thousands of miles away. That figure was more than five times what Bowman's own campaign spent, and it was decisive. Bowman lost by seventeen points.²⁰

The pattern crosses party lines. The same year, Representative Bob Good of Virginia, the chair of the House Freedom Caucus, lost his Republican primary to a state senator named John McGuire. McGuire ran with Donald Trump's endorsement, which Trump had given after Good backed Ron DeSantis in the presidential primary. He also drew support from outside groups tied to former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, whom Good had voted to remove from the speakership the previous year. Outside groups poured nearly $11 million into the race, one of the most expensive Republican House primaries of the cycle. Good's own campaign raised $1.4 million; outside spending against him reached $6.9 million. He lost by 370 votes.²¹

Both races show the mechanism, but only one of them keeps going past the primary. Good's defeat closed out an intra-party fight about who held the speakership. Bowman's defeat was one move in a longer effort with a clear policy direction, and that direction shows up in the votes Congress has been taking.

Returning to AIPAC, its reach goes well beyond a single race. Across the 2024 election cycle, the organization deployed roughly $127 million through its lobbying operation, its political action committee, and the United Democracy Project.²² Organized money on this scale can even produce policy outcomes that diverge from what voters say they want.

The gap between Democratic voters and Democratic representatives on Israel policy is unusually concrete. In April 2024, the House passed the Israel Security Supplemental Appropriations Act, sending roughly $17 billion in additional military and security assistance to Israel as part of a $26 billion supplemental package. House Democrats backed it 173 to 37, with more than four out of five voting in favor of its passage.²³ Their constituents were not with them. Polling around the same time found that only about a third of Democrats viewed Israel favorably, just a quarter supported continued U.S. military aid, and roughly three-quarters disapproved of Israel's military actions in Gaza.²⁴ In the same months that Democratic representatives cast their votes and the people who elected them spoke with pollsters, the two looked nothing alike.

The original principle was that every citizen has an equal political voice, and so far we've been exploring the ways in which that notion has been strained. So far the conversation has stayed with institutions: lobbying firms, super PACs, the legal architecture that turns money into influence. But voice is something people have, and nothing puts the claim of equal voice to a fairer test than the individuals whose voices, by any measure worth taking, now carry vastly more weight than those of their fellow citizens.

In the 2024 federal election cycle, the top five individual contributors to American politics were, in order: Elon Musk, who gave roughly $291 million; Timothy Mellon, who gave roughly $197 million; Miriam Adelson, who gave roughly $148 million; Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein, who gave roughly $143 million; and Kenneth Griffin, who gave roughly $108 million.²⁵ All five directed their contributions toward Republican candidates and causes. The cycle's total individual contribution from these five people alone approached $900 million. Musk's $291 million was nearly as much as Donald Trump's entire campaign committee raised from all sources combined.²⁶ Every donor, large and small, over the entire two-year cycle.

It would be tempting to view that graphic as a story about one party, one candidate, or one man, but the pattern is older and broader than any single cycle. In the 2022 cycle, the largest individual contributor in the country was George Soros, who gave roughly $178 million, almost entirely to Democratic candidates and causes, which was more than the next two contributors combined.²⁷ In the 2020 cycle, four of the top ten individual contributors gave principally to Democrats, including Michael Bloomberg at roughly $152 million and Tom Steyer at roughly $72 million.²⁸ The names and the partisan tilt change from cycle to cycle, but the system does not. In every recent cycle, a small number of individuals have provided a share of the country's political spending that no ordinary citizen, regardless of party, could plausibly match.

The 2024 cycle is worth dwelling on, because it produced something the country has not previously seen. Elon Musk's $291 million was not only the largest individual contribution of the cycle; it was, by available reporting, the largest disclosed individual contribution in the history of American federal elections.²⁹ After the election, the candidate he supported took office, and Musk was given a role with broad authority over the federal workforce, authority that included reducing the headcount of agencies, accessing internal government data systems, and shaping the operations of departments whose work touched directly on his own companies' regulatory environment.³⁰

Consider one example. In late January 2025, Musk's social media platform X announced a partnership with Visa to launch a digital wallet and peer-to-peer payments service, the first step toward what Musk has described as turning the platform into an "everything app" through which users could conduct their "entire financial life."³¹ Within ten days, Musk's team at the federal Department of Government Efficiency had arrived at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the agency created after the 2008 financial crisis to regulate consumer financial products.³² Within weeks, the bureau's leadership had begun moves to terminate nearly all 1,700 of its employees, its work was halted, and its headquarters was closed.³³ There is no precedent in American history for a private citizen contributing at this scale to an election and then assuming this kind of role inside the government that election produced.

But this has nothing to do with the particulars and everything to do with the system that allows for it. Consider how this would read in a history textbook written a century from now, describing a different era. Imagine if the entry for the 1904 election noted that John D. Rockefeller, having spent heavily to support the winning candidate, was subsequently given an office inside the federal government with authority to dismiss civil servants, access agency records, and oversee the operations of departments that regulated the oil industry. Most Americans would find it strange, and it would be strange regardless of what they thought of Rockefeller, the president, or the policies the arrangement produced.

None of what has been discussed thus far is illegal. The Supreme Court has, in fact, affirmed much of it.³⁴ Some readers may agree with what Elon Musk wants for the country, others with what George Soros wants. But given the scale at which money now operates in our politics, it might be time to ask whether the principle this country was founded on, that every citizen has an equal political voice, still describes the country we live in. That principle was written into the nation's founding, reaffirmed by amendment after amendment, and stated again as constitutional doctrine. The question is whether we practice it, or whether it is something we have merely learned to tell ourselves.

Footnotes

1. OpenSecrets, "Federal Lobbying Set New Record in 2024," February 13, 2025, https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2025/02/federal-lobbying-set-new-record-in-2024. ↩

2. Starbucks Corporation, "Starbucks Reports Q4 and Full Fiscal Year 2024 Results," October 30, 2024. Net income reported at $3.76 billion. (Starbucks's fiscal year 2024 ran October 2023 – September 2024; the federal lobbying figure is for calendar 2024.) ↩

3. Starbucks Corporation, "Starbucks Reports Q4 and Full Fiscal Year 2024 Results," October 30, 2024. Store count of 40,199 at fiscal year-end. ↩

4. OpenSecrets, "Federal Lobbying: Trends in Spending." Cumulative figure calculated from annual totals, 2010–2024. https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/trends-in-spending ↩

5. Author's calculation based on average SNAP benefit of $187.20 per participant per month in fiscal year 2024 (USDA ERS). Florida population estimate (approximately 23 million) from U.S. Census Bureau, 2024. ers.usda.gov ↩

6. Marianne Bertrand, Matilde Bombardini, and Francesco Trebbi, "Is It Whom You Know or What You Know? An Empirical Assessment of the Lobbying Process," American Economic Review 104, no. 12 (December 2014): 3885–3920. ↩

7. Raquel Meyer Alexander, Stephen W. Mazza, and Susan Scholz, "Measuring Rates of Return for Lobbying Expenditures: An Empirical Case Study of Tax Breaks for Multinational Corporations," Journal of Law and Politics 25, no. 4 (2009): 401–457. ↩

8. OpenSecrets, "Federal Lobbying Set New Record in 2024," February 13, 2025, https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2025/02/federal-lobbying-set-new-record-in-2024. NAR spending data also at https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/national-assn-of-realtors/summary. ↩

9. Burnett v. National Association of Realtors, W.D. Mo., No. 4:19-cv-00332, jury verdict October 31, 2023; settlement of $418 million granted final approval November 26, 2024. ↩

10. OpenSecrets, AFL-CIO organization profile. AFL-CIO membership figure of approximately 12.5 million workers across affiliated unions. https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/afl-cio/summary ↩

11. OpenSecrets, National Education Association organization profile. NEA membership figure of approximately 3 million. https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/national-education-assn/summary ↩

12. OpenSecrets, Service Employees International Union organization profile. SEIU membership figure of approximately 1.85 million. https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/service-employees-international-union/summary ↩

13. James Madison, Federalist No. 10, November 22, 1787. https://guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers/text-1-10 ↩

14. Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310 (2010). Argued March 24, 2009; reargued September 9, 2009; decided January 21, 2010. https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/08-205.ZS.html ↩

15. The overturned precedents were Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, 494 U.S. 652 (1990), and the relevant portion of McConnell v. Federal Election Commission, 540 U.S. 93 (2003). https://www.fec.gov/legal-resources/court-cases/citizens-united-v-fec/ ↩

16. OpenSecrets, "By the Numbers: 15 Years of Citizens United," January 27, 2025, https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2025/01/by-the-numbers-15-years-of-citizens-united/. See also https://www.opensecrets.org/outside-spending/by_cycle. ↩

17. SpeechNow.org v. Federal Election Commission, 599 F.3d 686 (D.C. Cir. 2010), decided March 26, 2010. https://www.fec.gov/legal-resources/court-cases/speechnoworg-v-fec/ ↩

18. OpenSecrets, "By the Numbers: 15 Years of Citizens United," January 27, 2025. Super PAC spending grew from $62.6 million in 2010 to more than $4.1 billion in 2024. https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2025/01/by-the-numbers-15-years-of-citizens-united/ ↩

19. Brett Bachman, "Democrats Groan at AIPAC's $14.5 Million 'Overkill' Against Jamaal Bowman," Axios, June 26, 2024. The figure represents United Democracy Project spending alone, which the New York Times reported "eclipsed what any interest group has ever spent on a single House race." https://www.axios.com/2024/06/26/democrats-aipac-jamaal-bowman-george-latimer ↩

20. Latimer defeated Bowman by approximately 17 percentage points. Bowman's pre-primary spending was approximately $2.7 million. https://abcnews.com/538/live-updates/new-york-colorado-utah-primaries/latimer-projected-to-defeat-bowman-in-new-yorks-16th-district-111426585. See also https://www.opensecrets.org/members-of-congress/jamaal-bowman/summary?cid=N00044790 ↩

21. Edward Sebastian and Tyler Englander, "Virginia's 5th District GOP Primary Between Bob Good and John McGuire Could Head to Recount," WRIC, June 19, 2024. Total race spending of $10.9 million per Virginia Public Access Project. https://www.wric.com/news/politics/local-election-hq/virginias-5th-district-gop-primary-between-bob-good-and-john-mcguire-could-head-to-recount/ ↩

22. Donald Shaw, "Here Is All the Money AIPAC Spent on the 2024 Elections," Sludge, January 24, 2025. AIPAC's PAC and the United Democracy Project together spent $126.9 million in the 2023–2024 cycle. https://readsludge.com/2025/01/24/here-is-all-the-money-aipac-spent-on-the-2024-elections/ ↩

23. Roll Call 152, H.R. 8034 (Israel Security Supplemental Appropriations Act, 2024), April 20, 2024. Final passage was 366 to 58, with 173 Democrats and 193 Republicans in support. https://clerk.house.gov/Votes/2024152 ↩

24. Lydia Saad, "Majority in U.S. Now Disapprove of Israeli Action in Gaza," Gallup, March 27, 2024. Pew Research Center, "Majority in U.S. Say Israel Has Valid Reasons for Fighting," March 21, 2024. https://news.gallup.com/poll/642695/majority-disapprove-israeli-action-gaza.aspx. Pew report: https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2024/03/PRC_2024.3.21_Israel-Hamas_REPORT.pdf ↩

25. OpenSecrets, "Top Individual Contributors: All Federal Contributions, 2023–2024." Figures reflect total contributions to federal candidates, parties, PACs, and outside groups. https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/biggest-donors?cycle=2024 ↩

26. Trump campaign committee fundraising figure from OpenSecrets, "Donald Trump – Candidate Summary, 2024 Cycle." Musk's contributions went almost entirely to outside groups. https://www.opensecrets.org/2024-presidential-race/donald-trump/candidate?id=N00023864 ↩

27. OpenSecrets, "Top Individual Contributors: All Federal Contributions, 2021–2022." https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/biggest-donors?cycle=2022 ↩

28. OpenSecrets, "Top Individual Contributors: All Federal Contributions, 2019–2020." https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/biggest-donors?cycle=2020 ↩

29. OpenSecrets, "Big Money, Big Stakes: 5 Things Everyone Should Know About Money in 2024 Elections," November 2024. The $291 million figure includes Musk's contributions to America PAC and other outside groups supporting Donald Trump. https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2024/11/big-money-big-stakes-5-things-everyone-should-know-about-money-in-2024-election/ ↩

30. Eric Katz, "Project 2025 Wanted to Hobble the Federal Workforce. DOGE Has Hastily Done That, and More," Government Executive, April 9, 2025. https://www.govexec.com/transition/2025/04/project-2025-wanted-hobble-federal-workforce-doge-has-hastily-done-and-more/404390/. See also https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2025/0512/doge-elon-musk-federal-government ↩

31. Hugh Son, "Elon Musk's X Begins Its Push into Financial Services with Visa Deal," CNBC, January 28, 2025. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/28/elon-musk-x-visa-digital-wallet.html. See also https://fortune.com/article/elon-musk-x-money-visa-partnership-impact/ ↩

32. Evan Weinberger, "Musk's DOGE Descends on CFPB With Eyes on Shutting It Down," Bloomberg Law, February 7, 2025. https://news.bgov.com/esg/musks-doge-descends-on-consumer-financial-protection-bureau ↩

33. Hugh Son, "Trump Administration, Musk's DOGE Plan to Fire Nearly All CFPB Staff and Wind Down Agency, Employees Say," CNBC, February 28, 2025. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/02/28/cfpb-leaders-and-elon-musk-doge-planned-to-fire-nearly-all-staff.html. See also https://www.npr.org/2025/02/12/nx-s1-5294479/cfpb-workers-fired-trump-doge ↩

34. See Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310 (2010); McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, 572 U.S. 185 (2014). ↩