David Sirota explores how money affects politics in a podcast simply called Master Plan. It’s a shorthand phrase for how the journalist sees wealthy businessowners working to relax campaign finance laws.
In the series, a number of Richmond connections come up — including a former U.S. Supreme Court justice and a former Virginia governor.
Sirota and reporter Jared Jacang Maher recently explained to VPM News how two figures from the commonwealth have played into the current campaign finance landscape.
The following has been edited for length and clarity.
Dave Cantor: What prompted your interest in campaign finance — and how did it lead to founding The Lever?
David Sirota: I had worked on Capitol Hill in the late 1990s. … I came out of college with West Wing–ish ideals about how politics should work and would work. And I was quickly disabused of those ideals while working on Capitol Hill for a then-relatively unknown House member named Bernie Sanders.
I saw the influence of money in politics pretty directly. In many ways, we tell the story in Master Plan about one way we saw it, which was these bus trips to Canada to spotlight the high price of prescription drugs and how we passed legislation to let consumers access lower-price prescription drugs. And then the pharmaceutical industry, and its army of lobbyists and its pile of campaign cash ended up killing those reforms. It was sort of a disillusioning moment for me.
I ended up writing a book called Hostile Takeover about how campaign finance — money in politics — changes the way we talk about issues.
There are a couple Richmond connections in Master Plan. Apart from being the former head of the Richmond School Board, who was Lewis Powell Jr. and why did he feature so prominently in the podcast?
Jared Jacang Maher: When we started this story to research the history of campaign finance and how money in politics got to be such an extreme problem, we initially weren't even thinking about Lewis F. Powell. We kind of found our way to him through this document that he wrote called the Powell memo.
“The attack on the American free enterprise system” was this memo that he wrote in 1971 when he was working as a lawyer in Richmond. When we were examining what was written in this document — really a manifesto about how the business community should get more involved in politics, in media and at every level of American institutions — we wanted to know more about who Lewis F. Powell was, how he managed to get onto the U.S. Supreme Court … and the impact that that memo had in transforming the way that the business world was interacting with American society.
I think the thing that surprised me was how much Richmond played as almost a character in this entire epic story that we told: Lewis F. Powell being at the center of this — his memo kind of kicking off the 50-year effort to take over different American institutions.
Richmond was a core part of his identity both as a partner in the law firm Hunton & Williams, which was one of the biggest corporate law firms in Virginia at the time, and then also as a lawyer for Philip Morris.
I don't know if he would have written the memo in the way that he did, if he wouldn't have had those influences from those institutions.
And I don't know if he would have done it at the perfect time to step in, post-Watergate, to really give the business world — and all these other powerful individuals who found themselves out in the political wilderness — something to latch onto as an expansive, multifaceted strategy that we see playing out in so many different areas today.
I don’t know that this was really touched upon in the podcast, but how qualified was Powell for his post on the court?
Sirota: Powell was at the pinnacle of the establishment. Lewis Powell was the head of the American Bar Association. Lewis Powell was a major tobacco industry lawyer. Lewis Powell doesn't look that different from a major political player today. I'm thinking, big-time lawyers, the people who kind of hang around politics, the rainmakers of politics. So, I don't think his Supreme Court selection was out of the blue, like, “Wow, this is weird and crazy.”
I think that what's weird and crazy about it is … there was the Lewis Powell known in the general political space as sort of a corporate lawyer, establishment figure at the nexus of government and politics, and private enterprise.
And then there's the less well-known Lewis Powell, which was the radicalized, very political Lewis Powell who had been radicalized by the zeitgeist of the era — the rise of Reagan, Barry Goldwater, the sort of nascent conservative foment against the New Deal and against the tumult of the 1960s.
When the Senate takes up his nomination, they're looking at the public Lewis Powell. They're looking at the Lewis Powell from Virginia who was on the school board, who's a pillar of the community in Richmond, who's the head of the American Bar Association.
The FBI, in doing its background review, did not include the Powell memo in its report to the Senate. So, when he’s being confirmed, he's not asked about this. The less well-known Lewis Powell is not interrogated in his confirmation hearings.
David, I’ve seen you critique Democrats’ performance during the presidential campaign. But did you see ripple effects of the Powell memo this cycle?
Sirota: For sure. I mean, obviously the huge amounts of money that have poured into this last election, I think, is a product of legalizing unlimited amounts of money and spending on elections — essentially turning elections into auctions.
I think the record amounts of money spent on both sides, absolutely, we're living in the “master planners” world. I also think that when it comes to the Democrats, there's been, I think rightly so, a lot of talk about how they did not connect with the working class.
And I would say the Democrats didn't connect with the working class, in part, because the party has become a party that seems unable to tell stories about the economic and corporate villains in the economy that are harming working people.
The Democrats, at best, typically tell a story about how they're going to solve problems: “We're going to do this, this and this.” But they don't actually tell a story about who's creating the problems. And part of the reason why they don't tell that story is because they're constantly caught between what the voters want and what their donors want.
And in a “master plan” world, what the donors want becomes as important — or even more important — than what the voters want, because the donors have disproportionate power through the amount of money they're now allowed to spend on elections.
The Democrats don't tell a villain story about the health insurance companies being at the center of the health care situation. The Democrats don't tell a story about private equity giants coming in to destroy local communities. They don't really tell those stories, because those villains are a big part of their donor base that has disproportionate influence in a deregulated campaign finance system.
The Republicans counter by telling a villain story about villains who, in my view, are not the villains: immigrants, Democrats, liberals, academics. But at least they tell a villain story, right? The public looking at the economy that we're living in is looking for an explanation about why life is getting harder.
So, you've got one party that's at least telling a story — in my view, not an honest story — and you have another party that just doesn't really want to tell a story. Or is sort of talking out of both sides of its mouth, because it's caught in between its donors and the voters.
In a “master plan” world, what the donors want becomes as important — or even more important — than what the voters want
The other local connection in the Master Plan is former Gov. Bob McDonnell, who had a conviction overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court — and tell me if this is incorrect — because of how the concept of an “official act” was defined.
What was he initially convicted of, and have there been repercussions from that Supreme Court ruling?
Sirota: What I can say about the McDonnell case is much of the “master plan” was focused on deregulating the campaign finance system, making it legal to pour unlimited amounts of money into elections where the “master plan” really accelerated after it had succeeded in doing that.
Citizens United was the sort of final phase of deregulating election financing laws — campaign finance. After Citizens United, that wasn't the end of the “master plan.” The questions then became, “All right, what actually is bribery? What is illegal bribery now?” And the Supreme Court was looking to narrow the actual bribery laws.
It’s one thing to say, “I'm going to give you campaign money, and you're going to be my ally in Congress.” There's a whole other thing where it's, “I'm gonna literally give you money in exchange for you, the governor or whoever, setting up a meeting for me, because I want something from your administration.”
So, McDonnell plays a big role in this concurrent line of deregulation, really narrowing the criminal bribery statutes. His case where the broad strokes are: He's helping a donor access different officials in the state government, setting up meetings, making introductions, he is prosecuted for this as basically bribery. … It gets all the way up to the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court overturns it, essentially narrowing the antibribery laws to say that the kind of behavior McDonnell engaged in is actually legal. And from the McDonnell ruling came a subsequent series of similar rulings, further narrowing down the bribery statutes to make more and more corrupt behavior — in my view — legal, unprosecutable.
Is there a connection between the legal issues former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell ran into and the current legal travails of New York City Mayor Eric Adams?
Sirota: Absolutely, 100% there's a connection. We have seen from McDonnell’s case that there was the case with Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey. There was the case with Andrew Cuomo. There was a case with a mayor in Indiana.
All of these cases are part of a string of rulings to limit the enforcement of antibribery statutes, where now politicians who are charged with bribery are reaching back to this series of cases — really, McDonnell being the biggest of them — to say, “I can't be convicted of these crimes, because this isn't actually the most narrow definition of quid pro quo bribery.”
