A ‘Pay to Play’ Congress End-Runs Democracy.

In case you find ‘pay-to-play’ ambiguous, it’s “an idiom describing a situation where services or favors are exchanged for money, often implying a form of corruption or unethical transaction, such as bribing officials for favorable legislation or paying for radio airtime to promote music.”

Forget radio airtime, how does paying for Congress to promote special interests strike you?

Many years ago, I suggested, somewhat (but not entirely) tongue-in-cheek, that I favored establishing a Super-PAC named Buy Back America.

The idea was, that if every American (including families with kids) kicked in a single dollar per person per year, a war-chest would be created to bribe our Congress into enacting some laws we citizens actually wanted. I even owned the buybackamerica.com domain name at the time, and I see it’s actually become available again at GoDaddy.com.

$345 million a year, to legally bribe our legislators to enact stuff that polls show Americans actually want. Stuff like gun control, national health care, control over cost-of-living increases, support for unions, job security, minimum wages, housing affordability, an end to homelessness and political corruption, social security increases, fair taxes to reduce the national debt, environmental protections, better schools, bridges that don’t fall down and putting a rope around the neck of the military-industrial thieves.

I may have missed your favorite need, but you get my drift.

The Supreme Court has finally made it legal for the ordinary American citizen to enjoy the First Amendment rights of Corporations. The Court did it sort of ass-backwards, but they did it.

Now, we can all have a Super Pac to call our own.

And, it’s amazing how cheap it is to legally bribe a congressman or senator.

So, let’s take Senator Chuck Schumer as an example. He’s a heavy-hitter Democrat, so I won’t be criticized as coming down overly hard on Republicans.

According to opensecrets.org, in the 2019 – 2024 Campaign Committee Fundraising season, Chuckie took in $42,963,220. He spent $43,104,304 doing gopd-knows-what, and ended up with $9,323,631 cash in hand. Don’t worry about those numbers not adding up, as Chuckie Cheeze began with a leftover amount from past years.

So, the American public could have owned Senator Schumer, arguably the most powerful Democrat in Congress, during those five years for a mere $50 million. And (pay attention, because this is important) during those five years, Buy Back America would have raised a cool $1.725 billion bucks. That’s enough grease to lubricate a whole lot of wheels.

A little-known fact is, that when senators or congresspeople retire, or are voted out, they get to take home what’s left in the till, along with the healthcare and retirement benefits they wouldn’t let you and me have. Each of them made sure their own wheel got greased.

Did you ever wonder why a senator or representative would spend millions (usually other people’s millions) to get a $174,000 a year job? There’s your answer. A chance to be a gangster without going to jail.

The name of the game is, if you can’t get a totally Paid-off Congress to do what the American people overwhelmingly want it to do, then Buy Back America with a citizen-owned Super-Pac.

It might be fun to do.

It might get some useful things done

We might even convince Stephen Colbert or Jimmy Kimmel to oversee it…