Make All Political Action Non-Profit

Politics is public work, not a profit center

A campaign for public office is not a business. It should not be run like one, and it should not enrich anyone. New Republic’s position is direct:

• Non-profit status required for all political action campaigns. Every committee, every campaign, every political action organization should be organized and bound as a non-profit — transparent books, no private inurement, mission over margin.
• Repeal Citizens United. The 2010 ruling that money is speech and corporations are people opened the floodgates to unlimited private spending. We support a constitutional remedy to overturn it and restore the public’s power to set the rules of its own elections.
• Turn antitrust law on the Super PACs. A Super PAC is a combination of concentrated money formed to corner a market — the marketplace of political speech — and to drown out every competitor who cannot match it. That is exactly what our anti-monopoly laws already forbid. We will use the antitrust statutes we already have against these combinations, treating them as what they are: trusts conspiring to monopolize the public’s speech — the same anti-monopoly standard we set in Competition by Design, applied to speech.

Why it matters

When political action can generate private profit, the incentives rot. Consultants get rich whether or not the public is served; donors buy access; the loudest dollar drowns out the quietest citizen. Binding political action to non-profit form realigns the incentive with the only legitimate purpose of a campaign: to serve the public.

This is the libertarian instinct and the progressive instinct meeting in the same place — get perverse private incentives out of the machinery of self-government, so that power answers to people instead of money.

Revolutionizing the Court

None of this survives the current Supreme Court — the same Court that handed down Citizens United. So we will renew the Court itself, by growth rather than by force:

• Add seven new justices over the next several years, seated through ordinary legislation. Congress has set the size of the Court many times in our history; it is fully empowered to do so again.
• Every sitting justice keeps their seat for life, exactly as the U.S. Constitution requires. No one is removed, and no term is cut short.
• Those original seats are simply not refilled once they end. Through attrition the Court settles into its new form — ultimately the seven new members — its balance restored by a generation that answers to the people rather than to concentrated money.

Reform through addition and patience, never through the removal of a single sitting justice: that is how a free people corrects its highest court without breaking it.