US Congress makes a 13th attempt to reign in dark money
DEPLOY THE ACRONYMS!
I used to be a keen photographer and would buy photography magazines for long train or plane journeys, until I realized that they basically only ever had one article — “How to Use Your Digital Camera” — which was repeated in different forms month after month. The magazines’ readership appeared to consist solely of people who had just bought a DSLR and wanted to know how it worked, and who, therefore, would only ever buy one issue, so the editor’s job consisted of endlessly coming up with new ways to write the same article. Working for one of those magazines must be one of the most soul-crushing forms of journalism in the world.
Anyway, writing this newsletter is nothing like that because you are an attentive and alert readership, always yearning for new oligarch-adjacent content. You therefore know already that I have a soft spot for the daft acronyms chosen by American legislators for their bills, because I regularly talk about it.
Which brings us to the Democracy Is Strengthened by Casting Light On Spending in Elections (DISCLOSE) Act, which is back in Congress for — I think — the 13th year in a row. Do legislators come up with the name first, then fit the words to it, or does it work the other way around? Is there one particularly gifted legislator who everyone else asks to do the acronym, like the clever kid at school? Or do they have an AI-enabled computer program? And more to the point, does having a catchy acronym help a bill become law? The fact that this particular piece of legislation has been failing to get passed every year since 2010, despite its great name, suggests that perhaps it doesn’t.
- “A toxic flood of dark money has given billionaires and special interests a powerful way to rig the system secretly in their favor, dark money even enabled these same interests to capture our Supreme Court,” said Senator Sheldon Whitehouse. “It’s time to pass the DISCLOSE Act to end the corrupting influence of dark-money spending and make government work better for the American people.”
It is indeed long past time. Incidentally, Whitehouse was in the U.K. last week, and I enjoyed meeting him at lunch.