Tillman Act of 1907

Here is the part that should bother anyone who takes the law seriously.

Corporations have been barred from contributing to federal candidates since the Tillman Act of 1907.

That ban is still on the books.

It has been law for one hundred and nineteen years, through both parties, every reform wave, and every scandal that prompted one.

Uh, the first one is money," and I don't remember what the second one is.

[laughs] And that led to ultimately Republican President Theodore Roosevelt signing into law the first major campaign finance reform act in 1907, something called the Tillman Act, that prevented direct corporate contributions to candidates and parties, and that was the foundation, uh, for a whole bunch of Progressive Era reforms.

Uh, fast-forward to 2010, the Supreme Court Citizens United decision essentially rolls back that regulation.

So technically, uh, at the federal level, corporations can't give directly to a candidate or a party committee, but they can give to these super PACs.

So there was that.

There was the Tillman Act, which was passed in 1907.

It made it a federal felony for any corporation to stick its nose in elections or fund any candidate for federal office.

It didn't cover state elections, because it was a federal act, but it did cover federal elections.

Teddy Roosevelt and Ho-- William Howard Taft used it to break up the railroad and oil trusts, along with dozens of others.

The Tillman Act of nineteen oh seven made it a crime for corporations to give money or any sort of support to federal candidates for office.

The income tax arrived in nineteen thirteen and the estate tax in nineteen sixteen, and by the nineteen-thirties, Franklin Roosevelt was building Social Security, the right to unionize, and the rest of the New Deal on that simple foundation.

After World War II, democracies around the world copied FDR's American New Deal formula and tightly regulated capitalism and imposed high taxes on the morbidly rich, which produced the largest middle class in history.

The oil barons, the drug companies, the banks, the tech billionaires, they write their checks, and the re- obedient Republicans go, "Oh, yes, we'd be glad to write that legislation for you." This used to be a crime, by the way.

In 1907, Teddy Roosevelt got the Tillman Act passed, which made it a federal felony for any corporation to put any kind of money or any other kind of support into any kind of federal political campaign.

That got knocked down by five corrupt Republicans on the US Supreme Court.

A political party that believes votes are something you purchase doesn't believe in democracy.

This used to be a crime.

After the robber baron scandals of the Gilded Age, Teddy Roosevelt pushed a humiliated Congress to pass the Tillman Act in nineteen oh seven to make it a felony for any corporation to give any sort of support or money to the campaign for any candidate for federal office.

As I laid out in The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America, it started with Lewis Powell's nineteen seventy-one memo, Nixon putting Powell on the court in seventy-two, and then a series of corrupt all-Republican decisions from Bolatti, which was authored by Powell himself, to Citizens United to redefine political bribery as free speech.

Republicans built that pay-to-play system.

And so the populist movement, the progressive movement, they were pushing back against this and saying, well, it's illegitimate for corporations to have so much power in politics because it's corrupting and it's anti-democratic.

And so enough pressure builds that you actually get members of Congress to vote against their interests in some ways and to pass in 1907 the Tillman Act.

And this bans corporations from contributing to candidates.

Now, is it perfect? Oh, of course it's not perfect.

Do we still have it today, really? Hard to say.

But now it will sound familiar.

You might not know the Tillman Act, but you know the

FEC.