Money Musk, Congress, and the Chamber of Democracy

Let's look at the probabilities of toppling the regime, and what it would take.

The question has recently been asked “what’s the tipping point, when we citizens make so much noise, raise so many objections, that the GOP Congress starts to listen to us, and will vote to impeach the President.”

The GOP Senate and House have answered the question "To whom do we pledge our allegiance, Trump or our voters?" In spite of all the phone calls, faxes, and emails from citizens, the GOP passed the Trump budget and Trump signed it.

The money that flooded the 2024 campaign is a major part of how we got here. A group funded by Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, took over core components of what was then the failing Trump campaign, including voter outreach operations. Dark money from groups that do not disclose their donors topped $1 billion, including at least $182 million that was funneled through groups closely aligned with the two major parties’ congressional leadership campaigns.

So it’s crucial to overturn the 2010 Supreme Court decision Citizens United, allowing unrevealed and vast amounts of money to flow into political campaigns. Only in densely populated, demographically united urban districts like AOC's can Democrats win without corporate funding.

Let’s look at the prospects.

In my planning coursework, we learned to name desired outcomes, work backward from there, and assign probabilities and time frames to each preceding step.

For example, if a desired outcome is to overturn Citizens United * it’s necessary to (1) have the Supreme Court render judgment overturning Citizens United.

The previous step would have to be that (2) Some parties would have a case brought before the Supreme Court challenging Citizens United based on new law.

The previous step would have to be that (3) the President would sign the new legislation that overturns Citizens United.

The previous step would be that (4) the House and Senate pass the bill overturning Citizens United and send it to the President to sign.

The previous step would be (5) the legislation passes through its committees and goes to the floor for a vote, and (6) a member of the House or Senate would have to write such a bill.

As it happens, on February 17, 2025, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (WA-07) introduced an amendment to the US Constitution that would end corporate personhood, and reverse Citizens United. And on March 27, 2025, Senator Jean Shaheen, D-NH, reintroduced a Constitutional Amendment to overturn Citizens United.

So (6) is started. Great. (To pass a Constitutional Amendment in the U.S., a two-step process is required, namely proposal and ratification. First, the amendment must be proposed, either by a two-thirds vote in both houses of Congress or by a national convention called by two-thirds of the state legislatures. Then, the proposed amendment must be ratified, which requires a three-fourths vote of either the state legislatures or state ratifying conventions. But of course, the Constitutional Amendment is a pipe dream.)

What is the probability of (5) the legislation passes through its committees and goes to the floor for a vote? (Never mind the probabilities of 1-4 for now.)

In the current Congress, the probability P that the legislation gets to the floor is equal to or less than P2, the probability that you will sprout wings and fly. P =/< P2.

So when might the probability P be equal to or greater than P2? P=/> P2?

When the House and Senate have Democratic Party majorities, maybe. Depending on the donors and the Party platform and leadership.

And that brings us back to the problem of money in politics. If you are going to run ads on radio, TV, cable, social media, hire staff, get candidates to meetings, feed people, hire offices, you need to spend the money.

To reduce the power of money in politics, it's not just Citizens United we need to reverse.

Remember that the GOP was raising massive campaign contributions beginning in 1971, after the Lewis Powell Memorandum, wherein Powell, then chair of the US Chamber of Commerce, organized CEO's to fund university chairs and fund promising law students, hire them into law firms and ensure they were well paid and pointed toward lobbying and politics, and pay lobbyists and contribute to GOP campaigns.**

The race to the bottom was on. In 1980, Democratic Congressman Tony Coelho of Los Banos, CA was named chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, a Hill committee that supports Democratic Party candidates. Coelho realized that the Democrats were getting beaten like a gong by the GOP in fundraising and would soon be nonexistent unless they also raised money from business. So under Coelho's leadership, the Democrats began to raise money from businesses, which later Ralph Nader would blame for changing the party.

So unless there is a way to outlaw all political fundraising, it remains suicidal for the Democrats to step back from corporate fundraising. As stated above, only in dense urban demographically unified districts like AOC's can Democrats win without corporate funding.

This brings us to Elon Musk and his America Party. Over the weekend, Musk announced he would be forming a new political party called the America Party. He said the party would become the deciding vote in Congress.

Musk has the biggest wallet on earth. True, he can't pass the smell test with the public. Here's the ad: This guy cut thousands of federal jobs, including National Weather Service jobs (show video of Guadalupe River flood in Kerr County Texas), and now he wants you to vote for his party?

Musk’s American Party just now is like unto the Earth in Genesis 1.2. It is without form and void.

Musk may not know how to file papers and get delegates to a party convention in any state. What he does know is the Rule of Three.

When there is a political conflict, divide the stakeholders into 3 entities and pit any 2 against the 3rd. The House right now is so close in numbers - 220 Republicans to 213 Democrats, with 2 empty seats due to the deaths of two Democrats, Reps. Raúl Grijalva (Ariz.) and Sylvester Turner (Texas) – whose seats will be filled after special elections in September and November - that adding 3 seats taken from Republicans or Democrats or both will give that 3rd party the Power to swing their votes to either of the other 2 parties and dictate terms. That's the game.

The probability of Musk’s America Party taking any seats from the Democratic Party is reasonably less than the probability of Harold the Ambitious Sheep sprouting wings and flying.

And that brings us back to the power of the American citizens and the Democratic Party and voting and money in politics.

As none of us is about to emulate Harold, it probably best to accept the presence of dark money and SuperPacs for the time being. How, then, can the people recover the spirit of the times that fits reality?

Maybe we need to convene a Chamber of Democracy meeting, in which we pass around a memo drafted by our best minds, urging our donors, economists, public policy thinkers, attorneys, bankers, ecologists, climate experts, activists and humble citizens to join us in the work, to rebuild from the wreckage of our nation a strong, sustainable, just, anti-autocratic Democracy.

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*From the Brennan Center article on the Citizens United decision :
The ruling has ushered in massive increases in political spending from outside groups, dramatically expanding the already outsized political influence of ultra-wealthy donors, corporations, and special interest groups.

…. But perhaps the most significant outcomes of Citizens United have been the creation of super PACs, which empower the wealthiest donors, and the expansion of dark money through shadowy nonprofits that don’t disclose their donors.

These trends reached new heights in the 2024 election. Billionaire-backed super PACs helped the winning presidential candidate close a substantial fundraising gap. These groups also went beyond just running supportive ads. A group funded by Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, took on core components of the winning campaign, including voter outreach operations. And dark money from groups that do not disclose their donors topped $1 billion, including at least $182 million that was funneled through groups closely aligned with the two major parties’ congressional leadership campaigns.

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**From the Wikipedia article on Lewis Powell:
On August 23, 1971, prior to accepting Nixon's nomination to the Supreme Court, Powell was commissioned by his neighbor Eugene B. Sydnor Jr., a close friend and education director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, to write a confidential memorandum for the chamber entitled "Attack on the American Free Enterprise System," an anti-Communist and anti-New Deal blueprint for conservative business interests to retake America.^[17][18] It was based in part on Powell's reaction to the work of activist Ralph Nader, whose 1965 exposé on General Motors, Unsafe at Any Speed, put a focus on the auto industry putting profit ahead of safety, which triggered the American consumer movement. Powell saw it as an undermining of the power of private business and a step toward socialism.^[17] His experiences as a corporate lawyer and a director on the board of Phillip Morris from 1964 until his appointment to the Supreme Court made him a champion of the tobacco industry who railed against the growing scientific evidence linking smoking to cancer deaths.^[17] He argued, unsuccessfully, that tobacco companies' First Amendment rights were being infringed when news organizations were not giving credence to the cancer denials of the industry.^[17]

The memo called for corporate America to become more aggressive in molding society's thinking about business, government, politics and law in the U.S. It inspired wealthy heirs of earlier American industrialists, the Earhart Foundation (whose money came from an oil fortune), and the Smith Richardson Foundation (from the cough medicine dynasty)^[17] to use their private charitable foundations, which did not have to report their political activities, to join the Carthage Foundation, founded by Richard Mellon Scaife in 1964.^[17] The Carthage Foundation pursued Powell's vision of a pro-business, anti-socialist, minimally government-regulated America based on what he thought America had been in the heyday of early American industrialism, before the Great Depression and the rise of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal.

The Powell Memorandum ultimately came to be a blueprint for the rise of the American conservative movement and the formation of a network of influential right-wing think tanks and lobbying organizations, such as the Business Roundtable, The Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and inspired the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to become far more politically active.^[19][20][21] CUNY professor David Harvey traces the rise of neoliberalism in the US to this memo.^[22][23] Historian Gary Gerstle refers to the memo as "a neoliberal call to arms."^[19] Political scientist Aaron Good describes it as an "inverted totalitarian manifesto" designed to identify threats to the established economic order following the democratic upsurge of the 1960s.^[24]