Congressional Fundraising: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

our main story tonight concerns political fundraising and before you roll your eyes this is not going to be about how money corrupts presidential candidates for that you can read much more on your most annoying friends Facebook posts dan that is a comment on a picture of a baby what the is wrong with you take it down I would like to talk instead about congressional fundraising which is much less covered but no less astonishing in the 2014 election cycle candidates for the House and Senate raiser combined 1.7 billion dollars that's a lot of money that's more than it costs to buy two hundred and thirty million choose of hemorrhoidal cooling gel and it's somehow even more upsetting now now interestingly much of that money has to be raised one way or another by the politicians themselves which they have complained about for years and and say that it can be the worst part of their job you know I hated raising money hated it it's painful frankly ah they continually ask people for money if Donna and I could tell you how many hours we spend with our good colleagues on our side of the issues talking about raising money it would be an embarrassment because it is an embarrassment Wow an embarrassment that is a strong statement although he might be overestimating Congress's capacity for embarrassment because bear in mind we are talking about a place where these moments happened do you like green eggs and ham I do not like them sam-i-am I do not like green eggs and ham two bits four bits six bits a dollar all for the Gators stand up in holler go Gators meet the Mets meet the Mets step right up and greet the Mets don't know much about chemistry don't know much toxicology don't know what's ammonium nitrate except it's easy to detonate but I do know that ist was used to increase our security what a much safer world this could be don't know much about gas burn oh my god what is most shocking about that last clip is that he read the room and decided you know what I think they want to hear another verse I think I think I'm gonna do another verse here I'm reading this room and I'm doing it but look the sheer amount of time politicians spend fundraising is not just embarrassing it's horrifying some say the members can spend anywhere from 25 to 50 percent of their time on it but former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle once guessed that in the two years before an election senators can spend two thirds of their time raising money and if two-thirds of the work you do is strictly about the money you're not a legislator you're Robert DeNiro at that point so so tonight tonight let's look at where that time actually goes and let's begin with the most obvious form of fundraising fundraisers these are usually shitty parties in DC bars restaurants or town houses and there are a lot of them the Sunlight Foundation estimates that in the last election cycle members of Congress held over 2,800 fundraisers Washington is like Rod Stewart's haircut party in the front party in the back frankly too much party and no business anywhere to be found fundraisers are so ubiquitous in DC you could conceivably construct a whole day around them which is exactly what former Eyal representative Bruce Braley did on September 20 2012 when 8:30 a.m. he held a fundraising breakfast followed at noon by a fundraising lunch and ending with a fundraising evening reception by that time he was less a member of Congress than he was a sentient storage container for canapes in fact fundraisers are such an integral part of DC's economy some restaurants derive a decent chunk of their income just from hosting them look at Johnny's half shell it's a seafood restaurant just blocks from the Capitol in the past 10 years a whopping 948 Congressional fundraisers have been held there it is almost inevitable that your elected representative will have spent at least some time in a place that market itself thusly champagne and oysters of Johnny's loose to Johnny's crappy to the quieter the happy out gift of the hot shell crabs of Johnny Sack shell on the terrace previous to you and your tiny choice after piece he is a significant figure in DC influential decisions are being made under the watchful eye of a man who looks like Jon Bon Jovi's less talented step cousin Jim Bon Jovi so some politicians even turned their own personal milestones into fundraising opportunities like Republican Andy Barr who held a 41st birthday fundraiser which cost a minimum of $500 per person to attend or theirs Florida representative Ileana Ross laitanan who turned her 30th wedding anniversary into a fund raiser an event that is almost breathtaking in its sadness because a 30th wedding anniversary should not be about raising political capital it should be about eating a largely silent dinner killing two bottles of wine forgetting to have sex and falling asleep to our friends rerun all of the anniversary and do it right and it in perhaps the most pathetic bid for hypnose available many members of Congress will even staged fundraisers at pop concerts the power of Taylor Swift not only changes the music business it makes money and so much so that some of washington's elites are capitalizing on the pop princesses 1989 tour which stops over in DC tonight we have over 10 Republicans five Democrats three packs all raising money off this Taylor Swift concert tickets going into thousands upon thousands of dollars some of these members we spoke to specifically representative buyer of Virginia who's having a fundraiser he goes his daughter turned him on to Taylor Swift he likes her feminist lyrics and that is why they're moving forward it's true representative Don Beyer held a fundraiser at a Taylor Swift concert and I don't know about you but this man is not feeling 22 he is feeling and looking very much 65 but but amazingly all of this is glamorous compared to the hours and hours that politicians spent fundraising over the phone a few years ago a PowerPoint presentation from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee two freshmen lawmakers leaked and it was showing their model schedule which suggested four hours a day of call time four hours on the phone the only time that makes sense is if you're trying to have phone sex with sting have you come yet huh it's been three hours have you come yet I've got stuff to do Gordon this can't be my day and look horrendously lawmakers have even been pulled out of hearings to go do that call time the first week I was down here we were having a committee hearing in education and my chief of staff at that time came in and said you have to leave you know we went into a V ante room and I said we don't have to go and she goes you have to go make phone calls and I looked at everyone this is my first hearing and you're coming in and asking me to leave how am I going to learn anything exactly she was a rookie legislator she needed to learn how to do her job the Knicks don't pull rookie kristaps porzingis out of a game so he can go make cold calls to season ticket holders because that would not be the best use of kristaps porzingis his time and if you think that sounds like a dehumanizing process rest assured it is I felt used when I had to go raise money I was embarrassed I thought it was ugly I thought it was demeaning my staff kept saying you got to go do it I said they don't like it you get a Rolodex and you get to go outside the building for a whole day and dial numbers of jerks you've never heard of in your whole life to get money out of them he's absolutely right if you want to get money out of a bunch of jerks you've never heard of before you shouldn't have to call them on the phone when you can simply open a vape shop boom done done and if you're wondering why he said he had to go outside the building that's because according to federal law members of Congress can't solicit or receive donations in their offices so each party's congressional committee has set up call rooms in their party headquarters just a few blocks from the Capitol we couldn't find any footage from inside those rooms but they sound pretty grim they've got cubicles and they've got a headset and they often have a minder who sort of sits at their shoulder and make sure that they don't take too on each call they say that the building can really start to stink after a while after a few hours it starts to smell like a locker room yeah but but what do you expect half the people in that room probably spent their morning slurping down Easter's in an 80s hockey player's sweaty crap Shack and just about all lawmakers have to do this even those like Eleanor Holmes Norton in ludicrously safe seats she regularly gets reelected with over 80 percent of the vote but despite that roughly six years ago she wound up leaving this voicemail for a lobbyist I was frankly surprised to see that we don't have a record so far as I can tell of your having given to me despite my long and deep work in fact it's been my major work on the committee and subcommittees been essentially in your sector I'm simply candidly calling to ask for contribution that is so depressing to hear even before you think about her calling from a room filled with the odor of Steny Hoyer shrimp burps and remember her seat is safe it's so safe she barely needs campaign funds for herself the problem is members are still expected to pay dues to their own party which can then be distributed to candidates in tougher races BuzzFeed actually got its hands on a d-triple-c spreadsheet two years ago showing the amount of money the committee expects each member to pay with figures ranging from a hundred and twenty five thousand dollars at the low end all the way up to eight hundred thousand dollars at the top so is it any wonder the politicians are hitting up their customer base harder than a Girl Scout with gambling debts Oh took two boxes of Samoas nah nah four boxes four boxes or I walk four boxes you get four boxes I know where you live whoopee and if you are desperately trying to rack up dollars that can affect the kind of people that you are targeting on the phone as Senator Chris Murphy explains for a Senate race I'm not calling anybody who doesn't have the chance of giving me at least $1,000 so you got to imagine that the people I'm calling you know are folks that are you know making a half a million to a million dollars and you know they have fundamentally different problems than everybody everybody else and that is a huge problem because it cannot help but affect the way you see the world if you're only calling donors rich enough that their main concerns are estate taxes or which Belgian kimono their cats will wear that day that's a good choice though but but but to be fair now to be fair direct fundraising by candidates is just one part of a system that also includes super PACs and so-called dark money although to be even fairer it is still the largest part and and regulating campaign finance is going to be difficult for a start there's the Supreme Court's 1976 buckley versus vallejo decision which basically held that spending money is a form of speech and sure there are times when that's probably true for example a 50 year old man spending money on a convertible is loudly saying I would like to sexually disappoint a woman half my age he's and we're hearing him loud and clear he's being hurt but but a bigger problem is that while both sides agree they hate this neither wants to unilaterally back down first it's basically a cold war but worse because at least in the real Cold War we got a trip to the moon and the third best rocky villain out of it which is not to say that there are not some attempts to address parts of the problem Democrats have pushed the disclose Act which would force more transparency on dark money and one Republican congressman has something called the stop act which will prohibit members of members of Congress from personally asking for donations but those would be very small fixes now a larger idea is perhaps the government by the People Act which would give tax credits and provide public funding for candidates by matching small donations and a ratio of at least six to one but before you get too excited about that idea to slight caveats first we asked and it would cost an estimated 500 million dollars a year which is a lot and second gov track taught us which offers predictions on whether bills are likely to pass gives it a 0% chance in our current Congress just flat zero which kind of makes you wonder if they try to find something more harsh than zero like negative zero or oh hell zero or just a zero with a frowny face in it and that's a bit frustrating because remember people in Congress are the ones constantly complaining about the time that they are forced to waste on fund raising in fact Steve Israel a Democrat from Long Island announced his retirement at the beginning of this year saying I don't think I can spend another day in another call room making another call begging for money and since he is leaving anyway I figured he might be willing to shine a light on some of the aspects of fund raising that we don't usually see so I sat down with Steve Israel last week take a look congressman thank you so much for agreeing to talk with me thank you so let's start with political fundraising in your prime how many of those fundraisers were you physically having to go to a year so all told over 16 years I've done just for my own re-election 1,600 fundraising events home Ashley fans that's one every three days more or less over 16 years yeah yeah that's a lot I'm gonna say three words to you congressman Johnny's half-shell I know it well oh yeah no you do yeah what's it like in there it is like look it's like any restaurant in America which has lots of people in suits raising money differences you have candidates and members of Congress and supporters who are contributing $1,000 for the privilege of having some shellfish it's just it's interesting to me it's like how every working Congress person in this city has a basic understanding of Johnny's half-shell right I don't think I've ever had a fundraiser for myself know you at that restaurant I just don't remember no in 2011 you had a breakfast fundraiser at the hard shell that started at 8:30 a.m. right probably no one goes to a seafood restaurant at 8:30 in the morning without expecting something in return no one is saying what I was gonna be there anyway to have my bucket of breakfast shrimp I'll swing by Steve's thing and that is the problem with the system is that people believe that if they are in that room having supported a campaign that they get access and the case access to Steve Israel wasn't enticing enough a review of his fundraiser invites threw up a common theme some congressmen have barbecue some have fishing trips what was your thing I did a long-arm pizza night but there was another thing to your fund raisers wasn't yes was what was it well I think you know what it was I'm anxious to know you had an annual Long Island wine trip Long Island wine tasting in DC Long Island wine and cigar tasting I hope those were not Long Island cigars and an event called Chinese food and politics where I'm gonna go ahead and say that you wash down your general sales chicken with a glass of no no no you cannot bring wrong our wine to Chinese food why just just Long Island why not pair well with it Chinese food not Washington Chinese what does it pair well with street violence remapping get me to say one negative thing about Long Island I'm very proud of it but I hadn't come here to talk about terrible wine I wanted to talk about the engine-room of congressional fundraising talk to me about the Congressional call center how important is that place well you've got to have a place to make those calls what does it look like me a word picture is there you know motivational posters on the wall saying hang in there and try not to think too much about what you're doing you have a bunch of cubicles set up and those cheap fabric dividers and you sit at a little desk and you have a phone and you have an assistant next to you and you have a call book and the coal book has sheets of every donor past donors and their records and your assistant gets a supporter on the phone and gives the phone to you and you engage in polite conversation and then you get to the point and then you hang up and then you flip the page to the next donor and then you make another call and you continue doing that until you have the resources in order to get reelected oh my god that's depressing not what our founders had in mind how do you train people to do it well is there a script like with small talk and how they could be part of the solution now so every member has their own approach my approach was to get right to the point and then have a civilized conversation okay I mean I guess it makes sense it's just like someone giving you a massage and starting with the and then working the shoulders it's fine it's just unexpected well everybody has their own style and their own preferences how much time is there between hanging up that phone in the next call you got to keep moving you have to keep moving if you are in a very competitive district and you know you've got to raise 1.5 million dollars that means that you have to raise a certain amount of money every quarter you break it down to a certain amount of money every month you break it down to a certain amount of money every week and you break it down to a certain amount of money in every hour of call time this whole call center sounds like a shitty telemarketing operation it is a my view of form of torture and the real victims of this torture have become the American people because they believe that they don't have a voice in this system now most goods telemarketing operations have a boss who holds people speak to the fire and forces them to make calls and hit their quotas who was that boss for you well my boss was the prospect of losing my election to a Republican who would undo all the work I did for the middle class yeah but also I'm gay as the prospect okay before that you were the chairman oh I'm sorry yes so I was the chairman the Democratic campaign team so you were that boss you were the one pushing people to hit quotas I had a responsibility to tell them you need to spend time raising money to come to Washington to change the system and he must have told them that a lot because in Steve Israel's time as chairman he managed to push members of the d-triple-c to hit record fundraising levels we out raised the NRCC by sixteen point two million dollars that's never happened before and it can't have been easy for Steve Israel to hate something he was so demonstrably good at it's like finding out this guy hates having bees on his face I mean who's not wrong it's absolutely repulsive it's just weird that he chose to do it in the first place and with his congressional career coming to an end it was time to toe Steve Israel in the most appropriate way possible um I brought some Long Island wine and I believe the traditional bag the bathroom is that a 2016 does it go back further the night I wouldn't recommend drinking it out of the bag Oh congressman I would never do this to a glass not there come on the bed sure that's fair yes what better way to end a bittersweet career than with the bittersweet taste of Northfork Chardonnay savor every last drop steam you

Channel: LastWeekTonight

Views: 10,137,352

Keywords: congressional fundraising, last week tonight, john oliver, last week tonight with john oliver

Id: Ylomy1Aw9Hk

Length: 21min 25sec (1285 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 03 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/The1stCitizenOfTheIn]

Is this why Bernie's able to work so hard? B/c he doesn't partake in this?

[u/[deleted]]

Am I the only one who thinks that the DC representative had no business fundraising? If you are elected with over 80% of the vote, I think you can afford to ignore fundraising. I doubt she faces stiff enough of primary competition to merit it.

[u/AlmightyWorldEater]

Ok, this sounds really, REALLY bad. Concerningly bad. ELI5: Is this normal? No limit to fundraising, no transparency? Where does this insane amount of money go to? What do the party members think?

I know the situation in germany about this is at least NOT GOOD, but that is just horrible.

[u/[deleted]]

This system is corrupt to the bone or to be more clear and honest its far behind that. The corruption goes all the way down to each and every bone cell.

[u/[deleted]]

There needs to be sweeping campaign fiance reform for ALL elections and it needs to happen before these congresspeople kill themselves.

This sounds like soul-crushing hell.

[u/fauxkaren]

It's INSANE how much money goes into politics here. Completely undermines democracy, really.

[u/deathpulse42]

Horrifying. Talk about an indirect advertisement for Bernie fucking Sanders though.