The invisible hand in our elections

The Washington Examiner reports that while federal law, as administered by the Federal Election Commission, formally bars foreign nationals from making contributions or donations in American elections, the loophole through which foreign-linked funds nonetheless travel remains open and largely uncontested. I am told the mechanism is indirect — money passed through domestic shells, intermediaries, and so-called dark-money vehicles that obscure the original source. The letter of the prohibition is preserved; its spirit is hollowed out.

I will speak plainly about what I understand of this, knowing I could not have foreseen the specific instruments involved. The civic question, however, is as old as the Republic itself: can a people govern themselves when they do not know who is speaking into their ears, and whose gold is paying for the whisper? My answer in my own time was no. My answer now is the same.

In my Farewell Address I warned — and I stand by every word of it — that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government. A foreign power need not send an army if it can instead purchase a faction, amplify a grievance, and set citizen against citizen from a comfortable distance. The army is expensive and visible. The funded pamphlet, or whatever its modern equivalent may be, is cheap and nearly invisible.

What strikes me as the deeper danger here is not merely the money itself, but the habit of indifference it cultivates. When a loophole is known, reported, and still left open, it is no longer an oversight — it is a choice. And that choice tells the citizenry something uncomfortable: that some in positions of power find the arrangement advantageous enough to preserve. That is faction operating in its most corrupted form, trading the Republic's independence for partisan advantage.

The rule of law depends not only on statutes but on the will to enforce them in full. A law that prohibits foreign contributions in name while permitting them in substance is not a law — it is a performance of virtue without its substance. The citizens of this Republic deserve to know, with transparency and without laborious investigation, who is funding the voices contending for their loyalty.

My counsel is this: transparency is not a partisan cause — it is the precondition of every other cause. No faction, whichever party it currently advantages, should be permitted to shield the origins of its political sustenance from the people it purports to serve. Close the loophole. Require disclosure. Enforce the spirit as strictly as the letter. And if those currently in office will not do it, the citizenry should make that inaction the plainest possible issue in the next election they hold.