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A Florida mailman landed a small gyrocopter on the lawn of the US Capitol on Wednesday, in an act of protest against the influence of money in politics.
Pilot Doug Hughes, 61, landed on the lawn without incident and was immediately taken into custody by police.
Hughes told the Tampa Bay Times what he was going to do before his illegal flight and landing. He said he had strapped 535 letters to the gyrocopter, intending to deliver them to every member of Congress and argue for campaign finance reform.
Pilot Doug Hughes, 61, landed on the lawn without incident and was immediately taken into custody by police.
Hughes told the Tampa Bay Times what he was going to do before his illegal flight and landing. He said he had strapped 535 letters to the gyrocopter, intending to deliver them to every member of Congress and argue for campaign finance reform.
WaPo video: http://wapo.st/1HubGl0
From 40 Charts That Explain Money in Politics by Andrew Prokop at Vox:
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Over the past four decades, Congressional attempts to regulate the campaign finance system have repeatedly been stymied by the Supreme Court on First Amendment grounds. This table lists the major cases in which the court has ruled campaign finance restrictions unconstitutional — and how closely divided the court has been in every case. The first major such case was Buckley v. Valeo, in 1976, which struck down much of the newly-adopted campaign finance infrastructure in the name of free speech. The next major campaign finance overhaul — the 2002 McCain-Feingold law — survived an initial court challenge in 2003. But after Justice Sandra Day O’Connor was replaced with the more conservative Sam Alito in 2006, the court had a majority that objected to major provisions of the law. Since then, a series of 5-4 decisions have narrowed the scope of permissible campaign finance regulations further and further.
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It’s commonly understood that campaign donations buy access to politicians and their staffers. And earlier this year, the first-ever randomized field experiment was conducted to help prove it. Joshua Kalla and David Broockman of UC Berkeley had a group try to schedule meetings between 191 Congressional offices and people who had donated to their campaigns. But sometimes the group pointed out that the people seeking meetings were donors — and sometimes they didn’t. As you can see in the chart, when the meeting-seeker was explicitly revealed to be a donor, he was four times as likely to get a meeting with the chief of staff, and twice as likely to get a meeting with the member of Congress.
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