Campaign Finance System Of Big Money Now Overshadows Watergate-Era Reforms
A total of 19,145 donors — that's roughly the population of Johnstown, Pa. — gave or spent $2.6 billion in the 2016 campaigns.
After the Watergate scandals in the 1970s, Congress passed a series of laws to reduce the influence of big donors in politics and to increase transparency. Forty years later, those laws have been weakened by additional legislation and a series of court decisions.
Where the Watergate reforms established a single regulated system used by all candidates to finance their political campaigns, now there are three separate systems.
Candidates and the political parties work mainly within vestigial, regulated system of the 1970s. Big donors benefit from a largely unregulated
