EDITORIAL: Sanders has plenty of super PACs — labor unions

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders is very fond of telling voters that he is the only Democratic candidate for president who doesn't have a super PAC, and that he's "going to prove the experts wrong" by winning the election without one. But Sen. Sanders is not counting contributions from labor unions, which former Vermont governor and presidential candidate Howard Dean says makes Sanders' boasting a little disingenuous.

"For Bernie to say he doesn't have a super PAC … labor unions are super PACs," Mr. Dean said on MSNBC last week. The former chairman of the Democratic National Committee also said his party doesn't go after labor unions because the "unions are super PACs Democrats like."

Mr. Dean is absolutely right. Democrats want people to believe that companies and individuals in the so-called 1 percent only support the Republican Party. The reality is Democrats have always had their own big benefactors, particularly from big labor. Nothing demonstrates that better than looking at campaign spending from 1989 through the 2014 cycle. The roll call, available at OpenSecrets.org, is dominated by Democrat-friendly labor unions such as the Service Employees International Union, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers and others. The so-called greedy, evil Koch brothers come in 59th, behind a host of labor organizations.

Sen. Sanders' top 20 contributors from 2011 to 2016 read like a laundry list of big labor unions, too, as he counts the SEIU, NEA, Communications Workers of America, National League of Postmasters, National Nurses United and many other unions among his biggest supporters.

Labor unions dominate the political contribution world in both number of donors and amount of money donated — and, in some cases, virtually every penny of those donations goes straight to Democratic coffers. Much of that cash comes directly from union dues, with the actual workers who are coughing up that money having no choice of where it's directed, unlike those who donate to super PACs and other groups, giving money of their own free will to causes they actually support.

The calls from Sen. Sanders and Hillary Clinton, his rival for the Democratic nomination, to overturn the U.S. Supreme Court's Citizens United decision and get money out of politics are laughable when one looks at the financial influence of labor unions on elections. Contrary to the Democrats' assertions, money doesn't correlate to success — as the Jeb Bush campaign is currently demonstrating — and how one spends money in politics, regardless of how little or how much, is a form of political speech that demands protection, as the Supreme Court rightly ruled in Citizens United v. FEC.

As we've stated previously, giving elected officials control over the speech of their adversaries is a dangerous idea. Americans should remain free to ruthlessly criticize their government and support whomever they wish — and blow a fortune doing so, if they choose.