The Really Big Money? Not the Kochs

Wall Street Journal’s Kimberley Strassel on union political spending and forced dues.

It’s an extraordinary thing, in a political age obsessed with campaign money, that nobody scrutinizes the biggest, baddest, “darkest” spenders of all: organized labor. The IRS is muzzling nonprofits; Democrats are “outing” corporate donors; Jane Mayer is probably working on part 89 of her New Yorker series on the “covert” Kochs. Yet the unions glide blissfully, unmolestedly along. This lack of oversight has led to a union world that today acts with a level of campaign-finance impunity that no other political giver—conservative outfits, corporate donors, individuals, trade groups—could even fathom. Mr. Reid was quite agitated on the Senate floor about “unlimited money,” by which he must have been referring to the $4.4 billion that unions had spent on politics from 2005 to 2011 alone, according to this newspaper. The Center for Responsive Politics’ list of top all-time donors from 1989 to 2014 ranks Koch Industries No. 59. Above Koch were 18 unions, which collectively spent $620,873,623 more than Koch Industries ($18 million).