When I pastored in Colorado, one of the best people in our congregation was an environmental engineer who specialized in groundwater. A lot of his business involved wetlands in one form or another, but he also got involved in housing construction, helping builders avoid basement water problems. I remember him pointing out one house where the basement had been sunk too deep into the ground, for a combination of reasons, putting it down into an underground stream; as a consequence, whatever that family did, they had water in their basement. Seal the outside, seal the inside, nothing they could do could permanently fix the problem, because whatever you do, water always finds its way in.
When he told me about that, my mind immediately went to politics and the whole question of campaign-finance reform—which is a joke, because the whole concept is that you can keep money out of politics. Not totally, to be sure, but that you can control the inflow—that you can limit how much of it comes in, and how, and where. A lot of well-meaning people believe this, but it’s ludicrously out of touch with reality. Laws are fixed, like concrete; money flows, like water; and just as the water will always find its way over, under, around, or through in the end, so too will money. The pressure is there behind it, pushing it in, and the demand is there for it, drawing it in, and so whatever laws you may write and whatever regulations they draw up, all they will succeed in doing is defining the cracks—or loopholes, if you prefer the term—through which the money will inevitably leak.
Want to reduce the importance of money in politics? Well, in the first place you might want to rethink that, since all that would likely accomplish is to further strengthen incumbents and further reduce turnover among our elected officials; but if you do, fine, more power to you. But doing it the brute-force, frontal-assault way isn’t going to work, because it never has. If you want to reduce the importance of money, you’re going to have to find another way. In the battle of water vs. concrete, the water wins every time.