Jan 27, 2015 3 min read

For about as long as most of us can remember, Americans have yearned for a third major political party, believing it would somehow cure everything they find distasteful in the quarreling and ideological bloodletting between the two major parties.

In 2016, Americans could well end up with a third party, though not in name and definitely not on any ballot. Instead, this party will rest on a bedrock not of candidates, but piles and piles of cash.

At a weekend get-together with like-minded, well-heeled friends and compatriots, it was revealed billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, who have already poured millions of dollars into American electoral politics over the last decade or so, are planning to budget $889 million for the campaigns in 2016. They will be writing checks themselves and having their friends do the same. To most of us, dollar amounts on that scale start to seem a little abstract, so here’s some perspective: In the 2012 election cycle, the Republican Party by itself spent $657 million.

Already on track to be the priciest election in our history, the Koch brothers’ expenditure will surely drive the cost to even more stratospheric levels, as candidates, parties and political action groups fight to keep pace. And, if the past is any guide, the expenditures by the Kochs’ organization will not be a model of transparency. The Washington Post reported one year ago that the organization is one of “unrivaled complexity, built around a maze of groups that cloaks its donors.”

It further described the labyrinthine network as being “singular in American politics: an operation conducted outside the campaign finance system, employing an array of groups aimed at stopping what its financiers view as government overreach.”

After a series of reforms in the 1970s, some following the Watergate scandal, campaign finance laws have been systematically weakened in recent years, with more and more money being pumped into our campaigns. When the monied have so much power over the process, it’s painfully obvious to everyone who will get their calls returned more quickly by an elected official, and it’s not a dad working three part-time jobs at minimum wage who can’t afford health care, takes the bus and is one mishap away from financial disaster.

Following the announcement of the impending deluge of dollars into the 2016 campaign, Lawrence Lessig, a professor of law at Harvard and an advocate for campaign finance reform, told Politico that “this is the natural consequence of a regime with essentially no contribution limits – a smaller and smaller number giving larger and larger amounts.”

Mark McKinnon, a Republican Party operative who wants to reduce the amount of money sloshing around in our political system, was even more blunt. He told Politico that “for that kind of money, you could buy yourself a president. Oh, right. That’s the point.”

Money is not a surefire guarantee of electoral success. The enormous sums the Kochs and their allies spent on the 2012 election did not result in President Obama being dislodged from the White House, and they had to wait another two years until the U.S. Senate changed hands. But no matter what the ideological leanings of big-money donors, allowing these expenditures to go unchecked and unregulated merely fortifies the impression that our political process is not designed to work for average Americans, but the people who write the fattest checks.

The biggest winner when money is king in our politics isn’t Democrats or Republicans. It’s cynicism.