Okay, so Charles Koch can deliver political speech, just so long as he uses OTHER people’s money to do it, and he has to go through the media-as-gatekeeper.
This sorta reinforces the argument I’ve been making about how this would strengthen the corporate media’s ability to control the debate. Basically you’re saying that Koch won’t be allowed to address the public at all unless he first gets a network’s permission.
Also, I just don’t get this “I trust elected officials” thing. Isn’t the whole reason for this amendment the idea that they can’t be trusted, that they are being bought? And you don’t think this amendment is self-interest? They want to pass it because they want to control the electoral process to make their reelections harder to challenge.
And if you trust them with the 1st amendment, why not just repeal the entire Bill of Rights and trust COngress to not abuse this new power? The 1st amendment contains our most basic freedoms and you’re willing to just hand it over to them trusting that they’ll only silence rich people who don’t own media corporations. Why not also trust them with the 9th amendment, where reproductive rights are found, or the 4th amendment?
If you don’t trust Congress to do the right thing on privacy or reproductive rights or right to trial by jury without constitutional guarantees, why would you trust them to treat freedom of speech responsibly?
“Money is not speech!”
“Money is not speech!”
“You’ll be allowed to spend as much as every other American. You aren’t losing any speech. Money is not speech!”
“Daily Kos doesn’t spend money so it can’t be regulated. Only money will be regulated and money is not speech!”
You get the picture. On a non-demagogue level I would point out that the Commerce Clause is an excellent example of just how wrong conservative slippery slope arguments about the eternal grasping nature of government really are. The history of the Commerce Clause is not one of constant expansion. Instead it was interpreted narrowly up until the Great Depression and has remained about the same ever since. The real dynamic is not government blindly seeking ever more power but of serving the interests of the Powers That Be as the default position of government. You just can’t run an advanced nation under the pre-“Switch in Time that Saved Nine” reading of the Commerce Clause. So even though rightwing reactionaries have taken root in the judicial branch the core of the broad interpretation is in no danger. Eviscerating it is not good for business.
This is simplistic. Just because a right is limited doesn’t mean it ceases to exist. You have no right to bring a gun into my home. That doesn’t mean the 2nd Amendment has been abolished.
The proposed amendment is for elections only. Not politics in general. Paid political speech would still be legal. You could buy political ads in favor of term limits or whatever to your heart’s content. It’s only ads saying to vote for or against candidates that would be subject to regulation. And “regulated” doesn’t mean “banned”. The attack ads Citizen United wanted to run were never banned. The organization would only have been prevented from paying for them with unregulated funds. According to adaher it’s constitutional right now to ban all political ads. But it’s not going to happen. No one wants that.
Just because both the Republican and Democratic parties have donors with deep pockets does not mean both sides of the political spectrum have anything close to equal influence. When it comes to economics both major parties are to the right of the American people. Fiscally we have a conservative party and a radically conservative party. The views on pocketbook issues of 2/3 of Americans are unrepresented. So don’t pretend that everything is hunky dory just because the Dems can still attract wealthy donors.
And again, we are only concerned here with campaign spending. The huge rightwing advantages in the media, policy institutions, and lobbying are untouched. Rich people will still have those advantages and in no sense will be muzzled. Preventing them from spending more than regular people might to elect candidates is hardly a burden.
I’m using these snippets as an intro to the more general point I want to make – although most of my argument is not with you but with some of the more extreme ideologues here.
Sure, why not? And so can David Koch, because it has nothing to do with being a journalist. We all have the same number of hours in a day. This is called a level playing field, or in more specific terms, democracy and free speech.
No – or more precisely, only if it falls within the spending limits of campaign finance laws, which in my view it should not. Six months of salary is the kind of political contribution that definitely starts to be out of reach of the average citizen, and therefore begins to disproportionately favor those who can afford such things and their special interests – never mind what it obviously means when you start allowing the expenditure of tens of millions!
No, the dissemination of information is crucial to a successful democracy, provided that everyone has a more or less equivalent opportunity to disseminate it – which leads to the following…
This is the kind of utter bullshit that Scalia likes to spew – the absolutely exact opposite of the truth. The “privileged few” is exactly who have the loudest bullhorns right now – those with tens of millions to contribute to political advertising.
adaher, it seems to me that now and then you can’t help but implicitly acknowledge this self-evident fact, so instead have been spending most of your efforts to show that no matter how many laws are enacted to try to level the communications playing field, the rich will always have an advantage.
I agree, and this is precisely the point: the purpose of campaign finance laws isn’t to achieve the impossible objective of perfection, of completely leveling the playing field and giving everyone an equal voice – it’s to try to make things a little bit more fair so that more voices can be heard, rather than being drowned out only by the voices of the rich. You may as well try to argue that we shouldn’t have speed limits because things other than speeding also cause accidents, and people speed anyway, so what the hell – eliminate traffic laws! The same ridiculous arguments are used against gun control: what’s the point of regulating guns when you can kill someone with a knife? The purpose of campaign finance laws is to create a more balanced system of campaigning, make the dissemination of information more even-handed, and thus contribute to a better democracy and a better society. Most civilized nations know this and reflect it in their campaign laws. In the US, even many on the right complain that Congress – on both sides of the aisle – is pretty much entirely in the pockets of corporations and the wealthy. Why do you suppose that is? Why do you suppose such an overwhelming preponderance of laws favor corporations, and so few favor the average citizen?
No, I never said that. Koch can use his own money to speak. He can use his own money to write a book. He can use his own money to appear on television. These things are all speech. Speech is protected by the First Amendment.
Donating money is not speech.
Some politicians can be bought and some are honest. Why should the honest politicians have to concede the advantage to the politicians who can be bought?
One line rebuttal, “Speech is speech, even if it’s paid for.”
Two lines if they are still listening: “The Democrats don’t care about money in politics, unless that money buys speech that criticizes them. That’s what they want to get rid of.”
Daily Kos spends a lot of money maintaining their servers. Plus they are the primary driver of donations to ActBlue, which donates HUGE amounts of money to candidates.
That’s not exactly correct. The RESULT has been that the government hasn’t expanded its’ power, but it’s tried. The Supreme Court has simply struck down three attempts since the 90s to expand the definition of the commerce clause. And that was only conservative justices. The liberal justices have never found a single commerce clause limit.
Are you saying that Charles Koch can run ads as long as he does it directly rather than through Americans for Prosperity?
The Udall amendment doesn’t limit the 1st amendment. It abolishes freedom of political speech completely, because it gives Congress unlimited power to regulate campaign finance. So if your political activity takes money, and all effective political activity does, then you are only allowed to do it if Congress lets you.
The amendment is for all money spent in relation to federal elections, and would empower states to also pass regulations on their own elections. So okay, you can do any political activity you want, just so long as it’s not on something actually important, like an election.
Those are a privileged few. And they exist in an ecology that also includes the political class, the media, and special interest organizations that live off of small donors. There’s all this money flying around, but the supposed threat is from billionaires. We aren’t even talking about corporations anymore, but individuals. So Citizens United isn’t even important anymore. Now we’re talking about undoing Buckley and saying that no, individuals do not have the right to spend large amounts of money pushing their point of view. Unless they are of the permitted class, like Rachel Maddow and Rush Limbaugh.
Actually, this amendment would be very effective at taking away the advantage rich businessmen not in the media sector enjoy. Problem is, you enhance the power of the corporate media in the process, as well as the power of the political class. They would essentially be the only groups with press rights. Everyone else would be regulatable.
See, now this is where you’re completely wrong. These restrictions don’t result in more voices, they result in less. That’s what it means to reduce money in politics. Money buys speech. You guys need to quit trying to argue otherwise, because let’s face it: you aren’t talking about limiting money spent on “party building activities” or for handing out flyers. You’re talking about limiting money spent on ads, which are speech. So you are talking about reducing the amount of speech in politics. As in, politicians speak, everyone else shuts up.
Okay, so the Kochs and Sheldon Adelson aren’t running ads anymore. How has this diminished the power of corporations?
I never doubted your ability to sum up your position in a sentence or 2 but I don’t see that those sentences have the visceral impact of “money isn’t speech” nor are they immediately understandable to voters without further explanation. Unfortunately I also don’t see any way to resolve this disagreement. I certainly am not about to pay a polling company to ask people.
The courts are part of the government so a more accurate statement would be that part of the government wanted to expand the Commerce Clause. The result is no different than if the Commerce Secretary recommended those three changes and the President said, “Nope.” There are always going to be people who want to change the status quo. That doesn’t change the fact that the status quo here has not been changed.
You are right that people on my side need to face up to the reality that they are asking to limit speech in a way but you and the people on your side need to face up to the reality that more speech isn’t necessarily better. Your guys like to pretend that speech massively amplified by money doesn’t drown out regular speech but that’s exactly what happens. It might not do so on television or on the street but in Congress the speech of a Sheldon Adelson or a George Soros gets heard loud and clear but the voices of you and I and millions of others are less than the sound of a pin dropping.
The only way is for the issue to be a big part of an election campaign. Democrats seem to be prepared to make it such an issue and Republicans seem eager to take them up on it. I love that. The best debates are ones in which both sides are sure they are right. I hate it when one side wants to debate and the other goes into a defensive crouch.
“Money isn’t speech” is really easy to counter though, since no one is calling for getting money out of politics UNLESS that money is used to buy speech.
That’s true, but it’s fragile. All it takes to expand the commerce clause is for Democrats to win another couple of elections. Then the limits just go away.
My side concedes that politics are corrupt in many ways. I think that’s a universally held position. The argument is over what is effective and what price we’re willing to pay. It’s exactly the same argument we have over security issues or health issues. I have always been a big supporter of campaign finance regulation that conforms with the 1st amendment as currently understood. I support the ban on soft money. I support the limits on donations to individual candidates. I support the lobbying laws. And of course the earmark ban, the anti-bribery laws, and all the other various ethics laws Congress has to abide by. We’ve passed a TON of laws to prevent corruption and we’ve been largely successful, I think. To do more requires draconian enforcement which really no one is willing to do.
And if you prevent them from spending money on ads, it doesn’t make your voice even a smidgen louder. The only way to get equality of little voices and big voices is to make the big voices little. Obviously, Liz Warren’s endorsement is going to have far more weight in the Democratic primary in 2016 than your endorsement or even the endorsement of everyone you know. She has earned that outsized influence because of money.
Because I like to amuse myself, I actually make official endorsements before every election. Haven’t done it here on SDMB because I get laughed at enough, but maybe I’ll do it for the 2014 election. I have swung a few votes in my day among co-workers and family, but obviously my influence is very tiny. Is that fair? Is there any legal solution that will make my voice equal to Bill Maher’s? Heck, at this point I’ll accept being equal to Markos Moulitsa.
Okay, look at it this way. If you talk to a politician in order to get him to do something, it’s speech. If you give a politician money to get him to do something, it’s bribery.
Now I imagine your head just exploded but stop and think about it. It’s definitely true that in general it’s considered bribery if you give a politician money to do something. So why are there special cases where you can give politicians millions of dollars and it isn’t considered bribery? For many of us, the only reason is because rich people and politicians collude to write laws that make these special cases legal. It’s still bribery but it’s legalized bribery. And we’re trying to make it illegal again.
And maybe you’re thinking that it shouldn’t be considered bribery because you’re not actually handing a politician a bag full of cash. Doesn’t matter. Doing “favors” for people that are worth money has always been considered the same as giving that person money. It doesn’t make a difference if you’re giving a politician a million dollars in cash or you’re paying for a million dollars of television time for him - both are a million dollar bribe.
Okay, so let’s follow the chronology here: The part of BCRA that regulated independent spending by corporations and unions was struck down. This was a crisis that precipitated the desire to amend the Constitution.
But fast forward to 2014, and we’re not talking about corporate independent contributions anymore. We’re talking about individuals. And this is only a tiny part of the overall problem. So I have to ask. Given how broadly the amendment is worded, just how far do Democrats intend to go here? How far do you want them to go?
Because their whole momentum is predicated on the striking down of just two provisions in two decisions. Sounds to me like they want to do a lot more than just reinstate those two pretty minor provisions. As you’ll recall, BCRA didn’t prevent billionaires from spending a lot of money on elections(remember Swift Boat Veterans For Truth?). So I think we should really know before we jump on board what they intend to do with all this new power?
It would have been the height of simplicity to simply say, “Congress may regulate direct contributions to candidates and corporate spending on TV advertisements”. What they’ve done instead is seek power to regulate ALL campaign spending in federal elections, which can really be defined as broadly as “interstate commerce” if they so desire and can get the courts(which they pack) to agree with them.
Relevant article: Rep. Walter Jones (R-NC), who has co-sponsored campaign finance reform proposals, is being challenged in today’s primary by Taylor Griffin, who is (according to the article) a far more reliable servant of Wall Street. And all the big financial interests are lining up behind Griffin.
Jones’ heresies go way beyond campaign finance reform. Not that he’s a bad conservative, but he’s a John McCain type who disagrees a lot and therefore draws opposition from the true believers.
Well I certainly have been calling for that as I hope you remember. And the Udall amendment is proposing giving Congress the authority to limit all money. It’s not that people on my side don’t believe that money for staff and rent and infrastructure and the like should be unregulated it’s just that campaign ads have been the focus of the disagreement.
Perhaps you are right that we will find out whose arguments are stronger this fall. That’s what I’ve been hoping for.
I wouldn’t go with “We’ve been largely successful in preventing corruption” as a campaign plank if I were you. American politics are almost unbelievably corrupt if we measure that as the influence of money compared to popular influence. But you have avoided the point. “Campaign finance regulation that conforms with the 1st amendment as currently understood” dooms us to eternal corruption. If you want to make the point that buying access to potential voters with campaign ads is speech then you are faced with a conundrum. That’s such a powerful tool that those who can afford to do so are almost monopolizing political influence. The corollary of money = speech is that unlimited speech in politics = unlimited money in politics. On those terms the only reasonable conclusion is that yes, there can be too much speech.
I don’t see how Senator Warren has earned her influence from money. On the contrary, she is believed by many to be one of the few politicians worth a damn precisely because she has favored the interests of regular people over those of bankers. I don’t see why her speech should be controversial. It’s free, after all. She’s not buying it. It’s money that needs regulating not the speech.
As I said, the problem goes back farther than 2002. The initial decision that led to this point was made in 1976.
All I’d ask for is an overturning of the judicial decision that declared money is a form of speech. Speech is constitutionally protected. Financial transactions are not.
Put money back into the realm of things Congress can regulate. It may choose to never actually enact any laws on this issue. Maybe politicians will decide they like receiving money and will never invoke this amendment. But at least it will make reform possible.
As a side note, this will move the decision-making power over this issue away from judges and back to elected legislators. Opponents of judicial activism should applaud this.
Personally, that’s one of the things that make me suspicious about your side. I can sympathize with the view of somebody who stays out of politics due to a belief in its corruption. But you have to question the motives of the people who profess their belief that politics is corrupt - and then willingly run for political office.
I’d prefer to vote for people who think some good can come out of the political system.