Colbert Super PAC vs. Mitt

Politics & Elections
81

Once you get to the part about the billboards, you cross from private to public property. You’re not talking about billboards, obviously, but the public airwaves. All airwaves are essentially owned by the government and private companies pay to license them. It would be anti-democracy to allow private ownership of something we all live in. Freedom of speech is not violated when the government restricts what is essentially public roads (in the form of radio waves) for the benefit of the public.

To put it simply: it is not a violation of the First Amendment if the government, as part of its agreement to lease out public airwaves to you, regulates what can go through those airwaves. Remember that Citizens United not only decided on whether or not the movie could be shown, but whether it could be advertised through broadcasts.

I’d like to ask how you and Ibn feel about anti-electioneering laws. Over where I live, its illegal to do electioneering in the buildings of the department that handles voting in this county. It is also illegal to do so within 100 feet of a polling place. Given that polling places are usually privately owned homes, churches, or public buildings like schools and libraries, if you think your own private domain should remain so insulated from regulation, do you think people should be able to do electioneering inside their own homes if its a polling place? If its a school, should principals be able to alter the polling places to their choosing? And if a church, should the church be able to put up signs telling voters to vote for the correct candidate?

Those obviously touch upon the same issue, which is that your personal freedoms vs. the notion of equal representation in the public sphere in a democracy. The prevention of the kind of broad electioneering that the Hillary Clinton movie is not a violation of the First Amendment’s freedom of speech because it is all about abusing public entities for private gain.

82

OK so you think that limiting a person’s ability to spend money on political speech (actually providing them with the money that they can spend on political speech) is the same thing as entirely repealing the first amendment?

The first amendment doesn’t evaporate when you put limits on it. We have a right to associate under the first amendment and yet super PACs cannot coordinate with campaigns. We have all sorts of reasonable limiations on political speech, especially with regards to money.

Yeah it kind of is. He is saying that noone would want to prevent people from putting up posters on their property and that is basically the same thing as spending unlimited amounts of money for a political campaign.

Toilet paper? Telling corporatiosn that they cannot spend unlimited amounts of money on elections is turning the constitution into toilet paper?

It does not mention corporate personhood but one of the ongoing issues is which of the rights afforded to natural person’s are extended to corporation which are juridical creations of the state. I’m not sure taht the distinction is very crucial when you look at the the way things have played out, very few corporations are dumping millions of dollars into SUPER PACS, the big donors are individual billionaires.

83

I think I am saying the opposite. I am saying that you should not be able to use your wealth to amplify your influence on an election grossly out of proportion to my ability purely by virtue of having a lot of money.

Your assumption was correct I meant to contrast the two. I mistyped.

Not entirely but I don’t really think the issue is corporations so much as it is the influence of big money generally, this includes unions, and billionaires.

How do you justify that distinction?

Its more than a public use issue. The court realizede early on that money affects elections and that permitted caps on donations and private spending. It permitted disclosure laws and special restrictions on corporations and unions. Now all of a sudden, we are trampling on the bill of rights to limit the ability of money to affect the outcomes of elections.

84

It’s a complicated issue… but there are other complicated limitations on the first amendment that haven’t resulted in slippery-slope meltdown.

For instance, if I have a neighbor I don’t like (Bob) and I tell my friend, in a private conversation, “Bob cheated on his wife”, I have broken no law. If I rent space on dozens of billboards around town and print the identical message, I have in fact broken one of several laws (libel and/or invasion of privacy… I think depending on whether Bob did or did not cheat on his wife).
So simply saying “hey, you’re proposing some limitation on what is currently viewed as free speech… but if I take an extreme simplification of your limitation, it clearly restricts something that we don’t want to restrict, therefore you’re trying to destroy the first amendment” is pretty clearly meaningless.

To me, and I recognize that I am in no way a constitutional scholar, there is a key issue/distinction. Any restriction that is based on the political content is absolutely forbidden… and this is the keyest issue. So any law where it’s OK to criticize democrats but not republicans, or anything like that, is clearly utterly 100% in total violation of the 1st amendment and can not be tolerated. Similarly, restrictions need to be applied fairly and equally to all citizens. But restrictions on monetary donations to political campaigns are NOT restrictions based on content, and can be applied equally to all people. Instead, they are restrictions based on volume/mode.

One might imagine a city park where there’s a tradition of people coming out, standing on soapboxes, and expressing their viewpoints. So a law which said “if you’re out in the park on a soapbox, you’re not allowed to criticize the government’s position on abortion” would be absolutely illegal. But then imagine that there’s a guy out on the soapbox who expresses views that a large organized group of people disagrees with, and that group comes out, sets up a ring of soapboxes all around the first guy, and starts chanting something in super-loud shouting unison, drowning out the first guy. I might support a law banning that behavior, if it was written precisely enough. And imagine instead that there’s a super-rich guy who hires enough people to man such a soapbox-ring 24/7 and permanently drown out the first guy, even though the people actually doing the drowning out were themselves not opposed to the first guy, but just doing what they were paid to do. I can certainly imagine a law outlawing that behavior which I would not find to be incompatible with the first amendment.
One final point: I definitely know of a situation I think would be bad (all political monetary donations by any possible person or organization in any amount is legal and no one ever has to disclose any details at all about who donated the money). That doesn’t mean that I have an instant and ready answer for every possible “ok, so should this be illegal” question you might pose to me. But then, that’s true of lots of laws. We agree (I assume) that the old shouting fire in a crowded theater should be illegal. But I’m sure we can come up with plenty of examples that are kind of like that but not really, where it’s not clear whether they should be illegal or not. Laws are complicated. They almost always have corner cases and loopholes and gray areas. That does not make it a pointless or meaningless or doomed endeavor to attempt to write them in the first place.

85

There are no criminal penalties for libel in the US and what you describe would certainly not violate any laws in the US that I’m aware of.

Bob could sue you in civil court, but the government couldn’t enact criminal sanctions against you.

86

I also find your accusations and conclusions wildly exaggerated. “Toilet paper”?

I stated with some definition that I am aware that restrictions on fundamental human rights are to be approached with trepidation and caution. Did you think I was simply lying about that, since no one with my view of things could possibly have a respect for First Amendment values equal to your own? Whereby do you derive this omniscience?

And what is this problem you have with white liberals and their failure to address issues of race to your satisfaction. There was a time that I shared a measure of your contempt, but that was forty years ago. I got over it. There are many, many fish to be fried, and I only have the one pan.

Yes, I quite agree, any encroachment on the rights of free speech is to be studied with great care.

Take either of the Koch Brothers. Has he a thousand times my political power? Does he spend literally millions every year to move the country in the direction he would prefer? This means, as a practical fact, that the simple possession of money has a direct impact on political equality. In my opinion, a vastly disproportionate impact.

I recognize that restrictions on campaign contributions has some speech implications. If I thought it were impossible to meaningfully restrict such contributions without doing irreparable damage to the Constitution, I would most likely just shrug, say “Shit!” and try to live with it. But I don’t. I do not clearly see the best method, but we are a clever bunch of monkeys and if we set our minds to it, we most likely could accomplish it.

Similar, but not identical, issues pertain to corporate political power. A corporation is a commercial enterprise. Historically, their commitment to patriotism and civic virtue is not on a par with a citizen. They are not drafted, for instance. When was the last time you heard of a corporate citizen offering to supply military goods on at “at cost” basis? When Halliburton goes to war, they make a profit.

We may pour holy civic oil on their corporate logo, but that does not make them people. Their rights do not rise to the same level of concern.

87

Huh? Are you psychic? No, I am talking about billboards. Try to confine yourself to the argument as presented, without inventing strawmen.

88

Did I say that? Did you read what I posted at all? Where in that post is there anything about “providing” anyone with money? Can you point out that sentence in my post?

89

No, that’s not the issue. Note that the amendment doesn’t say “people have a right to free speech”. The amendment protects speech itself.

If you’re claiming that the decision is based on other decisions that may be based on other decisions at the root of which is “corporate personhood” - you’d have to provide me with that chain of citations. Because I don’t think that’s correct.

90

Is this a fine point of semantic sophistry? Are you suggesting that the right to free speech is not limited to people? My dog has no political opinions so far as I know, and if he has them, he is well advised to keep them to himself. Its quite enough that he can lick his balls when he’s drunk, there is no reason he should vote.

91

There is no “right to free speech”. There is a restriction on Congress to prevent it from abridging speech - whether the speech originates from a person, from a hundred-year-old book, from a group of people, from a corporate entity, or from outer space.

If the amendment wanted to create a “right to free speech”, it would have said “the right of the people to free speech shall not be infringed”. It doesn’t.

92

So if Congress infringes on your freedom of speech, it is bad, but if a corporation infringes on your freedom of speech, that is just capitalism working as it should. Something like that?

93

How does a corporation “infringe on your freedom of speech”?

Are corporations the ones pushing for the banning of movies and books critical of political candidates?

I thought it was the opponents of Citizens United who were doing that.

94

It is not unconstitutional to define limits concerning the manner in which speech may be disseminated. Hence the legality of “free speech zones.” For this reason, in my view, it’s not unconstutional to define limits concerning how much money may be spent disseminating speech. The limit is a financial “free speech zone.”

You can say whatever you want–so long as you spend no more than X dollars in order to do so.

Similoarly, you can say whatever you want–so long as you stand no more than X-yards near to a certain area to do so.

95

So then does that mean I can spend as much money supporting a candidate for office that I like as Michael Moore did making Fahrenheit 911 attacking George Bush as well as the amount of money the Colbert Report does criticizing candidates Stephen Colbert doesn’t like?

Or, did they spend to much and as a result should be sanctioned by the government for spending too much?

96

Colbert isn’t so much criticizing the candidates as he is criticizing us. We let things get to this sorry state, we continue to permit it. We suck.

97

Hilarious. How about “you can say whatever you want but you cannot print it or put it on cable tv” - since that only limits how speech is disseminated, is it ok from 1st amendment perspective, you think?

It amazes me how the supposedly liberal types, when you scratch lightly, turn out to be hoary authoritarians.

In USSR, you could say whatever you wanted to a non-snitching friend, but God forbid you disseminated something in print that the state didn’t approve. Pure freedom of speech, wouldn’t you say?

98

So, it turns out that all along, it was the liberals who were the jack-booted thugs! Wow! A political thriller from M. Night Shamalayan.

99

I don’t understand this since it seems completely inconsistent with your earlier statements.

You raged at how unfair it is that the Koch brothers have so much more influence than you do yet you seem to have no problem with Stephen Colbert spending vast amounts of money attempting to influence various elections through either criticizing or praising various candidates.

Under the guidelines that most seem to be setting both Colbert’s show as well as Stewart’s should be regulated.

Moreover, by the standards most are setting the First Amendment doesn’t protect those shows because they’re produced and funded by corporations.

100

How about a happy compromise, corporations are all limited to 5000 dollars like I am as a real fucking person. Simple.