A good point. But you’re not getting it. My approach to democracy is practical. I see it as a practical way of mostly preventing people from feeling so alienated from their government that they start shooting people, the traditional way for angry and alienated people to change their society. Your “well they never bothered to vote” will cut no ice and prevent no bloodshed if things get to the point of bullets. Right now we are having a bunch of mass killings by angry, disaffected, probably crazy people. Are they harbingers of what is to come, or outliers, meaningless in terms of the whole society? I tend to think they are outliers, and I hope I’m right because I really don’t like the thought of things getting down to violence. Last time that happened, things were a mess, it was called the Civil War but there was nothing civil about it. In fact, many people think Roosevelt’s New Deal was a fear-driven response of the wealthy elites who ran things back then to the prospect of widespread social unrest and socialists and Communists making inroads in America, due to that whole Depression thing we had.
Seeing any mirrors when you look back to those times, Lance? Saying “did you vote?” is not going to impress some angry guy with an AK-47 who’s lost his job, his house and his family.
I don’t think we’re anywhere close to angry mobs storming the Capitol. But if we ever get there, I don’t think a law that denies corporations the right to spend money on political ads is going to do a damn thing to stop them either.
And FDR never took away the speech rights of the wealthy. How dare you invoke him. In fact, he reaffirmed freedom of expression in his “Four Freedoms” speech.
Posting to a message board is an obsession? Anyway, it’s an appeal to absurdity. The amendment I posted a while back only applies to for profit corporations.
Not according to Section 4, which grants Congress and the States the right to “regulate and set limits on all election contributions and expenditures, including a candidate’s own spending, and to authorize the establishment of political committees to receive, spend, and publicly disclose the sources of those contributions and expenditures”.
I doubt they could get away with it easily. They’d probably adopt the UK model (one point below the US in press freedoms, btw) of buying tabloids and whatnot. If Congress went after those, there’d be a serious problem, but if they just attempt to game the system with PACs Congress will take a reactive role and actively pursue them.
The UK has it easy because they can just pass whatever laws they want. Our press freedom doesn’t protect media companies, it protects the act of using the printing press or other means of mass communication. So any press guarantee nullifies a campaign finance amendment.
Um, yeah, we declared our independence from Britain a long time ago, and then passed a Bill of Rights precisely to prevent certain abuses of power that had been inflicted on us by Britain.
At which point it’d go to Court again. If the court interprets Section 2 of the proposed amendment as superseding Section 4 in allowing unlimited electioneering communications (which I can’t think of any reason for them to do other than partisanship), then a new amendment would have to be crafted.
If the intent of congress is to change the nature of press rights, they also have to be specific about their amendment superseding the equal protection clause, because it would be treating press rights as government-granted rights to a privileged class.
Otherwise, courts can just toss it based on it contradicting the 14th amendment.
They aren’t. The people choose to watch the channels and there are public alternatives. I don’t think very highly of the alternatives, but they exist. Advertising, on the other hand, is foisted on the viewer and the polls suggest they aren’t very happy about it (they’re willing to give up watching ads for candidates they like in order to not be inundated by ads for candidates they don’t). The alternate applies for me also. I’m willing to sit through one BNP ad secure in the knowledge that public funding is a better option than being inundated by adverts for each party.
It is not your place to decide that one kind of speech isn’t as good as another. It’s not your place to decide that one kind is “foisted” on anyone. It’s not your place to substitute your judgement for that of others.
Butt the hell out of other people’s business. They will decide what to watch and what to think of it. It’s none of your damn business.
I actually think his point about the difference between TV advertising and other forms of electioneering is valid, but it would apply to all advertising. The federal government has long been recognized to have control over the airwaves and gets a lot of deference. The problem Anthony Kennedy had in his majority opinion was that BCRA divided speakers into favored and disfavored. If you were to ban ALL campaign advertising on the airwaves, I suspect it would hold up.
But given Charlie Rangel’s angry grilling of TiVO’s CEO, I think most politicians would rather just endure the 3rd party barrage rather than surrender the incumbency advantage they enjoy on the airwaves.
Brotip: This is a message board and I’m well within the rules of posting here. People have decided they don’t like campaign ads. I agree with them. The Supreme Court says too bad. Senators have proposed a fix.
Should every generation completely rewrite its laws and Constitution simply because it wasn’t around to approve of them?
As for the iPhone reference - do you also think “freedom of the press” means that only people using a Gutenberg moveable type hand-operated press have that right? It doesn’t apply to TV and radio?
Oh, and is speech on a phone not protected because phones are not people?
If a sizeable majority do not endorse such laws. I’m not a federalist, remember. Do you oppose any amendment to the constitution which hampers the unfettered power of private concentrations of capital?