Okay, first of all, no, we DON’T need to rewrite the Constitution or even the First Amendment.
We DO need to get a reversal of a Supreme Court decision or two, but that is far easier to do.
There is NOTHING in the actual First Amendment, which says that MONEY is SPEECH. That is an interpretation, and the interpretation can change.
As for WILL we, I think the answer is an obvious and firm no, because the entire Republican Party, at least, is quite insistent that they be able to use anyone’s money anywhere, in order to manipulate local politics for their national ends.
Both parties want to be able to accept money from anyone, including foreigners, and use it as they see fit, to try to convince people to vote for them.
But again, to all you silly people who have been suckered by the Right wing people who want us to believe that money is a form of speech, consider this:
if you REEEEELY claim to truly believe that, it means that you fully support complete legalization of all forms of direct BRIBERY. Because if money is speech, then a bribe, is nothing more than a conversation.
Is money speech? If so, this is a case of the guy with a sound truck versus the guy standing on a soap box. He still has his freedom of speech, but gets drowned out pretty easily. Yes, it would take an amendment however.
No, no more than slander is legal speech, or threats, or treason, or incitement to riot. There are plenty of limits on speech, and bribery falls under those limits.
To quash the absurd claim that the first amendment is only intended to protect ineffective, or no-cost speech. The amendment wasn’t passed so you could scream on a soap box, it was created to protect the flow of information and the ability to PUBLISH information. There is no rational argument that the amendment was meant to protect effective publication of information, which cost money even back then.
First look at the amendment:
Then read what the founding fathers, and contemporary government groups thought at the time.
Just asking questions: why is a ban on foreign nationals contributing to campaigns okay, if there is no bar on foreign nationals (or corporations, more realistically) printing information that helps a candidate?
Out of state money is a necessary evil. Dark money is not. I see no liberty at stake in preventing donors from forming shell organizations where they can remain anonymous. You have a political belief and you want to donate to the cause, fine, that information should be readily available to everyone who cares.
This seems nuts to me. Do you think the KKK should have been free to acquire lists of civil rights supporters decades ago? Should #BlackLivesMatter activists be free to acquire the names of people who oppose them? Do you really want the NRA to be able to FOIA a list of people who contributed to Gabby Gifford’s gun control group? Or pro-life radicals to be able to get a list of NARAL donors?
What are you talking about? Civil right supporters didn’t achieve their ends because they were able to secretly fund a DC lobby. They did it by getting the shit kicked out of them in full view of the public and gaining the vocal support of the white majority.
Should #BlackLivesMatter activists be free to acquire the names of those funding organizations preventing change to curb police officer abuse? Why the fuck not?
I’m not afraid of the NRA. No one else should be either.
It seems the national parties often get involved to help somebody at a low level, say mayor or state representative, either win or lose.
Thing is in politics people move their way up thru the ranks of say county representative, mayor, state rep, governor … then to a national office like congress or the senate.
But by then it might take millions of dollars to get them to either win or lose so its cheaper, say $20,000 or less, to knock out somebody early.
I only say that because I know a person who when she was running for the Kansas statehouse from her small local area, several national groups thru money in to beat her. Same way another candidate got funding from the national office to run.
But then, thats why people like Hillary Clinton goes around appearing at small. local events to help raise money for those candidates who then support her later on.
For those of you wrangling with the First Amendment/free speech aspects of this, here’s how it comes into play. It’s not a question of money, so much as it’s a question of how would you prevent it without falling afoul of the 1st Amendment.
Let’s say that I’m virulently anti pot-legalization for some reason. And I’m fabulously wealthy. What’s to stop me from buying ads in Maine decrying the legalization of pot? Even if it’s a hot-button election year topic, I’m still entitled as a citizen to say what I want in the media without fear of government interference, as long as I stay within some really wide legal boundaries.
Now the TV stations and newspapers in Maine could refuse to take my money, and people could choose not to listen, but there’s no legal way to prevent me from buying column inches and minutes on TV as my bully pulpit.
I don’t know the legal status of monetary donations as free speech, although it does seem a bit of a stretch on its face to equate the two.
The issue is transparency, which I don’t believe runs afoul of the 1st Amendment in anyway. Do you believe campaign contributions should be made public? Why is that different?
There are two competing interests when we peel another layer off the onion.
4chan demonstrates the hazard to civil society that out of control anonymity creates. As do attack ads made by “People for Clean Air” which are totally funded, but totally secretly, by the coal companies.
Conversely, history is full of small groups that had to work quietly in the background for a long time accumulating small victories before they could be out, loud, and proud.
Expanding off Sitnam’s excellent post #30, there absolutely were civil rights campaigners who advanced the cause by getting beaten on TV. And it took a lot of bravery to be those people becoming widely known In their small towns with nowhere to hide after the cameras left.
But that wasn’t Phase I of the civil rights movement. That was Phase II or III. It was preceded by a lot of quiet organizing where keeping their activities and membership out of the public eye was key to not arousing the majority ire sufficient to strangle their nascent movement in its cradle.
In an era of big data, anything that becomes public is megaphoned directly into the HQ of your opposition.
IMO the proper societal balancing act amounts to letting David prepare in secret and ensuring Goliath’s every move (and money source) is public knowledge. This offsets the inherent power asymmetry between them.
Suffice it to say that’s very obviously demonstrating my bias towards change and away from continuity. Not all political stripes agree that’s the right bias.
Seems like two issues. The 1st amendment v ‘campaign finance reform’, and ‘out of state money’ specifically.
The former can debated till the cows come home, but I’m personally pretty much a 1st amendment absolutist and I think it’s basically naive anyway to think you can ever get money out of politics in a big govt system with huge money at stake in its decisions. Also there’s some contradiction in idea that it’s so important everyone vote but OTOH assumes people can’t make up their own minds but rather have them made up by campaign ads.
But the latter I have trouble seeing as a valid issue at all. The states long ago decided to form a Union and surrender a good deal of their sovereignty. Moreover, I think it’s reasonable to assume that ‘money out of politics’ people more often than not are left leaning in general and in favor of big govt and particularly a big federal govt in the US context and nationalizing issues and solutions (health care, etc). But then they’d have stricter rules to localize local elections?
In the second case it seems to me a more direct contradiction than the ‘tension’ let’s call it on the first issue, between people wanting the govt to have more and more power and its decisions worth more and more trillions but then wonder why people want to spend relatively minuscule amounts of their own money to try to convince their fellow citizens about those trillion dollar decisions. And their fellow citizens are free to ignore those efforts, which we must assume they are capable of ignoring in order to put purer and purer democracy on such a high pedestal as many people do.
Of course people can make up their minds. However, should this person run for office again their decisions while in office should be held up in the light adjacent to the signatures on the campaign checks they’ve cashed. An informed electorate demands this due diligence.
Perhaps a representative got a substantial contribution and ad money budget from a tobacco company in his district and later voted in favor of that company. That’s fine, he should still have to sell that decision as the best one for his electorate even though his motives appear suspect. I would feel the same if it was MADD, Sierra Club or any other lobby I happen to agree with.
Are you suggesting that only campaign contributions to politicians running for office be made public, or do you also want to see private contributions to issue-advocacy organizations made public? The last line in this post, and your post #28, seems to indicate its the latter. Do you not see a distinction between campaign contributions and donations to the NRA, MADD, or the Sierra Club?
Thinking about it more the dark money problem folds into the out of state issue regardless. Congressional representatives at all levels, even in safe districts, are required to hit the phones every day for contributions to the national parties warchest. That money then goes to ‘at risk’ candidates, which could be from Big Pharma, Big Tobacco, NRA, whatever but simply goes public as DNC or RNC contributions. Even if those total warchest contributions ARE transparent there is no way to demand a candidate stand tall personally for their voting record and every incentive for them to make back room deals with their party leadership who later will determine their level of campaign aid.