Your theory about constitutional rights is not quite right. A simple disproof is the right against self-incrimination (Fifth Amendment). That right applies to citizens and non-citizens, but not corporations. You’re correct that voting is constitutionally complicated. Notably, the Constitution is silent as to voting for non-citizens, so your whole citizen/non-citizen framework is incorrect as applied to voting as well. There’s nothing preventing a state from giving non-citizens the vote in federal elections, and some have done so in the past.
I am not claiming that corporations enjoy no constitutional protections, obviously. I’m not sure how you could have drawn that from my defense of Citizens United. My observation was that we do not provide them all of the same constitutional protections as persons. We pick and choose, so we must justify each on its own.
Not all 501(c)(4)s are corporations, but Citizens United was.
We don’t choose, so much as courts define the boundaries based on the logic of the philosophy of human rights.
The reason a corporation does not have a right against self-incrimination is because a corporation cannot take the stand. A representative can, and that rep can be required to speak because nothing the rep says that implicates the corporation implicates him personally(assumedly. Obviously if it does he can take the 5th as an individual).
The only way a corporation can incriminate itself is by handing over incriminating documents. Which individuals can also be required to do even if documents incriminate them.
No, courts ruling in this area do not generally use “the logic of the philosophy of human rights.”
Also incorrect. That is not the rationale.
But even if that were true, this ad hoc logic would always be applicable. A corporation cannot communicate either. Every action a corporation takes is through a representative.
So you’re barking up the wrong tree in trying to find some universal factor that explains which rights a corporation has.
I’ve managed to put my finger on at least part of what the difference is between a for-profit corporation and a person here.
If another person, acting purely as a private citizen with interest in the political process, supports, say, Mike Huckabee, and tries to convince me that I should vote for Mike Huckabee, what does that mean? Well, it means that he believes that Mike Huckabee would do the best job as president, that Mike Huckabee would, looking across all the different effects that a president has on the US, have the most positive impact. Of course, I may disagree, both about what the likely outcome of a Huckabee presidency would be, and whether those outcomes would be good vs bad, but I think that I can in good faith assume that this other individual is endorsing Huckabee because of his honest belief about the totality of a Huckabee presidency. And the same is basically true if this individual puts up yard signs, or donates money to the Huckabee campaign which can be used for TV advertising, etc.
On the other hand, what does it mean if General Motors is giving money to the Huckabee campaign? Well, General Motors isn’t a person. General Motors has no reason to care about the general happiness and success of the population of the USA. In fact, quite the contrary, GM has a fiduciary responsibility to its shareholders to try to maximize its profits. So presumably if GM supports Huckabee, it does so because it believes Huckabee will help it maximize its profits. In fact, it would be irresponsible for it not to do so.
Now, this doesn’t automatically mean that I don’t think GM should be able to give money to campaigns… I’m just trying to point out that there’s a big difference between some-guy-supports-a-candidate, or even some-group-of-guys-support-a-candidate, and a-for-profit-corporation-supports-a-candidate.
(1) While it is possible for an individual to support a candidate for something other than self-interest, and not possible for a corporation like GM to do so, why does that possibility affect anything? Would your analysis change if every voter simply picked the candidate they thought would best serve the voter’s interests?
(2) The corporations who are putatively the problem when it comes to big spending and dark money are not for-profit corporations. They are non-profit corporations. In terms of motivations, they are no different from your neighbor.
I don’t see why the motives of one guy should necessarily differ from the motives of a group of guys, and I dont’t see the difference between a group of guys and a corporation.
I also don’t see how you can distinguish based on this logic between a for-profit corporation, and a union. I don’t see why a for-profit corporation’s desire for the narrow self-interest of its shareholders differs from a union’s desire for the narrow self-interest of its members. Or even the Sierra Club or the National Pea Picker’s Association.
I just don’t see how you can tell all non-individual entities that they are not allowed to proffer “political speech.”
These obnoxious Super-PAC ads are not advertisements endorsed by a candidate. They are groups spreading a particular message. In that vein, most of them are single-issue statements urging support for one side or the other on a particular issue, typically entirely unrelated to an election.
In essence, to properly apply Sanders’ idea you would need a candidate to personally endorse any and all speech related to him or her and that speech would have to come from only an individual.
That actually greatly empowers the super-wealthy, who would be the only ones with the means to individually spread their message.
Not to mention that there’s no way to feasibly apply this principle to the internet. Is a Facebook group in favor of a candidate now illegal as well?
If the media brings down Clinton and costs the Democrats the election, we’ll also start hearing about how the media is allowed to have too much power over our democracy.
Both those statements are true but completely pointless to the argument. Republicans don’t dare touch the program because it’s been enormously successful and popular, not because their ideology is somehow more liberal. This is not a difficult concept to see, one has only to look at the tremendous and still ongoing Republican opposition to the ACA, despite being overall a relatively minor tweak to the health care system. And most if not all of the Republican candidates are still promising to repeal it! And the public option couldn’t even pass. Medicare was truly major. Basic Medicare is the public option, for the elderly. Do you seriously believe Medicare could be enacted in today’s lunatic political climate? I’d sooner believe any president proposing it today would be impeached.
Those are some really weird numbers there, and ISTM that it underscores the fact that it’s very difficult to accurately compare social spending in different countries because of major structural differences, and that the OECD isn’t doing a very good job of it. One of Canada’s major societal attributes is the strength of the social safety net. I have here a study called Government Spending in Canada and the United States, from the Government of Canada Department of Finance, Economic and Fiscal Policy Branch, dated 2003-05, in which the department’s analysts reconciled these complex structural differences to determine a meaningful comparison of program spending between the US and Canada in the years between 1992 and 2001. Here is the money quote: “We find that the most important category in explaining the gap in program spending between the two countries is income security, which includes, among other things, all social assistance and public pension benefits.”
Indeed, not only does Canada continue to spend more on social services, it spends dramatically more than the US does. From the same report, for 2001 the US spent 7.1% of the GDP on the broad category of income security, while Canada spent 11.0%, a huge gap of 3.9% of the GDP. Likewise for housing and community services: US 0.5%, Canada 1.4%, almost three times as much. Recreation and culture: US 0.3%, Canada 1.0%, more than three times as much.
And one also needs to keep in mind that this increased spending on social services is additional to and independent from the fact that everyone gets free universal health care. The whole social landscape is completely different. It’s ridiculous to suggest that the US spends more on these things. That’s just bad accounting.
You know, if you brought Goldwater back, he’d probably win the presidency in a landslide instead of being buried in a Democratic landslide. What do you think he’d say then about whether politics had moved to the right or not? Here, let me spell it out for you:
Conservatism was no suicide pill, it was the Republican future … Even as Goldwater was losing 44 states, there were remarkable signs of grass-roots enthusiasm for his conservative message … In 1964, the GOP’s center of gravity began its decisive shift to the West and South. Of the 12 presidential elections that followed 1964, Republicans have won seven, and every GOP ticket since the Goldwater campaign has included a conservative. Who doubts today that conservatives constitute the party’s base? Until 50 years ago, Republican presidential hopefuls competed for the imprimatur of the party’s liberal establishment.
The CAFE standards are basically worked out as a collaborative deal with the car companies based on what is technologically possible and what the auto makers tell them is affordable. Some might say that they’re more like the energy regulations during the Bush era, which for all practical purposes were written by the energy industry. And if you think EPA standards are so incredibly high, you should read this. You should also note that the EPA is one of the first things that many Republican candidates say they are going to abolish.
The Mann-Ornstein commentary I cited in #72 was indeed about the GOP, but the factors I mentioned in #68 were about the overall change in the political landscape. Some of the criticisms leveled at both Obama and Hillary reflect the fact that as Republicans have moved far to the right, Democrats have moved to the right of center, essentially changing what it means today to be “centrist”. Or as Bill Maher put it, Democrats have moved to the right, and Republicans have moved into the mental hospital.
You offer an analysis of Canadian social spending from 1992 to 2001, before the Stephen Harper era? Even my Canadian relatives that used to crow about Canada being more progressive than the U.S. have either shut up or flat out admitted it is now an untenable position to hold.
But you think Goldwater would today win the presidency in a landslide, so you are apparently completely untethered from reality. It has been 35 years since American voters last chose to switch from a Democratic to a Republican administration (Gore won the popular vote in 2000), and it has been 27 years since a non-incumbent Republican won a presidential election. Which he would lose if he had today’s browner electorate to contend with.
Go ahead and have the last word on this: I have said my piece, and some people just cannot be reasoned with.
I’m not interested in “having the last word”, I’m interested in correcting misconceptions, such as the ones noted below.
First of all, I was quoting numbers from 2001 because I have good US-Canada comparisons on hand, but if you look at your own OECD data, social spending in Canada on either a GDP basis or per-capita basis has been significantly higher in recent years than it was in 2001, even when adjusted for inflation. But that’s not the real point here, which is the following.
I have no love for Harper, as you can see from my posts on Canadian election topics. I neither trust nor like the man. But Canada is, after all, a democracy, and say what you will about Harper’s personal values and vision, he has to try to remain electable, which is why he stifles the extremist backbenchers who sometimes try to introduce radical measures. I condemn his cutbacks to increases in health care transfer payments and corporate tax cuts, but in the large scheme of things the health care system rolls on, the Canada Pension Plan is robustly funded, Old Age Security rolls on, the Guaranteed Income Supplement is still there, and the entire system of income security remains intact, whether Harper likes it or not. And on top of that, Harper has only had a majority government since 2011, and is not going to get another one in October – he’s more likely to be turfed out of office and replaced by the socialist-leaning NDP. As Harper becomes more of a known quantity despite his sleazy attempts to manage his image as a moderate, his conservatism is becoming unpalatable to Canadians. To suggest that Harper has somehow dismantled social services, or that Canada has somehow turned more conservative than the US, is beyond absurd.
You’re conveniently ignoring the cite and analysis I posted, which is that post-Goldwater politics became rapidly more conservative after his spectacular loss, a trend that has turned even more sharply right in recent years, as I demostrate with the Mann-Ornstein analysis and with specific examples, . Goldwater lost in a landslide because he was viewed my many as an extremist lunatic, but in terms of Republican politics he was just a man ahead of his time. And that is an important and telling point. His “extremism in defense of liberty is no vice” is a perfect match to Romney’s self-characterization as “severely conservative”, in which Mittens tries to shake off the politically fatal implication that he might be sensibly moderate, because no one either sensible or moderate wins the Republican nomination today.
There’s at least one difference… GM (or any large for-profit corporation) is made up of bunches of people. People have rights. But when the people who make up GM are acting in their corporate capacity, they are not just saying “hey, let’s decide what all of us, collectively, think is best for the USA, and endorse that”. Rather, they MUST be thinking “hey, let’s decide what all of us think is best for GM”. They are required to do so. In other words, if you and a bunch of your buddies form Shodan-PAC and each election decide who you’re going to endorse, you might base your decision on environmental policy one time, fiscal policy the next time, character the next time, etc.
That strikes me as qualitatively different than what it means for GM to endorse a candidate.
All of that said, I don’t have some fully realized plan here, just some vague thoughts. It’s a complicated topic. How is a for-profit corporation different from a PAC different from a union different from the Sierra Club?
But to go back to the OP: clearly the USA functioned just fine as a democracy for decades before Citizens United, so there’s no reason to think we shouldn’t be able to return to how we were before that. Whether Bernie Sanders’ proposal would do that cleanly and clearly is beyond me to analyze.
We are already where we were before Citizens United. All Citizens United did was strike down a part of BCRA. It’s not as if the 2002-2008 elections were signficantly better campaigns because of BCRA.
BCRA failed to accomplish any appreciable objective. We lost nothing by having it struck down.
I may be conflating several different things, but I thought that the whole super-PAC thing was basically brand new, and was due to Citizen’s United. Am I wrong?
The term is certainly new. But everyone from the Moral Majority to the Sierra Club to the AFL-CIO has been taking collectively raised money and spending it on political agitation for a long time, even if they didn’t call it a super PAC.
To be a bit more precise, my understanding is that what changed was that unlimited anonymous donations can now be made to super PACs, which was not the case before. Or at least something along those lines.
