Interesting… why do you think that’s a good idea? (I’m not saying it is a bad idea, I’m just wondering what problem you think it addresses.)
If this were possible, I’d be all for it. I just have no idea what practical steps could be taken. But to play devil’s advocate, why do you believe that a law against coordination doesn’t violate the First Amendment?
Yet another foolish statement.
Neither of us thinks that. We’ve merely pointed out that you’ve been desperately trying to change the subject because you’ve realized your rather silly efforts to prove that McCain-Feingold wasn’t a violation of the First Amendment has blown up in your face so you’re trying to move the conversation to a battle you haven’t been losing.
Agreed. Moreover, while certainly union members have been accused of intimidating, and occasionally doing worse to strikebreakers(or for those who prefer “scabs”) there’s not really a way to successfully “intimidate” someone into voting for your preferred candidate so long as there’s a secret ballot and even if there was such a way to do so, I’ve never heard of any union members being accused of doing so.
That being said, yes, the internet is a vast place and I’m sure if someone searched around it long enough one might find some instance of some AFL-CIO volunteers from the campaign for Senator blue-collar of Michigan who took down the signs of the Senator’s opponents or were accused of slashing the tires of some volunteers from another campaign, but that kind of crap happens every season and we’ve know reason to believe it happens more frequently with union workers. If anything probably less so, since they tend to have much more discipline than most volunteers.
That said, if some union members from, I don’t know, let’s say the United Auto Workers show up at your doorstep, cracking their knuckles, saying they saw you have Republican bumper sticker on the car, suggesting you stay home rather than go to the polls, just call the police. Real life is not an episode of the Sopranos.
Hopefully, Lance won’t mind if I answer for him, and in all seriousness that is a fair question that deserves to be answered.
The shortest answer is that the courts have repeatedly ruled that while candidates can spend as much of their own money to promote themselves or criticize their opponents, or, as you’d call it “electioneering”, the First Amendment does not protect people right to give their money to candidates. Once you allow people to co-ordinate with candidates you’re allowing them to effectively give unlimited donations.
So, if donating to political candidates isn’t protected, then neither is “co-ordinating” with political candidates.
Thank you. First thing we’ve actually agreed on!
Wow! A second thing we agree on! 
That first point is actually pretty important, but it’s really just one relatively small part of an overall strategy to make as many voices heard as possible. It’s a strategy embraced by all modern democracies that includes things like contribution limits, advertising limits, laws governing the conduct of election campaigns, public campaign financing, free and equal media time, a vibrant public broadcasting system, and in some cases things like subsidies to broadcast and print media to provide platforms to all candidates. Not all countries do all of those things, and they do them in different ways, but the US is notable for doing so few of them and so ineffectually.
That said, I’m going to make one last effort here to try to make myself understood and then probably just bow out of this discussion as a futile battle of cultures. I particularly want to deal with your flippant statements trying to justify why the US does few or none of the things other countries do to safeguard democracy, saying things like “we are better than even those advanced democracies. We don’t suppress speech.” and categorizing campaign finance as a demand that “… the US should settle for the lower standards of other countries”.
You’re better? Other countries have “lower standards”? According to the now-famous Gilens-Page paper, the US is no longer a functional democracy at all!
The paper itself puts it in dryer and more academic terms:
Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.
https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf
Jimmy Carter made much the same observations in a recent interview:
[The 2010 Citizens United decision and the 2014 McCutcheon decision] violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or being elected president. And the same thing applies to governors, and U.S. Senators and congress members. So, now we’ve just seen a subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect, and sometimes get, favors for themselves after the election is over. … At the present time the incumbents, Democrats and Republicans, look upon this unlimited money as a great benefit to themselves. Somebody that is already in Congress has a great deal more to sell."
And for proof you need look no further than the actual economic realities. I’m not just talking about the Wall Street crooks who brought the whole thing down in 2008, I’m talking about the fact that the US has a larger and faster-growing gap between the rich and poor than any other advanced democracy. I’m talking about the lack of universal health care. I’m talking about the fact that the middle class is getting shafted on their share of income while the wealthiest get ever wealthier. I’m talking about the fact that big money is corrupting major decisions on public policy to their own benefit and to the detriment of the general public.
Looking at some of the behind the scenes machinations makes it evident that the big-money problem and the control of the plutocracy over public policy is even worse than anyone might even suspect …
David Koch ran for vice president on the Libertarian ticket in 1980, but when the campaign was over, he resolved never to seek public office again. That wouldn’t be necessary, he and his brother concluded; they could invest in the campaigns of others, and essentially buy their way to political power.
Thirty years later, the midterm elections of 2010 ushered in the political system that the Kochs had spent so many years plotting to bring about. After the voting that year, Republicans dominated state legislatures; they controlled a clear majority of the governorships; they had taken one chamber of Congress and were on their way to winning the other. Perhaps most important, a good many of the Republicans who had won these offices were not middle-of-the-road pragmatists. They were antigovernment libertarians of the Kochs’ own political stripe. The brothers had spent or raised hundreds of millions of dollars to create majorities in their image. They had succeeded. And not merely at the polls: They had helped to finance and organize an interlocking network of think tanks, academic programs and news media outlets that far exceeded anything the liberal opposition could put together.
It is this conservative ascendancy that Jane Mayer chronicles in “Dark Money.” The book is written in straightforward and largely unemotional prose, but it reads as if conceived in quiet anger. Mayer believes that the Koch brothers and a small number of allied plutocrats have essentially hijacked American democracy, using their money not just to compete with their political adversaries, but to drown them out.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/24/books/review/dark-money-by-jane-mayer.html
And these insidious influences have woven their tentacles into everything from overt television advertising to a vast network of covert astroturf organizations managed by the same kind of lobbyists who drove the tobacco lobbies in their heyday and current work for organizations like AHIP to undermine any possible threat of publicly funded health care. Worse still, the Kochs and others have insinuated themselves into colleges and universities, funding programs to turn out the next generation of conservatives and libertarian thinkers to carry on their work into the indefinite future. From an interview with author Jane Mayer:
And I think one of the things that’s most important that the Kochs have done is to subsidize programs in universities and colleges all over the country. It’s hard to count because they’re not transparent particularly, but there’s somewhere between 220 and maybe 300 universities and colleges now that have Koch-funded programs.
What they would say, of course, is, well, the universities are left-leaning and liberal — but the thing is what they’re doing is subsidizing one point of view, whereas the others have grown organically because it’s academic freedom, and that happens to be what the scholars are teaching and believing. They instead are waging a war of ideas, but one in which they push their own point of view by paying for it, and paying universities to push it. And it’s growing at a very fast clip at this point.
One of the things in the final chapter of the book, there is a tape of them talking about all of this, at one of the secret meetings the Kochs hold, with the donor group that they’ve assembled. And their operatives are saying, “We’ve created something that the other side (meaning the liberals) can’t compete with, it’s unrivaled.” And they say, “What it is is a pipeline, a talent pipeline.” And they describe it: You take the most promising students that you can convert to your point of view and you move them on through the other institutions that they’ve got, which are political think tanks, advocacy groups, turning them into people who work in their campaigns, authors, media personalities.
They talk about this in such an amazing way and openly, because they’re talking in front of their own group, that they’ve created an integrated network. And it is an integrated network.
So, no, you’re not “better than other countries” from a ridiculously absolutist interpretation of the First Amendment – you’re teetering on the brink of a transformation where the populist and most basic foundations of democracy are being marginalized into irrelevance.
Nobody said it was off limits. Talk about it all you want. Just don’t be confused between Citizens United and campaign finance, because they are different things. If you know the difference, fine. It does seem that you want to answer questions about Citizens United by talking about campaign finance instead, and that sometimes you avoid answering questions about CU by talking about campaign finance.
Wolfpup, since you’re the guy who insists that SCOTUS has ruled that the Akamai burning crosses on the lawns of black families is protected speech, what do you you think of Sweden putting journalists in jail for committing “libel” against wealthy and powerful companies and individuals.
I believe, though I’m not 100% sure Norway and Denmark have similar laws.
Are you certain you want to stand by your moronic comment about the US having less freedom, where journalists don’t have to go to jail for saying bad things about wealthy companies and individuals?
Do you wish the US adopted such laws, particularly if the US made their libel laws stricter like the laws of the U.K.?
So what? That paper is wrong too.
This is STUPID.
It makes the same fundamental mistake you’ve made - confusing influence and power.
The average citizen doesn’t need to have “influence.” He has all the power - the vote.
If candidates who favor business interests are winning election, it’s because the voters CHOSE them.
Not much more to say than that.
Those don’t prove anything about our democracy. They prove that people with your particular agenda (and mine) are disappointed with the outcomes of elections, but they don’t prove elections are a sham.
Gosh, I guess actual voters weren’t involved in that?
We might have a better government if we took away some rights. But we don’t think it’s worth it.
I butt in and do that all the time, so you certainly can. 
As I said, it’s my version of public financing. It provides more access to TV ads to the candidates while relieving their need to raise gobs of cash to get it.
There is already a law against coordination. It’s not a First Amendment violation at all. It’s simply says that if you go out and ask a candidate “hey, want me to run an ad for you, or say something in my ad?” it makes the money you spend on that ad the same as a donation to the candidate. This keeps people from flouting the donation limits by going out and pretending to be doing independent spending on their own speech. Just as a donation of something other than money is still a donation (“in kind”), agreeing to spend money for a candidate is effectively the same thing as giving them the money to spend themselves, hence the coordination ban. The enforcement is incredibly weak these days, and many people in the public would be surprised to know it is illegal. The FEC has even talked about relaxing it more:
So you’re going to dismiss a well researched academic paper, and the Mayer book I cited, and all the other supporting evidence, as “wrong”, “stupid”, and “confused”, and that’s the end of it. Interesting. You know, there’s an old saying that the best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter. This is not to say that democracy is a bad idea, because it’s the best one we’ve got. Quite the contrary, it is to say that democracy is a very fragile idea that must be tended and protected like a delicate flower, lest it be overpowered by weeds. Apologies in advance if this is going to sound overly cynical or in any way preachy, but there’s surely good reason to be cynical.
You have surely heard those man-in-the-street interviews, where people are asked to explain their positions on various political issues. Most of them are embarrassing and downright scary. Voters as a group tend to be astoundingly uninformed on the issues, and much of what they do think they know is often outrageously wrong and influenced by dubious sources (I’m looking at you, Fox News, and the Murdoch papers, lobbyists disguised as “think tanks”, the network of Internet astoturf sites, late night talk radio, and on and on).
Basically voters tend to look for anyone who promises them boundless prosperity and lower taxes and has the snake-oil to fix whatever other specific complaints they might have in any given election, and manages to sound convincing and, most importantly, “looks right”, meaning he has nice hair and a nice suit with a flag pin in the lapel. Plus there’s always the boogeyman of keeping them safe that’s historically been used to drum up political support. For the decades of the Cold War, it was communism and the evil specter of the Soviet Union, now it’s terrorism and Muslims. And in judging these things the criteria of the average voter are often astoundingly superficial – you might want to look up the famous H.L. Mencken quote about that.
These are the folks you say have the power, and who allow the plutocracy and business interests to dominate the government “because the voters CHOSE them”, the folks who so rarely seem to be able to articulate anything intelligible about the issues they’re voting on – yet we’re supposed to believe that these voters are so incredibly well informed that they’re incapable of being manipulated by billions of dollars worth of the world’s slickest marketing and PR spin!
So yes, democracy is a fragile thing, easily manipulated and easily lost. Your guns aren’t going to protect you, and neither, necessarily, is the Constitution. The Constitution didn’t prevent idiocies like the 18th Amendment from being enacted, it didn’t prevent the PATRIOT Act or illegal surveillance, it didn’t prevent the 2008 economic meltdown or Wall Street thievery, it doesn’t prevent an ideological Supreme Court from making ideologically aligned extremist interpretations, and even now a bunch of wingnuts are calling for a constitutional convention, as noted in another thread, and if the wingnuts have their way there’s no telling what havoc they could wreak. And it also didn’t prevent a handful of states from enacting state constitutional amendments banning SSM and pushing for that nationally.
So what can you rely on? Only one thing: a robust, functional democracy, and for that you need at least a moderately well informed public. That’s why the channels of public communication that promote informed voting are so essential to a working democracy, and indeed are its last best hope. It’s why it’s so critically important that governments promote robust and diverse media and regulate a balanced fairness in their allocation to political voices. It’s also why public broadcasting is so critically important, another area where politics has driven the US to last place among modern democracies. But never fear – PBS has recently been getting pretty big injections of cash… from David Koch! The whole thing would be funny if it wasn’t so tragic.
I can hardly comment on something that Sweden supposedly did that you didn’t provide a cite for – I know nothing about it. It doesn’t matter, anyway. It may well be that Sweden did something boneheaded and I don’t know why it’s on me to defend it. There’s never total absolutism in any guarantee of rights – all countries including the US have laws against libel and slander and other limitations on free speech. It’s always a question of where to draw the line. If you actually read the links in my previous post, just for starters, like the Gilens-Page study, or the Jane Mayer interview, or maybe even take the time to read her book, it’s pretty evident that the conservative justices on the SCOTUS are drawing the line in a dangerous place that’s vastly empowering the plutocracy.
I agree with you, but the thing is, I find your position to be a perfect example of this phenomenon in regards to the issue of freedom of the press.
The average voter is apparently doing it wrong.
I dismiss the conclusions, which are nothing more than political judgements based on the idiotic conclusion that a certain outcome of elections that the authors don’t like means the whole system is a fraud. It’s nothing more than a temper tantrum.
And this is the heart of the flaws in your position, as well as the paper you cited.
You have contempt for the voters. You think they are too stupid to think for themselves. You think you should control what they see and hear. In short, you don’t like democracy.
Don’t lecture me about democracy if you can’t respect it.
(And, like all the other like you, you think you are somehow smarter than the masses. You’re above all that influence because you’re special.)
I couldn’t agree more.
You don’t inform the public by allowing the government to single out some speech as “too much” and allow it to hinder that speech.
The voters don’t need your help. Thanks anyway.
Lance, is it possible to have a debate without you using every other post to basically describe your adversary as being a bad person? It’s like you are more interested in the character of who you disagree with than talking about the issues.
I didn’t say you were a bad person. I said your views reveal a fundamental contempt for the ability of voters to be voters, and therefore for democracy itself. It’s not an insult - I’m not saying it because I’m mad that you disagree with me. It’s just the reality behind your views.
P.S. I’m sorry I sometimes make it sound like I’m personalizing things. I don’t mean to be doing that. It’s a mistake that got me a warning earlier in this thread. I’m describing your viewpoints or that of others such as Wolfpup, not attacking anyone personally or saying they are a bad person for holding those views.
So if you think the voters are so shallow and dumb and easily fooled, and this requires that smarter elites (like you?) manipulate what they are allowed to see and hear, why even bother to let them vote? Why go through the process of educating them properly so that they vote for the right people (according to those smarter elites)? If there’s only one good choice, why let the voters choose and risk them making the wrong one?
The idea that the people aren’t smart enough to govern themselves is the fundamental idea behind dictatorships and such. It couldn’t be more anti-democratic.
You’re making comments about people’s character which I don’t think have any bearing on the matter at hand. It’s like if we were debating the Iraq war, and one poster repeatedly said something like, “Your posts indicate that you hate America… but I’m not calling you a bad person.”
I don’t think I am, but like I said, I don’t mean to be.
I don’t see how I can say it any other way. If your posts indicate that you “hate America” (which I never said, but I’ll use it as example) then I think that’s the way it is and I should say so. Is there a better way to say it? If so, I’ll do that. Perhaps “your views are not consistent with American values?” If that’s better, I’ll try to say things like that instead. I honestly don’t want to make personal attacks.
