We have the right to make up our own minds; the First Amendment does not assign us the ability.
Nothin’. That’s what free speech means.
Not true; I’m opposed to it, and have said so three times now.
Exactly! I do not support limits on spending on speech.
I’m merely sad about the limitations of democracy, and how that spending allows people to buy and sell elections. I don’t have a cure. I don’t have a cure for old age either, but it doesn’t mean I have to like it!
Exactly. We’re on the same wavelength now (at last!)
Are you reading the same posts I am? I said, quotha, “I don’t like the Citizens United decision, but I have to support it.” This is exactly the opposite of saying “I opposed” it. I support it. I also reserve the right to hate it.
I said no such thing. Go back and read what I actually wrote, without projecting. I hate the decision, but I have to support it and agree with it. One is an emotional response, and carries no real ideological weight; the other is my reasoned belief, and is how I think and vote.
(Haven’t you ever hated something, yet still known is was right? It’s like brushing your teeth. No one really wants to do it; we just know we must.)
ETA: Oops, I messed up my usual editing practice: I forgot to include ". . . " in all of the places where I snipped. I apologize for any unclarity, and will try not to make this blunder again. Several of the quoted paragraphs, above, had other paragraphs between them, which I snipped, mostly for brevity. No distortion was intended.
Looking at this from an outside perspective, from a country where there are pretty tight expenditure limits in the interests of trying to ensure a level playing field, it seems to me perfectly justifiable to say that freedom of speech isn’t a right to shout the other fellow down or drown him out.
Where would a freedom of speech judgement fall on an organised attempt to chant at a public meeting sufficient to drown out any other speaker?
It’s not the exact opposite. We’re discussing the merits of the case, not whether you are bound to abide by court decisions.
What the hell does that mean though? You hate it, but you have to agree with it? See my confusion?
Okay, so all that’s left for me to wonder is why you would hate a decision you rationally agree with. You hate the fact that you must tolerate stupid voters and their stupid decisions? Okay, if that’s all there is to it, fine.
Okay.
If you ever want to talk about the court decision itself, I’ll be here.
Nobody is being “drowned out.” Nobody is being prevented from speaking simply because others are speaking more. There are no chants at public meetings involved here.
The limits on speech in foreign countries (presumably including yours) are more akin to limiting everyone to exactly one minute of speaking. That may make sense at a public meeting, but again, this is not a public meeting we’re talking about. No amount of speech in public limits the ability of others to speak.
If you think we should ration speech in this way, it would be a bit like a limit on how many times or how many words one can post in this forum, predicated on the idea that it’s just not fair if someone posts more than others. Would you support that?
Convenors of public meetings are allowed to set “time, place, or manner” regulations on speakers (if they choose to allow speakers). Preventing chants would fall into that category.
The appropriate analogy to campaign finance would be whether the convenors of the meeting could prevent me from recruiting six friends to all make similar comments during the public comment period.
I basically agree, although the “drowning out” part was I think the most pertinent part of PatrickLondon’s comment.
I would take your analogy a bit further. I’d say the campaign finance issue in its broadest sense could be best described as the right to recruit as many speakers as possible to make comments favoring my side, in a situation where there are either procedural or just practical limits to how long the public comments period can run. So that the net result is that the audience hears what seems to be a strong preponderance of opinion favoring my side, and moreover, because my guys have been expertly and professionally briefed, my side of the issue is not just dominant but particularly slick and persuasive.
I can literally see this sort of thing play out in a town hall meeting to decide between building a park or letting a developer put up a big apartment complex. The developer hires dozens of “supporters”, briefs them with arguments and spin about benefits to local businesses, increased town tax revenue, increased property values, contributions to infrastructure, etc – much or all of which may be bullshit, none of the drawbacks or stresses on infrastructure mentioned, none of the quality of life issues associated with parks and green space mentioned. They might even pass around glossy color brochures showing the glories of the apartment complex with falsified graphs claiming economic benefits. Near the end of it a few parents manage to get to the microphone with their plaintive pleas – “But … we need green space in the community, our kids need a place to play…”
“Great”, says the chairman, slamming his gavel, particularly anxious to get this over with since the developers were also funding his campaign. “Time’s up. We’ve heard both sides, now we’ll vote.”
Hardly anyone even notices the parents’ comments. The condo gets approved by an overwhelming vote. The park never even had a chance, and the community is the worse for it, plus now suffers from excess population density. The developer makes out like a bandit. Welcome to a microcosm of American politics, Koch brothers style.
First of all, neither this thread nor my last post or other posts are about Citizens United specifically, they are about the broader issue of money in politics in general, with the insidious influence of the Koch brothers often used as specific examples, as in the Jane Mayer book or the Gilens-Page study.
Secondly, Citizens United was far from the only such ruling. Just in recent years, there’s also been Federal Election Commission v. Wisconsin Right to Life, Davis v. Federal Election Commission, Arizona Free Enterprise Club Freedom, Club PAC v. Bennett, and McCutcheon v. FEC, just for a few examples.
Thirdly, you are greatly mischaracterizing Citizens United, and I suggest that you more closely familiarize yourself with the case. This is an excellent analysis by respected legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin, writing for the New Yorker. Long story short, Citizens Unitedcould have been a limited ruling on this one narrow issue alone. Instead, Kennedy and Roberts greatly broadened the scope of the ruling, going against the Court’s own recent precedents to engage in such flagrant judicial activism that, as the article concludes, “The Roberts Court, it appears, will guarantee moneyed interests the freedom to raise and spend any amount, from any source, at any time, in order to win elections.”
A few key extracts from the analysis:
All he was asking for was a ruling that the law did not prohibit this particular documentary by this nonprofit corporation during those thirty days. If the Justices had resolved the case as Olson had suggested, today Citizens United might well be forgotten—a narrow ruling on a remote aspect of campaign-finance law.
Instead, the oral arguments were about to take the case—and the law—in an entirely new direction … the current Court has matched contempt for Congress with a disdain for many of the Court’s own precedents. When the Court announced its final ruling on Citizens United, on January 21, 2010, the vote was five to four and the majority opinion was written by Anthony Kennedy. Above all, though, the result represented a triumph for Chief Justice Roberts. Even without writing the opinion, Roberts, more than anyone, shaped what the Court did. As American politics assumes its new form in the post-Citizens United era, the credit or the blame goes mostly to him.
… Through artful questioning, Alito, Kennedy, and Roberts had turned a fairly obscure case about campaign-finance reform into a battle over government censorship. The trio made Stewart—and thus the government—take an absurd position: that the government might have the right to criminalize the publication of a five-hundred-page book because of one line at the end. Still, the Justices’ questioning raised important issues. Based on the theory underlying McCain-Feingold, could Congress pass any law to ban a book? And was Stewart right to acknowledge that it did?
Stewart was wrong. Congress could not ban a book. McCain-Feingold was based on the pervasive influence of television advertising on electoral politics, the idea that commercials are somehow unavoidable in contemporary American life. The influence of books operates in a completely different way. Individuals have to make an affirmative choice to acquire and read a book. Congress would have no reason, and no justification, to ban a book under the First Amendment.
… According to the briefs in the case—and Olson’s argument—the main issue was whether the McCain-Feingold law applied to a documentary, presented on video on demand, by a nonprofit corporation. The liberals lost that argument: the vote at the conference was that the law did not apply to Citizens United, which was free to advertise and run its documentary as it saw fit. The liberals expected that Roberts’s opinion would say this much and no more.
At first, Roberts did write an opinion roughly along those lines, and Kennedy wrote a concurrence which said the Court should have gone much further. Kennedy’s opinion said the Court should declare McCain-Feingold’s restrictions unconstitutional, overturn an earlier Supreme Court decision from 1990, and gut long-standing prohibitions on corporate giving. But after the Roberts and Kennedy drafts circulated, the conservative Justices began rallying to Kennedy’s more expansive resolution of the case. In light of this, Roberts withdrew his own opinion and let Kennedy write for the majority. Kennedy then turned his concurrence into an opinion for the Court.
The new majority opinion transformed Citizens United into a vehicle for rewriting decades of constitutional law in a case where the lawyer had not even raised those issues. Roberts’s approach to Citizens United conflicted with the position he had taken earlier in the term. At the argument of a death-penalty case known as Cone v. Bell, Roberts had berated at length the defendant’s lawyer, Thomas Goldstein, for his temerity in raising an issue that had not been addressed in the petition. Now Roberts was doing nearly the same thing to upset decades of settled expectations.
… The Roberts Court, it appears, will guarantee moneyed interests the freedom to raise and spend any amount, from any source, at any time, in order to win elections.
A very uncomfortable image. It’s sickening. And, worse, I can’t think of any specific way to stop it. How would we go about vetting everyone in the meeting to make sure they’re really attending out of real civic interest, as opposed to being paid $90? How, in detail, can we act against this kind of manipulation?
Of course, in the real world, the developer simply donates $50,000 to the chairman’s re-election campaign committee, and gets the same result without having to hire actors…
Respectfully, you’re the guy who has repeatedly claimed that SCOTUS has ruled that burning a cross on a black family’s lawn against their will is “protected by the First Amendment.”
That does not exactly raise confidence in your understanding of the US Constitution or analysis of Supreme Court decisions.
So now you want to “vet” people before they are allowed to speak? To make sure they are properly qualiified according to your standards?
And does this mean anyone who is “paid to speak” on someone else’s behalf will not be allowed to speak? Will that extend to, say, a lawyer representing a client or a spokesman for a company or a non-profit group?
I’ve got a better idea - let the voters decide if things were done fairly or if the decision of the town council had merit, not you.
Only if the voters approve. If they don’t, they can get rid of the town council. This is true for any of the many other ways someone might influence an elected official - including the many ways you don’t care about because they don’t involve money, but work just the same. The voters will decide. They don’t need your help.
Not quite. The way our system works, any expenditure in support of a particular candidate counts towards total expenditure: up to the candidate and their agent how they choose to spend it or have it spent for them. If someone wants to spend their personal time supporting a candidate by posting on the internet or whatever, so be it. But if they set up a sockpuppet campaign and pay people to do so, that counts; likewise if they spend money on publishing and promoting a book in support of a particular candidate. However, the legal responsibility for that expenditure falls on the candidate’s campaign.
That’s not much different from out system, sort of.
A candidate, or anyone else, can spend as much as they want - per the First Amendment.
But if someone were to spend money on behalf of a candidate by coordinating with that candidate, that would count as a donation to the candidate, subject to donation limits. For instance, if a candidate sent me his ad and asked me to run it and pay for it, that would be coordination and an illegal attempt to get around donation limits. But I could run an ad I created and didn’t talk about with the candidate that supports him and it’s my speech only, and subject to no limits. The problem lately has been that coordination is hard to define and see, and our enforcement is weak anyway.
You mean if just anyone publishes a book they wrote about a candidate that praises him (or criticizes his opponent) it’s counted against the candidate?
If your system counts any speech on behalf of a candidate toward a limit on spending, how the hell does that work? So anyone could go around publishing books about him and that limits the amount the candidate can spend? That’s not only unfair, it sounds unworkable and rife for abuse. The fact that someone else talked about me shouldn’t limit my speech. But maybe I read this wrong.
You don’t appear to have read Toobin’s analysis. First of all a book is fundamentally different because you make a conscious decision to go out and buy it, it’s not something shoved in your face. But even more importantly, in the specific circumstances of the Citizens United sponsored film, the prevailing legal opinion was that it didn’t violate McCain-Feingold!
This is the whole freaking point about why the CU decision was such a travesty – there were straightforward grounds for a ruling supporting CU in the context of the existing law, done, thank you, next case. Instead, the Roberts court turned it into a huge and far-reaching issue that fundamentally changed the rules of the game in favor of big money, precisely the kind of over-reaching judicial activism that courts are not supposed to engage in, ruling on myriad things that the plaintiff had never even brought up.
And this is what I mean by dogmatism, not in a pejorative sense but in the actual sense of so blindly and tenaciously clinging to a particular dogma that you’re willing to throw democracy itself under the bus. That this may not be your intent doesn’t change the fact that it’s the result. Your statement above could not have been more succinctly supportive of the cause if you had been David Koch himself.
Allow me to introduce the definition of democracy: rule by the people, a form of government in which all the people are involved in making decisions.
And the definition of plutocracy: rule by the wealthy, a form of government in which policies are predominantly or entirely determined by a wealthy ruling class.
That last phrase in the definition of democracy is key: involved in making decisions. Note that 40% of voters schlepping to the polls under the sway of superficial and mendacious propaganda, 10% actually understanding the issues, and the other 50% staying home because they don’t even know enough to care, does not constitute “being involved in making decisions”.
I cited Jeffrey Toobin’s legal analysis as evidence that your characterization of Citizens United is simplistic and incorrect. If you disagree with it, take it up with Toobin, or give us the detailed reasons why you believe the argument being made by a respected legal analyst is wrong.
You misinterpreted my illustrative analogy. My hypothetical scenario was a town hall public meeting, not a council meeting. The scenario was that after being swamped by slick one-sided propaganda from the side of the developer, and having virtually no chance to hear the other side – because there’s no money to be made in parks and green space – the audience was swayed by the saturation of misinformation and foolishly voted in favor of the developer. You see, these were the voters!
Trinopus asks what one could do about this kind of situation. In this hypothetical, one might start by having the chair rule that each side gets equal time to make their case. Indeed, in real life meetings those are often the ground rules. In a court case there are strict rules about how and when the defense and the prosecution present their evidence and make their arguments. In your world, you seem to regard this as “censorship” and “limits on free speech”. Obviously it’s the opposite – those sorts of rules and regulations exist precisely to provide a fair and just ability for all sides to be fairly heard. It’s also the very nature of a functional democracy.
Very true. But is it not significant that the principle is exactly the same? I was just offering a very simple scaled-down hypothetical to illustrate that fact, a small-town example of how the influence of money can dominate the conversation and sway the outcome, and how terms like “censorship” are dog-whistle terms that obfuscate the central issue of fairness and integrity in political communication and the democratic imperative for different views to be heard. There are many different ways to do this in national politics, other nations do them, and they’ve been discussed here.
You’re making an argument very close to what John Paul Stevens did in his Citizens United dissent, which is that you can restrict certain political speech as long as it’s limited to a certain “time, place, and manner”. There was merit in that argument. But it seems to me that Citizens United opponents want to go much further than Stevens was willing to allow.
I would argue that it’s exactly the opposite. As per the first part of my response in #236, the Roberts court expanded and elevated what should have been a narrow and straightforward ruling into a far-reaching enactment of ideologically driven judicial policy-making about the broad issue of money in politics, Roberts going so far as to deny that there’s any evidence that such a thing could ever have a corrupting influence. All that CU opponents want is to have the damn thing overturned, because it has long ceased to be about whether or not this particular movie in this particular circumstance should have been prohibited as electioneering, and has become about the profound impact that the Roberts court specifically engineered, that went so far beyond what the plaintiffs asked for and what was necessary.