You know what? Money isn’t just bad for politics. It’s bad for justice. Looking at the stats on punishments for crimes would clearly show that the richer a person is, the less likely they are to go to jail for the same crimes as a poor person. Anyone able to hire Johnny Cochran to lead the defense has an unfair advantage to a poor shmuck stuck with a public defender.
To even out the playing field, why don’t we start limiting the rights of anybody with a net worth of, oh, over a million dollars.
Just to make it fair, mind you. Lets drop 4th amendment protections for these rich fat cats. Since they are no longer able to question police searches and warrants the fact that they are rich will be neutralized. The playing field will be leveled for all.
Or, we can just apply constitutional protection to everyone. No matter how much we think we are helping by limiting it because of the inherent evil of money being a part of the system.
What’s the difference? The first amendment wasn’t meant to guarantee me an audience equal to anyone else’s. Not every point of view deserves equal representation. Taken to its logical conclusion, the contrary view would have the KKK given equal time with the Democrat party by law. Effectively, the government would be favoring the KKK by giving it more credence than it could ever earn through its own efforts. The best you could hope for is a media that no one with any brains would listen to.
We’ll get the money out of politics about the time we get the wetness out of water.
Money is only the means by which those who possess it gain the attention of politicians and the electorate. If it isn’t dollars, francs or yen, it’ll be blowjobs.
Political advertisements are bad for politics: they try to reduce everything down to a 30-second sound bite. No position worth taking on any issue can be adequetely explained in 30 seconds of TV time. It’s lowest-common-denominator politics. It encourages attack ads (it’s a lot easier to say “The Democrats didn’t like the war on Iraq, so they love terrorism!” in 30 seconds than it is to explain that Iraq and terrorism are separate issues and that a position on one is not necessarily contingent upon the position on the other).
I think all TV ads should be barred during national campaigns as detrimental to the public good. Candidates should each be given 30 minute blocks of TV time each week, and there should be ten three-hour long, free form debates. No 90-second answers, no questions from panels or – even worse – from a studio audience of drooling, imbecilic “average Americans.” Let the candidates grill each other, each debate relegated to no more than three issues. Require all networks to air them as part of their broadcast license requirements.
That’d do a world more of good for public debate in this country than 30-second spots ever could, with or without the McCain Law.
Your political speech is not limited at all. You and I both can write letters and place phone calls to any candidate, or official that we see fit. We can also contribute money to said officials or candidates.
This law limits groups. Do groups get the same rights as you and I? Last time I checked, the bill of rights applied to individuals and not groups.
Time to suck it up and make the grass roots work again.
You don’t understand. The Bill of Rights never granted anyone any rights. It is a restriction on the ability of government to infringe on those rights. Therefore, groups have every bit as much right to free speech as individuals.
I don’t quite see how that deductively follows, yguy. I have the right to vote. You have the right to vote. We don’t get together and come up with a third vote.
The BOR does not grant rights, it recognizes rights which are inherent, and prevents government infringement of them. That being the case, non-governmental groups have the right to free speech, as it is not elsewhere denied by the Constitution.
This should scare the snot out of every decent American.
But I agree with elucidator and minty green (END TIMES! REPENT!!). Money is not speech. Restraining certain sorts of spending on behalf of greater fairness in the election process does not conjure up the Gulag for me.
Of course, the Internet and other non-regulated loopholes abound and will make McCain-Feingold increasingly irrelevant.
Much as I loathe the idea, I am beginning to lean towards public financing of all campaigns. With strict spending limits. No limit, though, on how many rallies you can appear at, how many newsworthy speeches you can make, and how many eager volunteers you can inspire with your message.
Suppose I want to support a candidate. I could go down to his office and volunteer my time. If I didn’t have much spare time, I could pay somebody to go down and volunteer. I see no substantive difference, therefore, between giving a candidate your time and giving him your money. Since giving him your time would be treated as protected political speech, giving him your money must be similiarly protected.
And now, my more visceral response:
Grass roots efforts will never serve anybody’s interests except the gaggle of mindless idiots who never want anything but to raid the gov’t coffers to line their own pockets…in other words, the “common man”. To get widespread grass roots support you either have to be a moral busybody or a populist. The wealthy make this country what it is, and those no good little leeches who feed off of them get garbage like this passed so that the nation’s greatest producers are reduced in political voice to the level of some schmoe who works at the gas station. We already have an almost unlimited franchise (and see how poorly that has worked out), one person one vote, but now it’s “one person one dollar”.
Democracy has failed, and this is proof.
I can only hope there’s a nice Scalia dissent buried in that opinion somewhere to lighten my mood before I get back to studying for my Admin Law final tomorrow.
And just how do you get from there to the idea that people have no right to pool their resources, appoint spokespeople, and propagate their message as widely as possible? Unless such a restriction can be found in the Constitution, it would seem to come under the protection of the first, ninth and tenth amendments.
Ah yes, incumbents will love that. Incumbents do newsworthy things. They are covered by the press and appear on TV all the time. They will love it when they can command free coverage and their opponents are limited in how much they can spend.**
So the press decides what is newsworthy, and can write and broadcast as much as they want. But if I want to spread my message, and need to spend money to do so, I go to jail. I don’t like it.
The First Amendment Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Is interfering with commercials restricting the freedom of the press? No. Is setting contribution limits? No. Are we forbidden from peaceable assembly? No. Are you forbidden from public speech? No. Well, so much for the first.
The Ninth Amendment The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Oh, people! Not “… people and the arbitrary groups they form.”
The Tenth Amendment The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
There’s that silly word again, people. Not, “… people and the arbitrary groups they form.”
Somehow I just don’t see a system where you can spend what you like as favoring challengers. Incumbents’ re-election bids in recent years have been successful a huge portion of the time. ** So the press decides what is newsworthy, and can write and broadcast as much as they want. But if I want to spread my message, and need to spend money to do so, I go to jail. I don’t like it. **
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The moral is, find ways to spread the word that don’t require huge spending on attack ads.
Takes imagination and an inspiring message, which will be tough for some politicos.
I totally agree that as long as money plays a part in politics, it will result in inequities. Right now, some groups can buy the $400,000 gold-plated sound truck (NRA, AARP), while others can barely afford a newspaper to twist into a megaphone. But McCain-Feingold “cures” this problem, not by giving the poorer groups more access to better outlets to publicize their speech, and not even by forcing the richer groups to use only twisted up newspapers. McCain-Feingold’s “cure” is to say that no one can speak at all.
So in order to cut off “bad speech” – specifically, “attack ads” and the allegedly corrupting influence of money – McC-F cuts off all speech. I think that’s facially overbroad. But more than that, it’s a rejection of the principle that the cure for “bad speech” is more speech. I seem to remember some poster (Diogenes?) whose sig line was something like “There is nothing more beautiful than freedom of speech.” I have no idea what happened to that sentiment.
My problems with McC-F are myriad, including the fact that I think it will be ineffective at stopping attack ads, leaves us to the major media outlets’ mercy for getting our information (Do you really want to rely on Fox for your campaign news?), and I think it’s naive to beleive that it will somehow make our politicians impervious to the influence of money. But my biggest problem is that I don’t see how the same Court which has repeatedly said that political speech is the most important and protected kind of speech, can now uphold a regulation banning political speech within 60 days of an election?
I’m sure I’ll get lambasted for even posting his name, but here, in a paragraph from Justice Scalia, is what I wish I’d said about this legislation:
And for those that say that spending money isn’t free speech, please see Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U.S. 1, 16 (1976):