How is a Super-Pac buying advertising time to support or bash a certain political issue or candidate different from Fox News or MSNBC doing the same thing with their paid editorial shows?
That would be a good argument if anyone had ever suggested that candidates shouldn’t be allowed to raise and spend money on campaign ads. But since no one ever did, that observation is both pointless and disingenuous.
I see that no one has refuted the list of five other SCOTUS rulings I mentioned here that are in addition to Citizens United. It seems that almost every year since 2007, the Roberts court has overturned some aspect of campaign finance regulation or provision for public financing, essentially making it crystal clear that in their view big money should control the political system without limit or impediment.
Politicians spend half their time fundraising and the other half legislating in favor of those who fund them. And people go around scratching their heads wondering why both parties suck and are almost identically dedicated to corporate interests and the wealthy, as if it was some kind of mystery.
But the wealthy didn’t have untrammeled control over our political system back then! Unfair! Unfair! The wealthy’s right to control our democracy is being usurped!
Or the Internet. Every man (or woman) can be a publisher now.
It’s no mystery, and that’s why the arguments of Ibn Warraq and Smapti fall on deaf ears. Wrt democracy, they want to kill the baby to save the bath water.
Internet is not free.
The important thing is that every person has the freedom to donate $400,000,000 for a single election. It’s just their own fault if some people choose not to exercise that right.
If so, then why do you think it was correct for Moveon.org to be fined for criticizing George Bush and encouraging people to vote against him?
If not, and you do think it was outrageous for the government to fine them for speaking their minds, then please explain your reasoning.
Thanks in advance.
If you think the government shouldn’t be able to sanction The Colbert Report or Real Time With Bill Maher for criticizing politicians you hate democracy?
Would you mind explaining that?
You might read your link and find out that a “network of politically active nonprofit groups” raised that money which “matched the long-established national coalition of labor unions”
I suspect you wanted it to say that the Koch brothers donated that money.
Do you honestly believe that Moveon.org was fined because they said bad things about George Bush? Or is resorting to this kind of ridiculous hyperbole the only way to support the Roberts court’s systematic dismantling of all campaign finance laws which has been going on for seven years now, one outrageous ruling after another?
Moveon was fined for violating the rules of its particular IRS 527 registration which granted it exemptions both from taxation and from political contribution limits. Under those terms a group may engage in issue advocacy all they like but may not expressly advocate for or against a specific candidate – a distinction that came out of the Buckley v. Valeo ruling so beloved by the Roberts court. They would have been free to criticize Bush all they liked if they had conformed to the applicable FEC rules for political funding.
It’s pretty clear that the Roberts court supporters just simply don’t like rules of any kind, but as discussed here and elsewhere in various other contexts, when you don’t have rules you have anarchy, and in anarchy the strongest and most ruthless dominate and prevail. That’s not democracy.
I agree that we have a problem. The solution is not to give Congress broad powers to regulate political speech. Write a much narrower amendment. This one repeals the 1st amendment’s protections for political speech entirely. Congress could pass literally any law governing political speech that they wanted to. I don’t normally have much use for Ted Cruz’s hyperbole, but he’s dead on when he calls this one of the most extreme proposals he’s ever seen.
IMO, the main issue is what Congress is allowed to do for contributors. Since Congress has few “rights”, per se, and can limit their own rights at will without even passing a real law(they can just change their rules), a better approach would be to simply get rules passed making it impossible for Congressional candidates to reward contributors. Perhaps make it like the court system, where Congressmen would have to recuse themselves from all votes pertaining to campaign contributors.
That sounds a lot like John Roberts’ “quid pro quo” characterization of the only way money could possibly corrupt politics, which was widely and properly ridiculed for its manifest absurdity. Real-world politics involves a vast array of complex and intricately inter-related issues and at the present time is so completely permeated by the influence of money that one simply wonders if Roberts is completely out of touch or being intentionally disingenuous.
Take an issue like climate change and emissions regulation, for instance. It touches so many aspects of so many industries that under your proposal no Congressman would be allowed to vote on any such legislation, ever, because there’s always some interests somewhere that are affected that have contributed to his campaign, not even considering that most Congressmen probably have direct contributions from the fossil fuel industries and/or the renewables industries and probably both. Everyone would be permanently recused, and nothing would ever get done – pretty much like today.
No, the real answer is what progressives have been saying all along and what most other countries are doing: put reasonable limits on campaign spending, put meaningful limits on campaign contributions, and put limits on 3rd party electioneering. Conservatives like to characterize this as “banning” free speech. Utter nonsense. It’s not “banning” anything – it’s bringing political campaigns down to earth from the rarified exclusivity of a billionaire’s game to a meaningful competition where ordinary honest people can hope to compete and to have their voices heard on an equal footing. Which of course is precisely why billionaires and their friends, like the Roberts court, strenuously oppose it.
Would you mind explaing how Jonathan Turley, the ACLU and Floyd Abrams are “conservatives”?
Thanks
Also, please define, using your own words “electioneering” because that’s one of those vague terms that’s regularly used to defend the banning of ads for movies and books.
Once again, thanks in advance.
No, if you think money = speech, you hate democracy, and love wealthy oligarchies.
An old story:
Did I say they were conservatives? If I had said they were, I might have to explain it. I didn’t.
I did, however, point out in this post that the ACLU supported only a narrow specific provision of Citizens United (and that many think they were wrong to do so) while still supporting many of the aspects of campaign finance law that I’ve been talking about.
As for Turley and Abrams, you’re perhaps under the mistaken impression that everyone who self-identifies as “liberal” or “conservative” is going to have exactly the same views about everything. You would also be mistaken if you think views on campaign finance regulation aren’t markedly different between the left and the right in general. Turley is generally liberal but has libertarian views on a lot of issues that align with the right and that progressives disagree with, though I certainly concur with his view that we’re currently dealing with an extraordinarily partisan and activist Supreme Court. And many think Abrams is wrong on a lot of issues, not the least of which is his defense of the tobacco industry against warning label mandates based on an equally absolutist interpretation of the First Amendment.
It’s a distinction the courts have already made – advocacy that is explicitly or otherwise clearly directed toward a particular candidate.
And I think your use of words like “banning” is intentionally provocative, when what is actually involved is the limitation of certain types of message to certain types of organizations that are subject to funding limits, or other similar rules that apply to everyone, the objective always being to limit the corrupting influence of money in politics. It’s all about money. Words like “banning” and “book burning” evocative of Nazi censorship is intentionally poisoning the well.
Thank you for conceding that you believe that the government should have the right to regulate both the Colbert Report and Real Time with Bill Maher.
Would you also support regulating the O’Reilly Factor and The New York Times or do you think that would be wrong?
Err… from you
Now you define “electioneering” as
Now, don’t The Colbert Report, The O’Reilly Factor, MSNBC, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Nation all advocate “explicitly or otherwise” for or against political candidates.
You do realize that based on the logic you’ve provided the Government should be able to regulate them.
If not, please explain why the Government is allowed to regulate the speech of the Sierra Club but not of The National Review?
Thanks in advance.