This might be a worse decision than Citizen’s United. At least that case had a plausible First Amendment rationale, but this…
Arizona provides public campaign financing. Like other such laws, those who accept the public financing are not permitted to accept private financing on top of it. As Justice Kagan explains in the dissent, the main issue with creating an effective public campaign finance law is to provide enough funding for a candidate to credibly compete. Arizona’s law provides a minimum level of financing, and matches nearly dollar for dollar any spending by the opponent’s campaign that exceeds this minimum level, whether personally spent or spent on his behalf by third parties, up to 3x the statutory minimum amount. The funding is available to any candidate, regardless of viewpoint or political affiliation. Sounds to me like a reasonable way of providing credible funding in a responsible and fiscally sound way.
But Chief Justice Roberts and gang didn’t see it that way. You see, this type of funding doesn’t subsidize speech, oh no. What it actually does is limit speech, because some wealthy wheeler-dealer candidate will be loath to spend too much on his own campaign if it will trigger the matching funds. If you’ve done all the back-scratching necessary to gather private funding, it’s not fair that the state would actually, you know, help your opponent compete. After all, who wants competition in an election?
If it wasn’t clear before, it should be now: maintaining the plutocracy, not protecting free speech, is the goal of the conservative bloc of the Supreme Court. This court rivals the Lochner era Court in its willingness to twist any principle towards support of the current status quo.
Why does the government propping up one candidate at the expense of another seem responsible to you, anyway? How does the government have any interest at all in assisting a guy who can’t raise as much money for campaigning as another guy?
I’d be surprised if MOIDALIZE had any great love for Davis either. What it comes down to, I think, is that the big hurdle for campaign finance reform people is Buckley v. Valeo. As long as the court recognizes funding campaigns as speech, it’s going to be very difficult crafting a law limiting campaign funding.
Theoretically, at least, the government has an interest in making sure that elections are fair and competitive, and that one candidate isn’t able to prevent his opposition from campaigning, and you probably could make the argument that it’s possible for one candidate to spend so much money as to buy the election and send out his message to such an extent that it interferes with others’ ability to do so.
But the proposed law doesn’t limit campaign funding or speech as far as I’m aware. I agree with Justice Stevens in Buckley v. Valeo. “Amplification of the opponent’s voice does not mean a diminution of the self-financing candidate’s voice.”
Bricker, the government has an interest in not letting moneyed interests dominate the political discourse. In my perfect world, I’d have as much voice running for president as <insert random extremely wealthy person’s nephew>.
That case was somewhat defensible, as the law in question allowed individual donors and parties to spend more than what was allowed for the opponent. So if you say “the Democratic Party can spend 3x on you what the Republican Party is allowed to spend on your opponent,” that’s not allowed. But there’s no such limitation in the Arizona law. Privately funded candidates can still spend what they want, they just lost some ability to grossly outspend their opponents.
The question wasn’t whether the law was responsible, clearly AZ has a right to determine what they want to spend their revenues on. In this case, they think it’s in their best interest to match campaign donations. I’m curious how “propping” up one candidate is somehow at the “expense” of another. And if you want to argue that the other candidate’s tax dollars go towards contributing to his opponent’s campaign, he could just as easily be the candidate on the lower end of the financial contribution spectrum and be able to benefit from such a law.
If I were to have a slam-dunk competition with Blake Griffin, fairness would require that a cherry-picker helps me into position and random electric shocks are applied to Mr. Griffin’s body to slow him down.
Otherwise it wouldn’t be fair.
I am unaware of any political contest in which one candidate had so much money that it actually prevented another candidate from buying whatever ad time he wished.
Your argument seems to be that the sheer quantity of ads somehow overwhelm the message of the more pecunious candidate. I don’t agree, but even if that’s true, that’s not the government’s business to fix. I disagree that the government has a compelling interest in assuring that every candidate has equal ad time. They have an interest in ensuring that every candidate has equal opportunity to buy ad time. But as with many things, there seems to be a tendancy on the left to confuse equality of opportunity with equality of results.
No, Arizona doesn’t have a right to give one candidate money without giving it to every candidate. That’s public money. When Arizona spends its public money on one candidate without giving equal money to every other candidate, Arizoan is assisting one candidate at the expense of the other.
Public money which the legislature of Arizona has determined to be used for the purpose of equalizing campaign finance donations. Where do you get the idea that if public money is being spent for one purpose, they are required to spend an equal money on an opposing cause? And again, the money is not being spent “at the expense” of another. It’s at the expense of their revenue dollars, sure. But not at the expense of the other candidate.
Public campaign financing is a choice. If you accept it, you agree to limit the private sources of funding you receive. If you have the funds, you’re under no obligation to participate. The government makes choices like this all the time. If you’re indigent, you can apply to have your court costs waived; this doesn’t require the government to waive everyone’s costs.
The legitimacy of public campaign financing is well established, and as spending is considered speech, the key concern is whether a law limits speech and whether those limitations are constitutional. How, exactly, does Arizona’s law limit speech?
Wealth or ability to spend money shouldn’t even be a factor in an election. I’d be for mandatory public financing of all candidates if it guaranteed a level playing field.
And there seems to be a problem in this post of understanding that elections are not sports events; they are about governance, not becoming a champion.
As such, of course the government, as an expression of the will of the people, generally, has an interest in ensuring that we, the voting public, have adequate information and access to as many sources of opinion and electoral choices as feasible, in order to make sound, informed judgement about who our elected officials will be and what they will be doing with our money and in our name.
So, Bricker, what happened to all that stuff about how state governments (unlike the federal government, which is a limited government of enumerated powers) have “plenary power”? And such questions should be settled democratically, not by unelected judges with life appointments?
It’s one thing for a person to say he thinks the law in question is unwise and should be repealed, but this law was struck down by the federal judicial system.
But what First Amendment principles? I not only have a right to free speech, I also have a right to dictate that other people (in this case the People of Arizona) cannot “speak” (pay money) to my opponent?
By this logic, a tobacco company could argue that taxpayer-financed public health warnings are a violation of the company’s First Amendment rights, as they are unfairly competing against said tobacco company’s privately-financed free speech in favor of the “Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should” point of view.
And maybe Bricker is right–but I’m wondering if this expansive view of things will be applied across the board. For example, I’m sure Bricker will now concede that sweeping court-mandated restraints on school vouchers are needed to protect the First Amendment rights of people who disagree with the curriculum of the private schools in question–I mean, that’s multiple clauses of the First Amendment there (free speech and both free exercise and establishment of religion).
