All campaign finance laws do is change the way money influences politics. It will never be eradicated, or even reduced. Even if you did public financing, that would just make the media the only competing megaphone, which would cause the Kochs to buy a news channel.
The goal of campaign finance reform should be to remove funding methods that lead to corruption, while being satisfied with funding methods that do not. There is no evidence that third party spending, or donations under $10,000, lead to corruption. When you look at all the favors done for donors, they are always bundlers, or in the past, huge soft money donors. Politicians aren’t going criminal for $5200 when they need about 500-1000 more donors giving that much. That was the point of making politicians raise funds from many donors, because they wouldn’t be able to please everyone, and once you’ve got 1000 or more people who you are beholden to, it’s not even worth it to try.
The whole “some people have too big a megaphone” complaint is useless. If you take away Sheldon Adelson’s megaphone, Rachel Maddow still has hers. There are many sources of influence in our politics, from universities to the entertainment industry, to the media, to churches, and of course, 30-second ads. The 30 second ads are not the most influential of those.
Actually, that wouldn’t have been a problem with the law as it was. If you wanted to give $1776 in political contributions, you could give it all to one candidate, or divide it among 100 of them.
True: it wouldn’t be workable if we had some sort of dictatorship that outlawed such activities. What makes it workable is that this is a democracy, and nobody would put up with those limits.
What it comes down to is: the reason separating money and speech is no problem, is that we’re living in a democracy where - let’s face it - those with money are always going to have more influence than those without, because that’s just the way life is.
And so it’s never going to be easier to limit money in politics in the future than it’s been at the various times in the past when even the Supreme Court believed there were many ways you could limit political spending.
There may be some alternate universe where the de-linking of money and speech resulted in laws that forbade even the trivial spending involved in posting something to your blog. But that’s some alternate universe. It isn’t this one.
I disagree completely with the notion that you can’t control the influence of money in politics. It’s easy to write laws that limit campaign contributions and force media to provide free ad times for political ads, we had such a system in place and it worked jsut fine. It’s a desirable thing to do.
The key thing is to make the penalties for breaking such laws jail time. No probation, jail, for both briber and bribee, even if said bribee is a sitting Congressman. That would have what we call a “chilling effect” on all that money.
Spending $100 million making a movie with a political message isn’t “money in politics”? Having a $100 million annual budget applied to opinion shows in prime time on Fox, CNN, and MSNBC doesn’t count as “money in politics”?
If you remove the ability to run 30-second ads, there are a still a zillion ways to use your money to influence politics. And the Kochs can easily by a news channel or major newspaper.
The latter used to count a lot less when we still had this “fairness doctrine” thingy. (It was based on the simple notion that the airwaves belonged to all of us, but not everyone could have their own broadcast or cable TV station. So the handful of people who did have TV stations or cable channels were speaking on behalf of all of us, rather than just on behalf of their own selves. Can’t see that that is any less true than it ever was.)
Anyway, I’m still going with the historical track record: if money is defined to not be speech, the likelihood of regulations that meaningfully threaten speech is essentially nil. Rich people will surely try to find ways around the regulations. If a workaround becomes a major thing, you regulate that too, if you can win that battle. Ultimately, the answer is to reduce income inequality, so that there’s simply less money trying to find its way around the regs.
The airwaves belong to the public becuase of the limited frequency bandwidth. Cable made that obsolete. We don’t need a fairness doctrine with a dozen or more channels plus the internet delivering political advocacy. And it’s not as if the glory days were really “fair”. When Walter Cronkite basically said the war in Vietnam was lost, he didn’t have to give someone equal time to take the opposite side. Because of the oligopaly of network news back then, what a Cronkite or Murrow said was basically the final word.
Since you’ll still have a corporate media, and a fabulously wealthy Hollywood, and even old fashioned book publishers, you’ll still have tons of political advocacy that the common person does not have.
The real issue we need to tackle is the nexus between money and political corruption, not between money and megaphones. There is nothing corrupt about someone taking out a 30-second ad to oppose or support a candidate. IT’s exactly the same as a blog with a large readership doing it, or Rachel Maddow or Rush Limbaugh doing it on their shows, or Michael Moore making a movie about it.
The only possible way you get corruption out of money is if someone can basically bankroll a candidate or party. As long as we have limits on direct contributions, then we solve that problem. The big thing we need to addess next is the practice of bundling. Bundlers get tons of favors.
If you don’t take that position, then how can you argue that anything isn’t speech? Do I have a constitutionally protected liberty interest in driving a tank on a public highway if I assert that I am doing it to make my views known?
When the side with the most money uses them to lie about the opposition for electoral gain, that’s where the harm is. When people are subjected to lies more than the truth, they believe the lies. See the lies about the ACA for proof.
First of all, if there’s any evidence that having “a dozen or more channels” ensures that all points of view are getting represented, I’d sure like to see it. It certainly goes against my experience. I’d like to see a cable TV channel that reaches most U.S. households and is as liberal as, say, longtime blogger Kevin Drum, who has long been considered to occupy the moderate end of the liberal blogosphere.
And the “plus the Internet” is nice, but for the time being, the vast majority of American households still get their news from TV. Once broadcast TV is phased out everywhere except in the wide open spaces of the rural West, and cable becomes nothing but a bigger pipeline for a neutral Net, then we can talk.
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The opposite side had already had massive, massive amounts of air time by that point. So point well taken: the Fairness Doctrine didn’t get stuff on the air that wasn’t regarded by TPTB as a matter of controversy. That was a real problem with the Fairness Doctrine, but it was still a hell of a lot better than not having it at all.
No doubt about it. Previous reforms have only reduced the degree of the advantage of rich people and the corporate world, and that’s likely the best that can be hoped for. But I’m enough of a realist to accept my half a loaf, when I can even get that much.
There is something inherently corrupting to democracy about the opinions of a wealthy or well-positioned handful of people driving the debate, and largely determining which issues are OK to debate and which aren’t.
That’s not a problem distinct to 30-second ads. The candidates lie about each other, talk radio lies, everyone lies. It’s a campaign.
If you have public funding of elections, the candidates will use your money to lie. Isn’t it better to have more voices contesting the lies, rather than relying on the skills of one campaign? Remember how Michael Dukakis failed to respond effectively to the Atwater attack machine? Sometimes a candidate’s team is just not up to snuff, or perhaps too naive to get as dirty as their opponent. It’s not good for democracy to leave a campaign solely to the campaigners and the media.
Kevin Drum rules, and Rachel Maddow is quite to the left of him. She sucks. Booo!!! I won’t say that all views are represented, but a heck of a lot more than before the Fairness Doctrine. And now you have niche shows like the Daily Show and Real Time which feature guests with viewpoints you would never have heard in the days of the Cronkite monopoly.
Problem is, I fear that “we’ll talk” is going to center around, “How do we regulate political content on the internet.”
The media should not be regulated. At all, as regards content.
Problem is, your half a loaf means dominance of voices more aligned with you than with me. If it’s fair to accuse Republicans of wanting to reduce voter turnout, it’s fair to accuse Democrats of wanting to silence conservative voices by limiting campaigning to the liberal media, liberal Hollywood, and the Democratic candidate vs. the Republican candidate. Somehow that doesn’t sound like a fair fight to me.
Just by equating money to speech doesn’t throw all other jurisprudence out the window. There are limits to speech in the existing framework. Surely you see that there can be forms of speech and protest that can be limited. Actions that cause direct harm to others is a good example (details important of course).
I actually think you can drive a tank down the street if it meets the regular road regulations. You can certainly own one.
You’re not suggesting that there should be legislation against lying in politics are you? Other than the existing slander and libel laws of course. This approach seems like a “people are too stupid so we have to make laws to protect them from making stupid choices”. You clearly didn’t believe the lies about the ACA - because you were wise enough to see through them. But those other people, not so much so they need to be protected from the lies?
Of course not. I’m saying that when the big money boys get to donate to as many campaigns as they want, then there will be more money available to spout lies and the campaigns that get the most big money players will have an advantage. When there was a ceiling on total contributions, at least we made the big money boys pick and choose candidates to donate for the purpose of lie-spreading. It’s no coincidence that the party favored by big money is also the party favored by 5 Supreme Court justices.
If you replace the idea of ‘money’ with speech above, I’m thinking you wouldn’t support that position. Instead of making donations, say those same players made speeches or Youtube videos supporting the candidate of their choice, with both the truth and their version of the truth (lies). Would you support limiting the ability of a person to do that? I’d be adamantly against any such limitation.
I’m not a great fan of big money in politics, actually. But I am a big fan of free speech.