Why should only candidates get air time? What if Michael Moore wants airtime to advertise his anti-Romney movie? What if MSNBC wants to run an hour long attack piece on Mitt Romney?
The Super PAC is independent. Supposedly.
Fine, fine; the government ain’t gonna spend a billion per candidate or anything totally insane like that. (That kind of insanity is reserved for defense spending.)
How about limiting campaigns to, say, three months? Is any important purpose served by allowing them to detract from the general business of politics for years?
How can you prevent people from campaigning? We do have a 1st amendment.
Reinterpret the Amerndemtn for the purpose of political campaigning - I dunno. It’s not exactly serving democracy, is it.
The whole point of the 1st amendment was political speech. Might as well just repeal it. I can’t see the value in a society that protects art as sacred, but regulates political speech.
Calling spending money on a campaign equal to speech may be settled law, for the time being, but far from philosophically settled. There are vast swathes of Constitutional law that were ‘settled’ for a long period of time until, fortunately, the inherent harms to life and liberty were recognized and old Constitutional interpretation was overturned.
Unfettered spending on political campaigns is doing more harm to democracy than it is helping.
You have a very archaic or plain bizarre way to use language. You may have a point somewhere but … it’s like not really worth the effort.
Technically, spending money on speech is covered under freedom of the press, not freedom of speech. Well, that’s not constitutional law, I’m just speaking philosophically. Freedom of the press is the right to use technology(which at the time, the pinnacle was the printing press), to spread a message around. That always costs money, so the act of paying for speech does not take away its protections.
if paying for speech did take away its protections, then all speech that reaches the masses can be censored by a mere act of Congress, without court review. Because all speech is paid for except that which comes out of your own mouth, without the aid of amplification.
Do you think freedom of speech applies to say, violent movies, but not political speech?
Is that how it works in the USA; you distort a statement into something the person didn’t come close to saying, and then ask a question based on the distortion - what are you, aged seven again? Go away - no one needs puerile intellectual dishonesty. It’s embarrassing.
Congress can define people, determine which types of speech are political and apolitical and determine which speakers are favoured or disfavoured? Why I never!
You made a rebuttal that wasn’t a rebuttal, just a “Me no likey!” The words I put in your mouth were much more intelligent.
Their ability to do so has to pass strict scrutiny. A pretty high bar. Free speech zones are allowed because it doesn’t infringe on anyone’s speech. It allows the protesters to speak, and the speaker they were trying to drown out to speak.
Anti-spam acts are regulations on commercial speech, which does not earn the same protections as political speech.
Trying to ban actual political speech? very hard, pretty much impossible.
I don’t think foreign donations are allowed in the US either. The fundraisers in London and Jerusalem were for Americans only.
What legislation are you relying on?
2 usc 441 e:
I’ll confess, I was a bit confused by that objection as well and have never heard anyone object to that.
For the record, I have no problem being referred to as an “Iranian-American” or “Muslim American.”