What if you and your friends got together and combined your contributions? Let’s say your alumni class of 500 all pooled your political contributions ($1,000 each) together and elected a committee of 5 people to determine which candidates got how much. Would that be okay under your proposal?
Well, the FEC rule regulated airing 60 days or less prior to an election. Since F9/11 was released in the US in June, there was no FEC issue. Unlike the…what was it again…the movie about Hillary, I think, that spawned Citizens United.
If you have a cite that F9/11 was shown within the 60 day period before the election, you’d have scored. Do you?
I think freedom of speech is the problem here. I have no problem with banning political contributions, but that is just a system of making it easier to speak. The money could be spent by the individuals to achieve the same result without the creation of a PAC or other entity. The owners of the corporations could take the money out as profits and spend it on campaign commercials. I don’t like the system that makes it so easy to give the money to let someone else speak, but in the end, freedom of speech will include using money to speak by paying for a campaign commercial.
Well, since you seem to want to go all Scalia when it suits you, perhaps you can cite to the constitutional provision protecting the right to abortion? No assumptions or interpretations allowed.
Could a guy in Ohio spend his own money bankrolling advertisements for someone in New York? So the candidate in question never handles a contribution from out of state, but only ever notices as radio spots and television commercials and full-page newspaper ads pop up on someone else’s initiative?
Well it was certainly shown 60 days prior to the Republican primaries, and based on the standards regarding the documentary about Hillary certainly wouldn’t have been allowed to be released during that time period. Remember the Hillary Movie would have aired long before the actual election, but within 60 days of at least one Democratic primary.
So, anyway, please answer the question.
Why do you think F9/11 should have been banned from release as should the book Unfit for Command, which ripped into John Kerry(remember the government’s position that “a campaign document in the form of a book would be affected”)?
Furthermore, how would the banning of Fahrenheit 9/11 and the banning of books criticizing John Kerry and George Bush not have violated the First Amendment.
Ok, this isn’t meant to be critical, but then did you applaud when the FEC hit the Sierra Club for handing out fliers criticizing a Republican Senate candidate’s voting record on environmental issues(which the courts upheld)?
Similarly, did you think the NAACP should have been sanctioned for running the anti-Bush ad in 2000 criticizing Presidential candidate Bush for his stance on hate crime legislation(which it would have been if McCain-Feingold had been in affect back then)?
Yes, but how can money be considered the same thing as speech?
I didn’t mean to come across as snarky as this response would imply.
Apologies.
Would printing my own newspaper count as “freedom of speech”, or would that be “or of the press”? How about pamphlets? Or leaflets? Maybe posters? Possibly billboards? Publishing a book? Filming a movie? Can we put slogans on bumper stickers? T-shirts?
I didn’t applaud, but I didn’t boo and hiss either. I would prefer that money could not be given to political campaigns in any form, but I would rather maintain freedom of speech, and definitely want to see the laws applied equally. The particular political cause is irrelevant to the principle.
Cohen v. California wikipedia is about a jacket…but I, apparently unlike Really Not All That Bright, would interpret that to also cover t-shirts. I guess that’s pretty risky position to take, though…involves some assumptions and all.
So then did you support sanctions being imposed on the Sierra Club for handing out fliers criticizing a political candidate or not?
Again, not challenging just asking.
Well, it’s only IMDB, but…
$119,194,771 (USA) (28 October 2004)
$119,078,393 (USA) (3 October 2004)
$118,877,529 (USA) (26 September 2004)
$118,561,908 (USA) (19 September 2004)
$118,334,272 (USA) (12 September 2004)
$118,002,561 (USA) (5 September 2004)
Sorry, but I don’t recall the details of that incident, so I can’t speak to it directly. If the sanctions were enforced as a matter of law, then I could only have objections if the law was unfair, or unfairly enforced. What are you asking exactly? Do I favor unfair laws? No. I don’t see how the particular political issue involved matters. I do object strenuously to anything that denies anyone freedom of speech. But I don’t personally believe gifts of money are free speech, I consider them bribes.
So you tell me since you brought it up, what was the Sierra Club case about? Were they in violation of any laws? If so, what law was violated?
Under my amendment, no he couldn’t. We have a representative democracy, so each citizen should only be able to vote for or against, or try to influence, his own representative or senator.
The current rich and/or powerful will never allow such an amendment, of course.
Yeah, as well as the idea that free speech extends to radio and TV and whatnot. You’re free to say whatever you want, but Congress has every right to prevent you from *broadcasting *your opinions. It’s a wild-ass leap to say otherwise.
This.
Imagine that corporations mandated that a certain percentage of all employees pay went into a fund that they used to contribute to Republican candidates. The left wouldn’t have any difficulty seeing the unfairness of that.
However, since the shoe’s on the other foot and it’s the Democratic candidates who benefit from these forced contributions there is no objection.
Back to the point of the thread. This is in Canada. Do they have a Supreme Court in the pocket of big business like we do? Do they have a constitution that gives human rights to corporations?
Ours does not either. It took a biased court to make it so.