# The FEC throws up its hands and surrenders **URL:** \ **Category:** Politics & Elections\ **Created:** [May 3, 2015, 4:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-fec-throws-up-its-hands-and-surrenders/719156 "2015-05-03T16:42:05Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 14
**Author:** ![Haberdash](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/f9ae1b/32.png) [@Haberdash](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Haberdash)\ **Post date:** [May 4, 2015, 12:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-fec-throws-up-its-hands-and-surrenders/719156/14 "2015-05-04T00:59:11Z")
> [@Lobohan](#): > > No, it’s literally referring to rich people throwing their money in to influence elections. “Influence”…“purchase”…why won’t you acknowledge that what you are talking about is preventing people from engaging in political speech? That’s SUPPOSED to be an opportunity to “influence” others. > [@](#): > > The Koch bros want to purchase a GOP government because it gives them a better business environment. Well, that, and they’re Libertarian dipshits. They want to help their preferred candidates buy commercials. That’s their right. The 2.5 billion dollars Hillary Clinton plans to raise will probably counter it, just as all the caterwauling about Mitt Romney “buying the election” resulted in Obama being re-elected. The arrogance of the Democrats is only matched by their cowardice – are you really that afraid of people hearing other viewpoints that you have to tear up the First Amendment? Can’t your platform stand on its own merits? > [@](#): > > If you think that campaign finance reform is the same thing as destroying free speech, Then I am merely paying attention. > [@](#): > > obfuscatory language like, “censoring political speech.” No one is saying that you shouldn’t have the right to say what you believe. They’re saying that money shouldn’t be used in limitless quantity to saturate the media with one message over another. Plusgood doublethink there. > [@](#): > > Buying elections is accurate. Censoring political speech is histrionics. I’ll just paste in this explanation I provided in another thread: > [@Hillary went straight demographic warfare](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hillary-went-straight-demographic-warfare/717600/128): > > I will walk you through it, as you probably don’t know all the relevant facts if you’ve been getting your news from Stephen Colbert. > > Under both the text of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 and the Federal Election Commission’s interpretations, the act of “speaking critically about a political candidate” was held to a be “campaign contribution in kind” to all possible and actual, present and future opponents of that candidate. Also under the BCRA, corporations and labor unions were blanketly banned from paying for such communications. > > Under this doctrine, the FEC barred the scheduled offering over pay-per-view cable of a conservative film critical of Hillary Clinton, as it was funded by Citizens United, a conservative activist group which is incorporated. > > Citizens United sued the FEC, and, in 2010, the Supreme Court found that laws blanketly prohibiting political speech from classes of speakers are a violation of the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech. > > Now, the spin that the pro-“campaign finance reform” people put on this case was that it > > 1. barred all regulation of campaign funding under the doctrine that ‘money is speech’ > 2. created the doctrine that ‘corporations are people’ to justify itself > > Neither of these things are true. In fact, the decision only overruled the attempt by the BRCA and the FEC to treat _speech as money_ as a means to regulate speech under campaign finance laws. Congress is still free to pass just about any restriction it likes on who may donate money to a politician or how much, but has seen fit to decline to do so in favor of caterwauling about Citizens United rightfully upholding the basic principle of free speech. > > “Corporate personhood” is, of course, inherent in the entire purpose and definition of forming a corporation, has been a fact of corporation law since corporations have existed, and does not mean that “corporations are people.” In any case, neither the phrase nor the concept even appears in the CU decision at all. The notion that the case “established” a doctrine which in fact has been around for over a century and had absolutely nothing to do with the case was seized upon by comedians who found “corporations are people” an easy target of mockery, leading to widespread confusion over what Citizens United did. > > What Citizens United actually did was overturn a law saying that it is illegal to go on television and criticize Hillary Clinton. > > What this has to do with the news story is: Since this was a Supreme Court decision, it can only be overturned by another decision or by Constitutional amendment. Since it was a Supreme Court decision protecting the most basic civil liberty of the Bill of Rights, the right to speak freely about political leaders, any amendment overturning the decision must necessarily be a repeal of the First Amendment. Furthermore, no amendment would be required to simply pass a law regulating actual financial donations to candidates; only the “don’t criticize Hillary Clinton” law is at issue here. > > Hillary Clinton has announced her intention to raise 2.5 billion dollars to win the Presidency in 2016. Apparently that kind of “campaign finance” does not require “reform,” but the part where it’s legal to say you don’t plan on voting for her does. This is an extremely ominous attitude from a politician who has demonstrated authoritarian tendencies in the past, and it’s impossible for anyone claiming the good name of an ACLU liberal to support it. The issue here is quite simply – you want to ban people from engaging in political speech by defining speech as “money.” This the only area where obfuscation is taking place and it’s an affront to the core values of America. --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-fec-throws-up-its-hands-and-surrenders/719156)._