[Peace-discuss] SC overturns campaign spending laws

[C. G. Estabrook]

[It seems to me that the Court has decided this matter correctly.  Justice 
Kennedy is surely right when he says, “If the First Amendment has any force, it 
prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, 
for simply engaging in political speech.” The argument in favor of neutralizing 
the First Amendment would seem to be that corporate money will be too 
influential in politics - as if that weren't the case now. Much of Obama's 
backing came form Wall Street - he got more there than McCain did - and we see 
how it paid off. When I ran for Congress as a Green, I argued that the campaign 
finance laws (like McCain-Feingold) were at best fig leaves, and they restricted 
many groups that were not corporations, like labor unions and interest groups. 
If you want to make money less effective in political campaigns, make TV time 
free to candidates - that's where most of the money goes.  --CGE]

	The New York Times
	January 22, 2010
	Justices Overturn Key Campaign Limits
	By ADAM LIPTAK

WASHINGTON — Sweeping aside a century-old understanding and overruling two 
important precedents, a bitterly divided Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that 
the government may not ban political spending by corporations in candidate 
elections.

The ruling was a vindication, the majority said, of the First Amendment’s most 
basic free speech principle — that the government has no business regulating 
political speech. The dissenters said allowing corporate money to flood the 
political marketplace will corrupt democracy.

The 5-to-4 decision was a doctrinal earthquake but also a political and 
practical one. Specialists in campaign finance law said they expected the 
decision, which also applies to labor unions and other organizations, to reshape 
the way elections are conducted.

“If the First Amendment has any force,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the 
majority, which included the four members of its conservative wing, “it 
prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, 
for simply engaging in political speech.”

Justice John Paul Stevens read a long dissent from the bench. He said the 
majority had committed a grave error in treating corporate speech the same as 
that of human beings. His decision was joined by the other three members of the 
court’s liberal wing.

Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader and a longtime opponent of 
broader campaign-finance restrictions, praised the Court’s decision. In a 
statement Thursday he called it “an important step in the direction of restoring 
the First Amendment rights of these groups by ruling that the Constitution 
protects their right to express themselves about political candidates and issues 
up until Election Day.”

“By previously denying this right, the government was picking winners and 
losers,” he said.

The case had unlikely origins. It involved a documentary called “Hillary: The 
Movie,” a 90-minute stew of caustic political commentary and advocacy 
journalism. It was produced by Citizens United, a conservative nonprofit 
corporation, and was released during the Democratic presidential primaries in 2008.

Citizens United lost a suit that year against the Federal Election Commission, 
and scuttled plans to show the film on a cable video-on-demand service and to 
broadcast television advertisements for it. But the film was shown in theaters 
in six cities, and it remains available on DVD and the Internet.

The lower court said the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, usually called 
the McCain-Feingold law, prohibited the planned broadcasts. The law bans the 
broadcast, cable or satellite transmission of “electioneering communications” 
paid for by corporations in the 30 days before a presidential primary and in the 
60 days before the general election. That leaves out old technologies, like 
newspapers, and new ones, like YouTube.

The law, as narrowed by a 2007 Supreme Court decision, applies to communications 
“susceptible to no reasonable interpretation other than as an appeal to vote for 
or against a specific candidate.” It also requires spoken and written 
disclaimers in the film and advertisements for it, along with the disclosure of 
contributors’ names.

The lower court said the film was a prohibited electioneering communication with 
one purpose: “to inform the electorate that Senator Clinton is unfit for office, 
that the United States would be a dangerous place in a President Hillary Clinton 
world and that viewers should vote against her.”

The McCain-Feingold law does contain an exception for broadcast news reports, 
commentaries and editorials.

When the case was first argued last March, it seemed a curiosity likely to be 
decided on narrow grounds. The court could have ruled that Citizens United was 
not the sort of group to which the McCain-Feingold law was meant to apply, or 
that the law did not mean to address 90-minute documentaries, or that 
video-on-demand technologies were not regulated by the law. Thursday’s decision 
rejected those alternatives.

Instead of deciding the case in June, the court set down the case for a rare 
re-argument in September. It now asked the parties to address the much more 
consequential question of whether the court should overrule a 1990 decision, 
Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, which upheld restrictions on corporate 
spending to support or oppose political candidates, along with part of McConnell 
v. Federal Election Commission, the 2003 decision that upheld the central 
provisions of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law.

On Thursday, the court answered its own questions with a resounding yes.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/22/us/politics/22scotus.html

-- 
This message has been scanned for viruses and
dangerous content by MailScanner, and is
believed to be clean.