[Peace-discuss] SC overturns campaign spending laws

[Laurie Solomon]

With tongue firmly in cheek, can it be "free speech" when you have to pay 
for being able to say in in public over public airways? Having removed my 
tongue from my cheek, I have to wonder if the constitutional provision for 
free speech apply to real human individuals alone or o both artificial legal 
associations and entities made up of real individuals but treated as if they 
were themselves single real human individuals in the political process?  I 
know how the court has ruled and via the insertion of some text by a clerk 
into a court opinion defined artificial legal entities as actual real human 
individuals under the Constitution and law; but I cannot help but wonder how 
the conservative, strict constructionists feel about this, can reconcile it 
with their strict constructionist perspective, and can accept such a 
completely external provision as being constitutional?

Moreover, since the airways are public as are interstate, state, and local 
roadways, access to  speech which uses those avenues of communication that 
rely on the public airways and public roadways for distribution of speech 
should also be free without charge to all human citizens (I do not think 
this should be the case for non-human individuals such as groups, 
associations and organizations - especially when the subject is the public 
business or about the public business.  In so far as people, organizations, 
corporations, etc, seek to and do acquire licenses from the government to 
use the public airways for profit, they tacitly accept or should be required 
to accept control over their policies, decisions, and actions regarding 
access to and control over the use of the airways in which giving free 
without monetary charge access to their facilities by members of the public 
to do the public business of government is to be considered as being a cost 
of their doing business.

--------------------------------------------------
From: "C. G. Estabrook" <galliher at illinois.edu>
Sent: Thursday, January 21, 2010 11:32 AM
To: "Peace-discuss List" <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>
Subject: [Peace-discuss] SC overturns campaign spending laws

> [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
>
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