[Peace-discuss] SC overturns campaign spending laws

[E.Wayne Johnson]

It has been my observation that the so-called campaign finance regulations
are perform the same function as many other regulations ---  they cripple 
new entrants
and disable the small players, while the huge mega-outfits that are able to
"comply" with the regulation just consider it a small part of the cost of 
doing business.

The nullification of the despicable McCain-Feingold regulation is a 
tremendous
positive blow for liberty.

The Powers That Be wont take this one lying down, though.  Already D D 
Kirkpatrick
is putting a ridiculous spin on the SC decision.

The constitution has a lot of enemies.  Some of them are foreign.  Most of 
them are domestic.

Cass Sunstein is among those who will be fuming over this reinforcement of 
the 1st amendment.




----- Original Message ----- 
From: "C. G. Estabrook" <galliher at illinois.edu>
To: "Peace-discuss List" <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>
Sent: Thursday, January 21, 2010 11:32 AM
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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