[Peace-discuss] SC overturns campaign spending laws

Fri Jan 22 03:06:22 CST 2010

There's a good bit of difference between regulating corporations - a good idea,
including how they can spend their money - and regulating speech, including
spending for speech.

Of course the real way to prevent wealth from having an undue influence in US
politics is to make it unnecessary. It's necessary now to buy TV time.  So
there's an obvious answer.

John W. wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Jan 21, 2010 at 11:32 AM, C. G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu 
> <mailto:galliher at illinois.edu>> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> [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.”
> 
> 
> So you don't fine or jail them; you merely revoke their corporate charter and
> seize their corporate assets.
> 
> Only in a Bizarro alternative world run by minions of Satan could the 
> spending of vast sums of money by artificially created "persons" be regarded
> as "political speech" protected by the First Amendment.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 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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