Yeah, exactly. Even if they try to limit it from US corporations, couldn't a multi-national or seemingly separate foreign company just start advertising online?
Then you have to deal with regulating the internet. And, we don't want that because it opens the door to individuals' voices being censored too.
What a can of worms. I'm glad I'm just a programmer.
The freedom to shout at strangers on sidewalks is a meaningless one in terms of ability to add your ideas to the national political dialog. All meaningful political speech in the modern day has some kind of money spend behind it -- including your posting here on this comment thread. And if we raise the bar from "I guess theoretically this might potentially affect something" to "obviously meaningful speech," then the money spends become quite large.
If the government can restrict any and all money spends on political speech, it can suppress all meaningful political speech. This is the absolute core of the First Amendment.
That's absurd. The government can guarantee equal speech instead of allowing some speech to dominate everyone else.
How can the 1st Amendment be protecting the voice of the poor if they have no avenue of expression? And when their views are beaten down by the few rich. That is not at all in the spirit of the first amendment or of democracy.
> The government can guarantee equal speech instead of allowing some speech to dominate everyone else.
How? What do you mean "the government can guarantee equal speech"? Do you mean they should disallow some speech from dominating other speech? Who decides what to censor, and how is that done, for example, on the internet? Is that not a form of censorship itself?
> How can the 1st Amendment be protecting the voice of the poor if they have no avenue of expression?
How can you say they have zero avenue? They can rally within their community with no money at all. MLK and other civil rights activists made some of the biggest changes in this country through their speech alone, and they never even held office. He may have even received donations or media support from companies employing large numbers of black people. Would you say that is unfair too?
I also want us to find a better way to end corruption in politics. I just don't think it is so simple, and free speech and the ability to spend your hard earned money on what you want, regardless of whether you're poor or wealthy, is the core of the first amendment. I'm not sure about Joe Shmoe CEO + board deciding to donate company earnings, which are not all their own, to a super PAC or secretive non-profit of their choosing. That's ~20 people deciding where the money of 100s of hard working people goes.
Is it easy to fix that? Are laws themselves enough, or do we also need to be able to enforce them? What happens when some business claims their money was not spent in support of a political campaign, but it supports a foreign company who is advertising online?
The 1st Amendment does not attempt to guarantee equality of "voice," just the opportunity to speak. It especially does not attempt to guarantee equality of voice by silencing some arbitrary group.
And even if it did, which, again, it really does not, it wouldn't do it by the avenue of declaring that "money is not speech" and thus that there are no restrictions on the government preventing people from spending money on speech.
Imagine thinking a person shouldn't be able to rent billboard space for a month and say their congressman sucks because thats not covered under free speech
Actually it is. For when you show willingness to silence one form of speech by anyone you forever give up your right to form any association to do similar.
While many of us do not like all the money in politics how people assemble to pool that money should not be the concern. The concern should be and always should be how politicians routinely ignore the rule of law and Constitution and twist the words to deliver the outcome they desire.
If anything, they would love restricting who can put money into politics as all their personal avenues of funding are protected.
No. I'm sorry, but spending money is not speech. Restricting the amount of money that one can donate to political campaigns would be perfectly fine, and would not infringe upon anyone's rights at all.
The amount you can donate to a political campaign is already limited at $2700.
Your right, spending money isn't speech. However, preventing someone from buying an advertisement to display a message and they are denied because its deemed 'political' is definitely limiting someones free speech. It doesn't matter if the message is 'America Rocks', 'Shop at this new store here', or 'John McCain sucks please stop voting for him'; if your gonna limit some but not others because the message is deemed political then you no longer have free speech.
I'm not an expert on this, but my understanding is that concerns in this area often center around donations to political action committees, rather than to campaigns directly, although both are matters of concern. A "SuperPAC" backing a candidate may receive an unlimited amount of donations, and may spend it to support their candidate as long as they don't coordinate too closely with the candidate's campaign. They must remain sufficiently independent for it to count as independent expenditure, in which case the donations and expenditure are unlimited.
Unlike regular political actions committees, which can donate to candidates and must report who they receive donations from in turn, Super PACs are not required to report their sources of income.
This essentially means that people are free to spend unlimited amounts of their own money talking about their favored political candidate, though they can't donate unlimited amounts to the politician's campaign.
I don't have a strong personal stance on this issue, but I consider the ruling fundamentally fair. If I want to spend an unlimited amount of my own money buying advertising space to raise awareness around global warming, I can do that. That's speech, and large-scale speech takes money. I should be able to do the same thing to support a political candidate.
Spending money is necessary in order to speak to a large audience. You need money to rent space to use as meeting halls, or to buy advertising space like billboards or newspaper space, or even simply run a website. The more traffic, the more eyeballs, the more people impacted, the more it costs. Speech in the real world costs money.
The presidential election isn't won in the town square, where everyone can hear him gather to speak simultaneously. That might work for mayoral elections of small towns, but it does not work for a nation of 318 million people. And besides, who is going to pay to rent an auditorium for a town hall meeting?
The citizens deserve to hear their elected leaders and candidates speak, and it requires a considerable amount of money to reach such a large audience. (Note that donating air-time or website space or advertising for a candidate is tantamount to donating money.)
What is the serious alternative? Political candidates are limited in their ability to get their message out, based on where they can travel (no money for transportation), and the people they can speak to directly in person? How will democracy function at scale? Presidential candidates are pilgrims, traveling the country by foot? They'll have a hard time reaching a few hundred thousand people at best.
If we did not allow political contributions, and we did allow candidates to spend their own money on their campaigns, then only wealthy billionaires would become successful national politicians. Indeed, many successful politicians are extremely rich, like Mitt Romney (estimated net worth: $250 million), and candidates like Donald Trump rely largely on their wealth. Small-time candidates would have zero chance against them if contribution were not allowed, even while billionaires are spending their personal fortunes.
Now, to be a fair, a purely representational democracy could perhaps function on this basis. The people in a local area elect their local leader, who travels to the capital of a territory to mingle with other local leaders, and from them elect a higher leader, and so on, such that at each level campaigning is all word-of-mouth. But that's an idea that I think will fail in reality at the scale of the USA.
You're not entitled to speak to a large audience. And I'm not saying to completely ban political donations. I'm saying to severely limit them. Let every citizen donate $500/year to political causes, no more.
The budgeting problems of campaigns are not my concern. The ability of a few wealthy elites to completely dominate the political conversation simply by having more money, and therefore more speech, is.
The Supreme Court's job is to decide what laws are legal, not what they think the law ought to be. Deciding what the law ought to be is Congress's job.
Do you suppose that nine Supreme Court justices might have considered and already dismissed your three-word argument in their lengthy decision on the subject?
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