SCOTUS: No Means No
The Supreme Court must be wondering: When will you blockheads get the message? Limits on political giving are OK. Limits on political spending are not.
The decision in the Citizens United case is indeed dramatic, overturning campaign laws first adopted more than a century ago. But the relentless drive of the speech regulators to tighten limits has pushed the country to a truly absurd point: the attempted outlawing of an advocacy documentary about a candidate for president. Really - if that is to be forbidden, what's permitted?
For 35 years, so-called campaign finance reformers have been addressing non-problems in ways that make those non-problems bigger. They wanted to curb campaign spending and enhance transparency. Their measures have brought us to a point where so-called 527 groups can spend unlimited money in ways more secretive than ever. If there has ever been a policy failure, this is it.
The court has again and again struck speech restrictions to the ground, only to be confronted with ever new attempts to control speech.
Will we ever have a back to the drawing board moment on campaign finance? If so, now should be it.
As Peter Wallison argues in his great book on party finance, the real evil of American politics is that politicians must beg interest groups for the money to finance their campaigns. What we need is not "less money" and CERTAINLY not less speech - but more distance between donor and recipient. The mechanism for that is the political party. Reformers should be focusing on lifting limits on the flow of money from parties to candidates and restoring the role of the parties as the funders of campaigns. Instead of Candidate Smith asking Donor Gonzalez for money - and Donor Gonzalez asking for a favor in return - party chairman Robinson will ask thousands of donors for money on behalf of a slate of candidates, who will never know precisely whose gift was directed to them. That step will diminish corruption and the appearance of corruption.
The outlawing of speech by corporate group on the other hand only diminishes liberty.