Here's another one for you:
Bloomberg is hiring campaign workers at a reported $6K a month with three catered meals a day. As a result, other campaigns are having trouble hiring enough people in every state, because there are only so many idealists in the world.
Individual citizens banding together in a non profit to express their political point of view is at the very heart of what it means to have a democratic process. You can't just say "well they could have done the same thing as individuals" because in many cases this isn't possible. You need the organization of a corporation to do projects like this at scale.
Before Citizens United, "individual citizens banding together in a non profit to express their political point of view" could absolutely do so. When I say that stakeholders can spend their own money, this includes giving money to PACs. Citizens United was just a PAC that didn't want to obey a particular restriction on PAC spending. Namely, they wanted to run ads within 30 days of the election. Quoting from the beginning of Stevens's dissent[1, p.80 of the PDF]:
Under the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (BCRA), it could have used those assets to televise and promote Hillary: The Movie wherever and whenever it wanted to. It also could have spent unrestricted sums to broadcast Hillary at any time other than the 30 days before the last primary election. Neither Citizens United’s nor any other corporation’s speech has been “banned,” ante, at 1. All that the parties dispute is whether Citizens United had a right to use the funds in its general treasury to pay for broadcasts during the 30-day period.
I think this also indicates just how broad the ruling was. At first, Citizens United wasn't even asking for such a ruling. They posed much narrower questions to the Supreme Court, who then asked them to brief on the broader question. This goes against their usual principle on deciding cases on the narrowest possible grounds.
[1]https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/09pdf/08-205.pdf
(edited to add link to decision)
Citizens United is a non-profit that produces documentaries, and sought to distribute a documentary about Hillary Clinton during the 2008 primaries. It was sharply critical of her.
Fahrenheit 9/11 was a documentary produced and distributed by a for profit company called Dog Eat Dog Films, sharply critical of George Bush, and released in the summer preceding the 2004 election. The director, Michael Moore, was open about his hope that this film would impact the election.
You can watch both documentaries online now if you want to judge them on their merits and whether you consider each to be good political speech, or bad political speech. The idea that the FEC should be able to decide on your behalf is what the Citizens United decision was about.
It has nothing to do with "god" or "bad" political speech. Before their court challenge, Citizens United was free to make their documentary. They were free to show and distribute their documentary. They were free to advertise their documentary. What they weren't free to do was to spend money to advertise it within 30 days of the primary election. Citizens United asked for that part of McCain-Feingold to be overturned. They didn't even ask for anything nearly as broad as what the court ended up doing.
The choice between completely forbidding or completely allowing the government to put restrictions on political speech is a false dichotomy. The slippery slope argument here is not a serious one. It's not even the one made by the majority in Citizens United.
https://ballotpedia.org/2008_Primary_Elections_Calendar
And it is relevant, because the right to advertise Fahrenheit 9/11 was never restricted in this way, because the FEC decided that it was a different sort of documentary. Citizens United even sought to clarify this in 2004.
https://www.rcfp.org/fec-dismisses-fahrenheit-911-complaint/
The majority did decide on broader free speech grounds, on the urging of civil liberty groups like the ACLU, because they recognized that officials in the legislative and executive branches should not have the power to decide that some corporations (like Moore’s) were engaged in legitimate speech while others should be restricted. Or to decide which organizations were legitimate media orgs, and which were political activists, essentially making an artistic determination. Summarized in Wikipedia:
In Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, however, the majority argued that the First Amendment purposefully keeps the government from interfering in the "marketplace of ideas" and "rationing" speech, and it is not up to the legislatures or the courts to create a sense of "fairness" by restricting speech.
The facts I referenced about the distinction in treatment of the two films are referenced in the annotation of the decision from the court here:
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/558/310/#tab-opi...
Of note from Kennedy's decision:
Yet, the FEC has created a regime that allows it to select what political speech is safe for public consumption by applying ambiguous tests. If parties want to avoid litigation and the possibility of civil and criminal penalties, they must either refrain from speaking or ask the FEC to issue an advisory opinion approving of the political speech in question. Government officials pore over each word of a text to see if, in their judgment, it accords with the 11-factor test they have promulgated. This is an unprecedented governmental intervention into the realm of speech.
...
The law before us is an outright ban, backed by criminal sanctions. Section 441b makes it a felony for all corporations—including nonprofit advocacy corporations—either to expressly advocate the election or defeat of candidates or to broadcast electioneering communications within 30 days of a primary election and 60 days of a general election. Thus, the following acts would all be felonies under §441b: The Sierra Club runs an ad, within the crucial phase of 60 days before the general election, that exhorts the public to disapprove of a Congressman who favors logging in national forests; the National Rifle Association publishes a book urging the public to vote for the challenger because the incumbent U. S. Senator supports a handgun ban; and the American Civil Liberties Union creates a Web site telling the public to vote for a Presidential candidate in light of that candidate’s defense of free speech. These prohibitions are classic examples of censorship.
edit: noted the 60-day rule for general election, and added reference to decision.
1. Name recognition, if nobody knows who you are nobody will vote for you - this can be countered (or effectively reduced) by just super charging public information sources on all candidates, and some of the equal airtime laws (repealed under clinton urgh) helped with this issue.
2. Policy clarity, reduction of misinformation allowing publicly funded debates for candidates to self-advocate for positions and making sure the media is subsidized for covering those debates and fact checking helps inform the public.
If we move over to public funded elections, reinstate equal airtime and subsidize national debates we'll be in a good place - then arm the FEC and let them come down on a hammer on anyone trying to skirt the rules by trying to utilize either their own or their friends assets to give that person a bump. I think there is an assumption in the US that telephoning for a candidate is a valid and natural donation of time and support, and we need to break that because telephoning is already well onto the slippery slope. Lastly, Canada has an advantage here that the season is intensely short for campaigning, so it limits how much shady stuff you can actually pull off.
They never applied to the Internet, cable TV, or cell phone bandwidth. And those have become the dominant forms of communication. Only around 15% of people get over-the-air TV. And while the numbers for radio are somewhat higher, it's competing against much more targeted messaging on social media and web advertising -- both of which are unregulated.
So even if you reinstated airtime laws, and actually enforced them, I don't think it would make much difference. It's not the loss of equal time that allows obviously-biased mass media TV "news" channels to exist, but the fact that they're not broadcast over the air.
Amending the laws to cover those would almost certainly run you afoul of the first amendment, since the equal time doctrines were only legal because the bandwidth was so restricted. The unrestricted bandwidth of the Internet will make it much harder to justify.
Bear in mind, it's not like we have no control over debate platforms now - the rule enforcement has been lacking but foreign money in campaigns is strictly verbotten, free speech has some limits.
But these sorts of fuzzy lines have to be drawn in other areas in relation to the First Amendment. Libel, illegal images, threats to assassinate the President, etc. etc. Just because there's no logically compelling cut off point doesn't mean that a court can't draw the line somewhere. The First Amendment isn't absolute.
In fact, any disanalogy only lends further support to my point. If the First Amendment doesn't even permit you to say anything you like, then it surely doesn't permit you to spend money any way you like!
If it were really impossible to draw a line between money and speech, then the First Amendment would protect all kinds of dubious financial schemes. It doesn't.
...
* A wealthy person is unbiased when hiring, but locates all his offices in buildings owned by a senator to make him/her vote in his favor.
* Private property
* Preventing small interest groups from having outsized influence
Choose two. Or maybe 2.5 at the most. But the problem is there's no clear delineation between "money" and "speech". At some point you either impose restrictions on free speech, prevent the unlimited accumulation of wealth, or accept that billionaires are just always going to have more political influence than Joe Sixpack.
For as much as people like to shit on it, very few people have actually read the body of Citizens United. If you haven't, I highly suggest doing so. Because it really brings up deep paradoxes that suggest that the First Amendment is fundamentally incompatible with campaign finance restrictions. European countries manage to keep money out of politics, simply by not sharing America's Constitutional guarantee of absolute free speech.
There's no logically consistent way to regulate "money in politics" in a way that doesn't also restrict "speech in politics". Consider all of the below scenarios and tell me at what point "money" ends and "speech" begins:
* A wealthy person makes huge campaign donations to his favored candidate.
* A wealthy person runs for office, and uses his personal wealth to buy campaign ads.
* A wealthy person buys a media conglomerate, and uses his editorial control to favor his preferred positions.
* A wealthy person buys a media conglomerate, doesn't exert direct editorial control, but only hires journalists who share his opinion.
* A wealthy person uses his money to fund movies with no political message. However he becomes famous from starring in his own subsidized movies. He uses his fame to spread his message without directly buying access.
* A wealthy person hires people to attend protests in favor of his position.
* A wealthy person finds people who genuinely wants to attend his protests, but subsidizes their transportation, signs, organization, etc.
* A wealthy person buys nice clothes and speaking lessons for people that share his positions so they become more persuasive.
* A wealthy person buys a chain of sports bars and makes sure that the TVs only play his preferred cable news channel.
* A wealthy person biases hiring to favor like-minded people. On net that raises the status and influence of people like him.
* A wealthy person biases his firm to doing business with firms run by ideologically like-minded CEOs. That makes people who share his views wealthier, and hence gives them more influence.
* A wealthy person is unbiased when hiring, but locates all his offices in areas that share his views so that hiring naturally biases towards like-minded people.
* A wealthy person uses his money to attract a very famous and attractive movie star. Once married he influences her to his political positions, then that movie star uses her famous and status to influence her fans.
* A wealthy person uses his money to throw big, fancy parties. He invites anyone regardless of views. However at the beginning of the party, when people are enjoying the free cocktails and hours d'oevrues his always gives a toast that gently nudges the partygoers in favor of his views.