Thursday, March 8, 2012

2. Overturn the "Citizens United" Case

From http://www.the99declaration.org/overturn_citizens_united
The immediate abrogation, even if it requires a Constitutional Amendment, of the outrageous and anti-democratic Supreme Court holding in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission and its progeny.  This heinous decision proclaimed in 2010, equates the direct and indirect payment of money to politicians by political action committees, corporations, wealthy individuals and unions with the exercise of protected free speech. We, the 99% of the American People are outraged and demand that this judicially sanctioned bribery of politicians be reversed and never be deemed protected free speech again.
Right off the bat, I can see something that is a misinterpretation of the ruling. "...equates the direct and indirect payment of money to politicians by political action committees, corporations, wealthy individuals and unions with the exercise of protected free speech." As far as I can tell, after having read parts of the ruling and interpretations thereof, the case only has to do with independent speech. The candidates themselves are still bound by campaign finance rules.
And therein lies the problem. This is a giant gray area, and I have to say that reading the court's opinion, their logic is fairly sound. They reason that because the first amendment protects an individual's political speech, and corporations (specifically Political Action Committees) are just groups of people, the speech of that group of people can not be inhibited. They also reason that it is not the court's nor the legislature's job to "ration" speech -- in essence, they can't decide what amount of speech is fair for someone to have, since everyone is guaranteed unlimited political speech.
This idea that not all speech is equal, and that's OK, is logically based in history. If you think back to when the country was founded, the main distributors of ideas were the newspapers. Freedom of the press is also guaranteed in the First Amendment, so newspapers were obviously considered when it was written. If a newspaper editor wanted to publish nothing but liberal opinions, for instance, that would be their right, though it's not necessarily ethical. So the average person's speech at the time was limited to what they could get published in which newspapers. There are no laws -- as far as I know -- that seek to give equal time to anyone who wishes to publish in a newspaper.
Now, however, we have much more varied forms of media, and forms of media that reach much wider audiences. It does scream of injustice that any one individual or small group of individuals can get their message out to the masses at the exclusion of others. In essence, by not limiting the speech of few, you are silencing the many. But you can't limit the speech of the few, because they have just as much right to unlimited speech as the many do. It's a giant legal quagmire.
So how do we fix it? The only way that I can see to do it is to eliminate Political Action Committees altogether. Prohibit corporations, as entities, from campaigning for any particular candidates or parties. The individuals within the corporations, of course, still have unlimited political speech, and if they wanted to raise money or group money together informally to campaign for a candidate or party, they would be welcome to do so, but all the money would be treated as personal income, and subject to taxation. Obviously, throw in the caveat that independent expenditures (ie: if I were to pay for a television ad supporting Mitt Romney, but I'm not part of his campaign) would have to bear the names of the individuals responsible for the content, and you've got something that could be workable.

As a bit of an aside, I'd like to address something that I find incredibly positive that has come out of the Citizens United decision. I'm all for ballot access. I think that the more candidates on a ballot, the better. With that in mind, the current Republican primary, with the help of SuperPACs, is going great. Because the candidates themselves don't have to spend as much money to campaign, they are able to stay in the race far longer than they otherwise would have. That means that instead of having a nominee pretty much decided in the first few contests, the entire nation has an opportunity to make their voice heard.
I can't find anything wrong with that.

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