It's not amazing how many people who are seemingly progressive want to see the powers of oligarchs curbed in order to preserve the state which in turn protects individual rights.

fyp

That's my fear. In a vacuum this is a 'yeah yeah whatever' thing but the ultimate consequences may be very scary.

Yes let's get at the fundamental judgements here. The example/model I keep coming back to (maybe you have a better one?) is monopolies in business. We have laws against monopolies which are obviously a direct limiting of some freedom. If you want to label that freedom as freedom of speech, since spending money is speech and beating your competition into the ground is even more "expressive" than just pouring money into a candidate you like, then fine.

If we are going to impose limits on the allocating of resources so dramatically in the private sphere to enforce a form of plurality there, why wouldn't we do the same when it comes to the far more critical and fundamental public sphere which itself is the only guarantor of pluralistic/democratic values across the entire society?

As a corollary question, what are the implications of this ruling and Citizens United to the exposure of antitrust law? or other law?

What would be the ultimate consequences?

I will answer (what I take to be) your question, but I want to be clear that this hypothetical is impossible.

I mean, let's suppose Warren Buffett decides to purchase literally every ad spot on every single cable channel for the next year, and every single Clearchannel roadside billboard in the entire U.S. for the same amount of time, and every single op-ed slot in every newspaper, no matter how small its circulation. Even then, there's nothing stopping you from starting your own rag-tag publication using your laptop and a color copier, or posting a blog, or rallying your friends to call up Comcast en masse to collectively tell them that if you see one more ****ing Warren Buffett commercial, you're all cancelling your cable subscriptions forever. Or you could, you know, just turn off your TV. Even in the hypothetical world where someone goes absolutely nuts and spends their entire personal fortune buying up airtime, you aren't somehow forced to listen to -- much less agree with -- that person's message.

But I promised you an answer. And that answer is yes. Yes, it's your money and your right, and no, you aren't trampling on the First Amendment rights of anyone else. If Mr. Buffett had really, really wanted me to know that he and all of the good folks at Berkshire Hathaway support Barack Obama, then, well, I guess I would have had to endure the unimaginable torture of seeing his wrinkled old face telling me that Barack is a great guy while I watched How I Met Your Mother re-runs. I don't suspect I would have somehow been hypnotized into changing my opinion (which, by the way, was that Obama was far too conservative for me on just about every conceivable metric).

I'm not arguing that "deploying one's resources in any conceivable way" is always speech. Like, I don't think I'm "speaking" about my love of Mountain Dew every time I buy one from the vending machine. I'm arguing (as is the Court) that a campaign contribution, the purpose of which is to help a candidate for office get his or her message out through various forms of political advertising and campaign speaking events, most definitely does finance real political speech. Literally no one endorses the "one dollar = one vote" view.

Meh, fair enough, I guess, but that's true about literally every Justice on the Court. Every one of them has done or said something majorly hypocritical at some point in their tenure. I don't think Scalia is especially bad (I mean, he can't be worse than Kennedy). His flip-flopping just bothers you more because it's on issues you care about.

I'm not sure I follow your logic or ianlippert's. If this is some really convoluted way of saying that the "problem" here is really "the inherent nature of representative democracy," then I'm on board.

An Individual buying the Presidency at worst. (And I did say may)

If we really wanted to get the money out of politics we'd go after partisan think tanks, policy centers, etc. Those are the institutions that actually shape public opinion and governmental policy on a pay-to-play basis.

it was a test of consistency which you easily passed with the quoted paragraph. Basically my point was that the kind of rhetoric you were using in the OP just wasn't sensitive to the details of any specific campaign finance restriction, so if you were going to reject the aggregate limits under those arguments, you basically have to reject any limits, in particular the individual limit should be eliminated. However, this paragraph seems to imply you more or less agree.

The slippery slope can basically eliminate all campaign finance laws entirely, where a persons choice to engage in free speech in the manner of their choosing such means they shouldn't be forced to disclose their free speech so unlimited undisclosed funding, they should be able to release ads without being forced to do it in certain ways with things like "I approve this message" and so on....do you also agree these need to be cut on your view?

If you want to get literal...when you are giving money to a candidate that is not you speaking but rather turning up the volume and reach on that candidates speech. Again, in the private sphere we regulate this, restricting freedom in the process. For example we have limitations on advertising volume and placement.

It's often true that, through a given action, one persons freedom is expressed to the detriment of another person's freedom. The goal should not be to maximize all freedom (like yeah, your free to kill someone if you want) but to be selective in limiting some freedoms in order to optimize the higher values of which freedom is a basic building block, such as self determination both on an individual and societal basis.

Once you realize that obtuse notions of absolute, vacuum inhabiting freedom is not an end in and of itself (which you basically have to concede) it becomes clear that the question of what the actual effects of a policy are should be the focus so that we can view those in light of our operational values (like self determination, individual rights, pluralism, competition, democracy etc). It is pretty amazing that you hold all of these entrenched opinions and yet you haven't offered any citations to studies showing the actual effect of the nature of campaign financing on levels of corruption or influence or anything real. You hinted at what you guess the effects are, then when griz said such studies exist you were like "oh cool let me see those" as if this were an afterthought and not fundamental. So far you've had no comment on them or my refutation of them. You're just taking selectively myopic interpretations of the constitution, speech, and freedom in order to justify your ideological position that we should be ruled by the rich more than we already are.

This is a cop-out. One used by too many people, well respected academics included, for way too long.

This line of argument is essentially: "I can't find it. I can't quantify it. But I just know it's there, somehow."

Now you should weigh this against what we know for a fact money does do in politics. It encourages political participation by, as some posters here said, "turning up the volume". It encourages politicians to at least sit down (fundraising) with more people who do not agree with them (but can write checks). It gives small and poor minorities voice they otherwise might not have had.

Highlights from Justice Breyer’s McCutcheon Dissent


What the majority got wrong (page 2):
[The majority's] conclusion rests upon its own, not a record-based, view of the facts. Its legal analysis is faulty: It misconstrues the nature of the competing constitutional interests at stake. It understates the importance of protecting the political integrity of our governmental institutions. It creates a loophole that will allow a single individual to contribute millions of dollars to a political party or to a candidate’s campaign. Taken together with Citizens United v. Federal Election Comm’n, today’s decision eviscerates our Nation’s campaign finance laws, leaving a remnant incapable of dealing with the grave problems of democratic legitimacy that those laws were intended to resolve.
Corruption as a broader concept (page 4):

In reality, as the history of campaign finance reform shows and as our earlier cases on the subject have recognized, the anti-corruption interest that drives Congress to regulate campaign contributions is a far broader, more important interest than the plurality acknowledges. It is an interest in maintaining the integrity of our public governmental institutions. And it is an interest rooted in the Constitution and in the First Amendment itself.

How the ruling changes the game (page 15):
Before today’s decision, the total size of Rich Donor’s check to the Joint Party Committee was capped at $74,600—the aggregate limit for donations to political parties over a 2-year election cycle. After today’s decision, Rich Donor can write a single check to the Joint Party Committee in an amount of about $1.2 million.

Will political parties seek these large checks? Why not? The recipient national and state committees can spend the money to buy generic party advertisements, say television commercials or bumper stickers saying “Support Republicans,” “Support Democrats,” or the like. They also can transfer the money to party committees in battleground States to increase the chances of winning hotly contested seats.

Will party officials and candidates solicit these large contributions from wealthy donors? Absolutely. Such contributions will help increase the party’s power, as well as the candidate’s standing among his colleagues. Will elected officials be particularly grateful to the large donor, feeling obliged to provide him special access and influence, and perhaps even a quid pro quo legislative favor? That is what we have previously believed.
What’s at stake (page 30):

The result, as I said at the outset, is a decision that substitutes judges’ understandings of how the political process works for the understanding of Congress; that fails to recognize the difference between influence resting upon public opinion and influence bought by money alone; that overturns key precedent; that creates huge loopholes in the law; and that undermines, perhaps devastates, what remains of campaign finance reform.

http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2014/04/02/...cheon-dissent/

An important takeaway from the dissenting opinion is that the actual effects/predictable outcomes of the law matter. Values are materialized in the real world, not in some selective and highly abstract interpretations of speech, which, considering the political alignment of the vote, are obviously just cover for an ideology that competes with that expressed by lawmakers who have enacted campaign finance reform.

What do you think the purpose of them are, exactly? I'm not saying "the state" in the general sense. I'm saying "the state" in the sense of the particular form we currently use.

People observe an incompatibility between speech and this particular form of representative democracy, knee-jerk reaction is to tighten down permissible forms of speech rather than evolve the form of government. It's 100% backwards.

oh right, well that might be your overt objective but it's not at all clear that those limits had any meaningful effect on advancing that goal. I mean what the **** anyway? Your motives are pure so you get a pass on trampling rights? Get the **** out.

So how exactly would you quantify those types of things? Can you cite any studies that do it?

You are 100% wrong that we "can't find it". It is trivial to find it. It's just not something that you can quantify easily.

We are on an internet poker forum and one of the most clear cut examples of this kind of money influence just came last week in the poker world. Do you really think Lindsey Graham wastes his time drafting anti-poker legislation if Sheldon Adelson were poor?

Come on dude.

yeah, basically. It seems a lot of people see representative democracy as an end in and of itself rather than the means to something else. it's not like this is the first time they've displayed this sort of thinking.

lol

wasn't this covered in the climate change thread? The right to misinform and spread lies is a very valuable right that must be preserved!

Well in a sense it is, even if there are people who don't use it in good faith.

if spending = speech and corporations = persons, then how come politicians can't = products that are covered under consumer protection laws?

All the other products I speak with from Target are, afterall.

Because spending doesn't equal speech in all circumstances, SCOTUS just treats it as such in instances of political campaigning.

5-4 along political lines is the headline in the news and in the OP.

Let's look into that a little bit further. What are the political lines exactly? Some clarification can be found here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/20/us...agewanted=all&

In this article the NYT names Scalia and Thomas as participants in a Koch brothers strategy seminar which the invitation to the event describes as:

Notice two interesting points in this quote from the article:

1) The agenda of the meeting is to focus on legislative policies, mattes decided by the legislative branch of government, a branch of government that is supposed to be separate from the judicial branch. Scalia and Thomas's participation in this type of activity is an undisclosed conflict of interest, the remedy of which is for them to recuse themselves from certain rulings, such as Citizens United which had direct benefits for Koch industries.

2) This article is from October 2010. Charles Koch's net worth is cited by NYT as 21.5 billion per Forbes magazine. A google search today shows Forbes lists Charles Koch's net worth at 41 billion. http://www.forbes.com/profile/charles-koch/. That the Koch brothers inherited their wealth doesn't mean they are not necessarily productive people. But do you really think anyone is capable of producing 20 billion worth of value in 4 years? how about 40 lifetimes?


Thomas, one of the biggest trolls in the history of America (or countries), actually said the McCutcheon ruling didn't go far enough, writing an opinion that all such limits are unconstitutional. Here is Thomas from 2000 on political influence on the SCOTUS:

http://nypost.com/2000/12/14/thomas-...partisan-body/

Says the supreme court judge who goes to secret meetings of billionaire libertarians hell bent on buying a legislative agenda that increases their wealth and power (and hey, 20 billion in less than 4 years isn't a bad result).

And the trollalaliest quote of them all:

Am I jumping the gun here? or is sweeping SCOTUS members away to Palm Springs to participate in libertarian strategy sessions not a "try" to influence court members? And what about the selection process for potential SCOTUS members where political loyalty is a chief consideration?

Different planets? This must have been a different Palm Springs like on Mars or some **** that required Thomas, the Koch brothers, etc to travel through outer space in order to reach.

Come, now. Surely you know that I recognize this. I even offered a fairly detailed account of why I think the value of free expression requires extremely robust protection. Here's what I said:

I'd be interested to know what parts of that you disagree with.

I asked about grizy's studies because I was curious what they showed, not because I think the quantitative results are crucial in resolving the normative question. I'm endorsing the view that, even if those studies showed that the effects were bad and governance was unequivocally better with the BCRA in place, I still wouldn't be willing to sacrifice the principle of free expression to make that happen. As pvn has pointed out, I'd rather change certain key features about the system of representation itself. (Also, it's basically impossible to imagine defining "better governance" in a way that's ideologically neutral.)

Yeah, I agree, it's bizarre. It seems like the most illiberal stance you could possibly take on the question. If you study the history of American civil rights with any degree of critical distance, it's virtually impossible to avoid the conclusion that democratic governance is wholly conformist. It serves to reinforce and protect (and, more recently, improve the efficiency of) a hierarchical system of social and economic organization. The right to free expression is one of the only safeguards that heterodox positions have against compulsory regression to the mean. When this freedom is weakened in the name of improving democratic governance itself, the effect is to dampen resistance to the values of the status quo, which are -- surprise! -- profoundly socially conservative.

Like, the cynic in me can even believe that Scalia is, at this very moment, sitting in his chambers cackling while Charles Koch pours him another brandy. But I honestly don't care if the Court is getting it right by accident.

Oh I think it's pretty clear that they do. This is where academic research can come in handy. Griz tried and failed to cite any legit research showing a contradiction of the null, that corporations give money to campaigns for a return on investment. By law in fact corporations would have to expect some advancement of the shareholders interests (i.e. earnings) from that contribution or be in violation of the Business Judgement Rule. Do you have anything showing any research showing what you claim?



Let's look at the most extreme example of rights, those under a rule of absolute freedom: anyone can do anything they want. What's the problem with that? Well one result would means someone can murder someone else and that would be legally acceptable. But we know this isn't acceptable. The problem is your right to murder me infringes on my right to live. So we start restricting actions, restricting freedoms in order to...stay with me here...protect higher valued freedoms and other higher values.

We do this ALL THE TIME. We are allowed to restrict some absolute freedoms, including those legitimately considered speech, in order to preserve our values, such as democracy. Foe example we are allowed, under our constitution, to tell cigarette companies they can't advertise to children.

Whoops! Corporations are people, and people can talk to children if they want to however they want to because of free speech, rite? NO. We are giving our children a degree of freedom to not be brainwashed into becoming nicotine addicts. We are allowed to choose one freedom over another in this way and we do it all the time because THAT'S how our system is supposed to work.

Dr modern, I don't think this really changes anything (I've always thought of the American govt as bought and paid for by corporate America) but all I am asking is how you square calling one type of economic expenditure (campaign donations) as free speech with no limits but don't allow all other forms of economic expenditure to be free speech free from the current laws that limit the expenditure of that wealth.

It seems putting spending as free speech and the first amendment together leads to the ultimate free market argument.