…for the First Amendment. SCOTUS has struck down much of the atrocious campaign-finance laws, including the worst parts of McCain-Feingold. It’s a little disturbing that the ruling was so close, though.
[Update a while later]
“It certainly changes the Boxer race,” Stern said. “It means corporations, without setting up a PAC, can spend as much as they want opposing Boxer.”
While unions would be able to help Boxer, Stern said “they were already able to do it through PACs. Corporations were having more trouble doing so.”
It will be an interesting fall, here in California and elsewhere.
One of the most disgraceful decisions of President G W Bush was when he did not veto McCain-Fiengold, assuming (one supposes) that such a bill would be struck down by the Supreme Court. That decision was based on tactical political considerations, such as the inevitable outraged reaction of the mainstream media and punditocracy, not on principles. He abdicated his responsibility to uphold freedom of speech and relied on others in the SUpreme Court to do the right thing (which they did not).
This is the best news I’ve heard in a long time, and undoes a lot of the damage McCain did to this country. McCain-Feingold was the main reason I didn’t vote for McCain. That it was close may be upsetting, but it’s less surprising than the fact they ruled this way at all.
One of the most disgraceful decisions of President G W Bush was when he did not veto McCain-Fiengold, assuming (one supposes) that such a bill would be struck down by the Supreme Court.
Yes, it was a blatant violation of his oath of office.
I’ve been told repeatedly on this blog that all of the evils of the Gilded Age are “corporatism.” Putting aside for a moment the constitutionality of the ruling, explain to me how this isn’t a corporatist, and thus bad ruling?
How is allowing corporations to spend their own money “corporatism”?
Some people don’t understand the difference between freedom and coercion.
Rand – Frankly, I’m not sure I disagree with the ruling.
But what I’m trying to understand is if you’re okay with, for example, Boeing spending a bunch of bucks in support of candidates who pledge to spend taxpayer money on their rockets, and not SpaceX or some other alternative company? If you are, that’s fine – I’m just trying to understand your thought process.
Allowing anything of which essive disapproves, is always some kind of icky “ism.”
Damn keyboard. Should be “…which a progressive…”
But what I’m trying to understand is if you’re okay with, for example, Boeing spending a bunch of bucks in support of candidates who pledge to spend taxpayer money on their rockets, and not SpaceX or some other alternative company?
I don’t know what you mean by “am I OK with it”? I wouldn’t be happy about it, but the solution is for SpaceX (and their supporters) to spend money on candidates with the opposite position. I certainly don’t think that it should be illegal, as long as it’s disclosed. When government policy can influence your business, it becomes a cost of doing business to attempt to influence policy.
Rand – the question is a matter of scale. Boeing has profits of around a billion dollars a quarter. SpaceX has no profits, and Musk, although wealthy, can’t match that scale of spending.
I guess that’s the problem with saying corporations are persons. They have (or can have) vastly more resources than any individual. In any practical contest, from the courtroom to the court of public opinion, that gives the corporation a huge advantage.
Actually, SpaceX is profitable, or at least so Elon claims.
Bill Gates has a lot more money than I do as well, but that doesn’t mean that he has no freedom of speech, or to spend it as he wishes.
I should note that the problem isn’t so much corporations buying influence per se, as the fact that the government, much of which is unconstitutional with powers far beyond anything envisioned by the Founders, has so much influence for sale.
You will never have a case where an entity with more resources does not have an advantage over an entity with less resources.
The best you can hope for is to have this political influence peddling out in the open and exposed to the world so the voters can make an informed decision.
If the government had less power over the system the incentive to “bribe” the government would be greatly reduced.
Rand – your point about Gates is well-taken, which is why I’m not sure how I think about this ruling.
The point about “government has too much influence” is, however, irrelevant. During the Gilded Age, corporate interests spent their money trying to keep government small. This was because they were able to hire lawyers and otherwise use their excessive resources to overpower private individuals, as long as government stayed out of the way.
Everybody knew who owned the coal mine – that didn’t prevent the mine owner from abusing his employees.
“The point about “government has too much influence” is, however, irrelevant.”
Tell that to survivors of the gulag.
Or the Holocaust.
Or the coal miners buried due to no safety regulations? Or to the blacks lynched under Jim Crowe? Or to the folks who got “ethnically cleansed” in Rwanda?
Let’s not get stuck on stupid. Lack of government, AKA anarchy, sucks too. Extremes tend to be lousy places to be.
Chris,
If Brad Pitt and I go to a bar to pick up women, he will enjoy advantages that I cannot hope to compete with. Does this mean that the governmet should put a sack over him so that I have a ‘fair’ chance? Ultimately in any competitive environment some of the actors will hold advantages over the others. Even if it were possible to ‘level the playing field’ by somehow eliminating our basic liberties (and freedom of speech is one of the most essential ones), I would still oppose it. The point of good government is to reinforce those liberties, not the other way around.
If you want to reduce the negative impact of some actors having more lobbying resources than others, reduce the scope of government. If Boeing can outbid SpaceX, they will gain little if SpaceX can find profitable operations outside the reach of the government. Remove government’s heavy hand and provide multiple opportunties for ‘oppressed’ workers to leave abusive employers (granted this cannot be done in the extreme, and should not taken as a call for ZERO regulation, merely much less), and suddenly those who want to spend $$$ lobbying will find less and less value in doing so. Only when the government is the only game in town is lobbying so overwhelmingly useful…
Apparently my hope to save yet another strawman didn’t come in time. Nobody is claiming that there is no role for government (OK, a few silly teens who just finished Atlas Shrugged for the first time, but I will do you the courtesy of assuming you don’t fall in that category), but it does seem everytime the overweening intrusion of the government gets decried, the usual suspects (take a bow Chris) come out with the strawman argument that if we don’t have endless goverment control we can only have anarchy as an alternative. I believe this is what your hero (The One!) likes to call ‘a false choice’
I might point out that some regulation is seen as a necesary evil by all but the most extreme libertarians, but even then, you can never be sure if it will work. To take your example, Jim Crow was often put in place and enforced with the full cooperation of local (and sometimes state and even federal) governments, and prior to the Civil War (and for some time thereafter), the federal government was an active player in the support and enforcement of all sorts of ugly racist laws.
The problem is that when you give the government too much power (even with the best motives, and we all know where good intentions lead us), you are taking a bet that the government will: 1) remain under control; 2) remain under the control of good people; 3) perform as expected (i.e. no unintended consequences); and 4) that the control you have granted to the government will not impose excessive externalities (loss of freedom, etc.) on society as a whole or in part. History, both inside the US and in the world in general, is replete with examples to show the validity of those concerns.
Try looking up concepts like ‘rent-seeking’, or even garden variety corruption, and then provide a blanket defense of all extensions of government power. Nobody here that I have seen is an advocate of ‘no government’ only of ‘small government’ (some smaller than others, to be sure), and your use of strawman arguments to the contrary is simply silly…
The ruling still require disclosure for corporate expenditures, thus providing much needed transparency about where the money is coming from. This is a much needed improvement from before where corporations spent money anyway but they hid it in PACs and such. Which is to be preferred: an advertisement by Boeing saying it supports Candidate A or a PAC with some euphemistic name like The National Alliance for Aero Excellence supports Candidate A? With the former you know where the money is coming from with the latter you have no clue. This ruling also levels the playing field with other corporate entities such as labor unions and not for profits.
As several posters have mentioned limiting the power of government is one preferable alternative to limiting freedom of speech. Another is to limit the power of boards. AFAIK in the US as in Europe (with the exception of the UK and to a leser extent the Middle European states and the Netherlands) the law gives boards a lot more power relative to shareholders than a free market would tolerate.
Or the coal miners buried due to no safety regulations?
You’re really comparing that to the Gulag?
Or to the blacks lynched under Jim Crowe?
That was with the complicity of the government. And while obviously criminal, still doesn’t compare to genocide.
Or to the folks who got “ethnically cleansed” in Rwanda?
Again, that was a government action.
This is good news. Pundits on the Right have been arguing for freedom + transparency for years. If Soros wants to buy a candidate, let him, just let everyone know that he’s Soros’s man.
“Lack of government, AKA anarchy, sucks too. Extremes tend to be lousy places to be.”
I wasn’t the one conflating money that buys influence with the ultimate power of government.
Rand – my reaction to the gulag comparison was to point out that all governments, much like everything else made and ran by man, have failure modes. Saying “kep governments weak or we’ll have gulags” is like saying “keep airplanes small and less people will die in any given crash.” While it’s true the fewer people will die in the crash of a smaller plane, that doesn’t do anything for aircraft safety. Nor does it mean that less people will die in plane crashes.
Scott – Brad Pitt is one person. If a hundred Brad Pitts showed up, that would be a different story. Size matters, so to speak.
Another concern is corporate governance. Yes, in theory the shareholders control the company. In practice, the Board and CEO of a company is so well-insulated from the shareholder as for them to be non-existent.
What makes this worse is that most Americans hold their shares via mutual funds. So my fund may own a billion shares of Company X, but I don’t vote even a proportion of them – the guy that runs the fund votes the shares.
This leads to a case where an anonymous employee (albeit one with a nice office) can exercise a lot of power with few checks.
The issue isn’t how large or small government is, but whether it is used to defend rights or to impose the will of whoever can get hold of it on the rest of the population.
“Or to the blacks lynched under Jim Crowe?”
…Remind me, Chris: Which party stood staunchly against antilynching laws for over fifty years? Took pride in defending lynching, in fact? Used to refer to it as a civil right?
Can’t quite come up with the name of that political party, Chris. I remember them being the same guys who also opposed desegregation, and have spent the past ten years opposing freedom of education for blacks… but I can’t recall what they call themselves. Can you?
PS- there’s no “e” in Jim Crow.
DaveP – it’s the same party that pushed desegregation through. Please try to keep up with the changes in the American political scene in the last few decades.
DaveP – it’s the same party that pushed desegregation through.
Partly because much of it saw it as a way to keep them under its thumb, and provide votes to keep it in political power, while pretending to be morally superior to those who believed in liberty. And the majority of blacks remain on the new “liberal” plantation, though there was some liberation in the nineties, with welfare reform.
Let’s see Chris, was it the party that George Wallace belonged to or the one that Martin Luther King belonged to which pushed through desegregation?
Gulags require a certain critical mass of ideology. Which ideology is more likely to lead to Gulags — liberty or statism? Take your time; it’s open-book.
I scrolled down after the third Gerrib comment. Has anyone pointed out whose lobbyists tend to support regulation these days? Hint: they tend to be the regulated.
Looks like it’s going to be a bull market in bullsh…I mean, campaign services.
Where can I invest?
The Supreme Court is a party?
And has anyone pointed out to Chris that without Republican congressional support much of the essential civil-rights legislation of the 1960s would have failed?
Saying “kep governments weak or we’ll have gulags” is like saying “keep airplanes small and less people will die in any given crash.”
No, it’s not.
“…it’s the same party that pushed desegregation through.”
A larger percentage of Rs voted for the bill than Ds. Without the Rs, the other Ds would have kept it from passing.
The point about “government has too much influence” is, however, irrelevant. During the Gilded Age, corporate interests spent their money trying to keep government small. This was because they were able to hire lawyers and otherwise use their excessive resources to overpower private individuals, as long as government stayed out of the way.
I see yet another vapid and clueless comparison to the “Gilded Age” from our resident expert on the subject. We have to f- our s- up merely to avoid one of the more revolutionary and enabling times of US history? Government power is “irrelevant” even though the entire US government is structured expressly to reduce government power relative to the citizen and the business? Especially given the centuries, if not millennia of history that demonstrate the wisdom of doing so?
Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
“A larger percentage of Rs voted for the bill than Ds. Without the Rs, the other Ds would have kept it from passing.”
Bill, immediately after that vote all the mean, bitter racists switched affiliation and became Republicans*, while all the good saintly people became Democrats.
The internets tells me so!
*Well, except Robert “KKK” Byrd.
JP Gibb – actually, that’s an over-simplification, but not much. The Dixiecrats split from the Democrats over desegregation, then moved to the Republicans.
Going back to the original subject, I am being told that the Citizens United opinion makes no distinction between US and foreign-owned corporations. If accurate, I guess Hugo Chavez (via Citgo) gets freedom of speech.
In the 19th century, businesses were quite highly regulated by state governments. In some ways, more than today. They could be called to task if they didn’t achieve the public purpose set out in their charters, for instance.
What was different from today was that no one much bothered trying to influence the federal government and that corruption could occur under the radar much more easily.
Still, it’s a complete myth that these influential businesses controlled state (or the federal) government. They faced, after all, competing influences (including businesses in other industries) and had to deal with politicians who opposed them for one reason or the other. That’s true today, too, of course.
Note, too, that where businesses tended to have the most influence was in areas that were sparsely populated and undeveloped. If you’re the government of a state or territory and need the railroads to open up land for development, you’re likely to be very pro-railroad, whether they give you money or not, right?
As for this issue about businesses having speech rights, of course they should. Transmitting your ideas beyond the reach of your own voice often requires money, especially if you want to reach significant numbers of people. That means that people need to be able to associate freely and pool their resources to pay for such speech. Thus do we have businesses, churches, consumer advocacy groups, unions, newspapers, etc. communicating their ideas over mass media.
Trying to parse or distinguish among groups impinges on the right of association. By calling one company “the press” and another company something else, you are discriminating due to the nature of the association. Are the political interests of The St. Petersburg Times superior to those of Coca-Cola? Certainly, the press has its own political interests and uses papers, TV, lobbying, campaign contributions, etc. to promote those interests.
Largely, McCain-Feingold served to make it more difficult to unseat incumbents. As everyone knows, we tend to keep electing people already in office. Which means it’s difficult and expensive to challenge incumbents. McCain-Feingold helped to make that tough task even harder.
Finally, McCain-Feingold did nothing whatsoever to reduce any company’s (or other large group’s) influence on government. Do lobbyists seem less influential today than they did 25 years ago? Of course not. There’s no tangible difference except that until recently, there was a silly law that chilled speech with the threat of regulatory action or litigation.
Incidentally, the disclosure and disclaimer requirements still stand. Disclosure might be a reasonable impingement on our speech rights, because it’s really aimed at the politicians themselves–gotta tell us where you got that money, bub. I think that’s a little less offensive.
“Going back to the original subject, I am being told that the Citizens United opinion makes no distinction between US and foreign-owned corporations. If accurate, I guess Hugo Chavez (via Citgo) gets freedom of speech.”
Since he already had it when addressing the UN, that’s not much of a stretch.
I may hate what you say but I will defend your right to say it isn’t just a good idea, it’s the law. One that never should have been altered.