Count on it: when you see a 5-4 decision in the U.S. Supreme Court, it means—except for rare exceptions like the “Obamacare” vote—very bad news for liberals.
And it happened again yesterday, with the court voting to eliminate the cap on the total amount of money individuals could contribute to all federal candidates in an election. The five-vote majority included all of the usual conservative suspects: Roberts, who wrote the majority opinion), Alito, Scalia, Thomas, and Kennedy. Thomas wrote his own concurring opinion, and you can see the full court decision in McCutcheon et al. v. Federal Election Commission, with Breyer’s withering dissent—co-signed by Sotomayor, Ginsberg, and Kagan—here.
As the New York Times reports:
Wednesday’s decision did not affect familiar base limits on contributions from individuals to candidates, currently $2,600 per candidate in primary and general elections. But it said that overall limits of $48,600 by individuals every two years for contributions to all federal candidates violated the First Amendment, as did separate aggregate limits on contributions to political party committees, currently $74,600.
. . . Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for four justices in the controlling opinion, said the overall limits could not survive First Amendment scrutiny. “There is no right in our democracy more basic,” he wrote, “than the right to participate in electing our political leaders.”
In a dissent from the bench, Justice Stephen G. Breyer called the majority opinion a disturbing development that raised the overall contribution ceiling to “the number infinity.”
“If the court in Citizens United opened a door,” he said, “today’s decision may well open a floodgate.” [JAC: In the “Citizens United” case, the Court ruled that corporations could spend unlimited amounts of money on election campaigns.]
In his written opinion, Justice Breyer said Wednesday’s decision would allow “a single individual to contribute millions of dollars to a political party or to a candidate’s campaign.” He was joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.
The ruling was on First Amendment grounds, with individual political contributions considered by the majority as a form of “free speech”. That’s a bizarre twist, because it isn’t immediately obvious that such donations constitute “speech”, just as it doesn’t seem obvious that corporations are people, another path the court has broken. (The previous donation caps were also also allowed in the name of “political speech,” but the limits were set low to prevent corruption.)
Although the $2,600 per candidate limit looks small, it’s deceptive. The total amount of spending per federal campaign cycle is now $3.6 million per individual, and you can put all of that, if you wish, toward a single candidate simply by directing it to that candidate through special fund-raising committees. The donations, in effect, get laundered.
The problem, of course, is that—at least in America—money talks, and money has a huge influence on the outcome of elections. That’s why candidates engage in a frenzy of fundraising, and why the sizes of candidates’ warchests are regularly reported. You can, in fact, buy elections in this country through advertising (often negative) and other forms of promotion.
This shouldn’t happen in a democracy. Those having more money should not be allowed to unduly influence the political process. Chief Justice Roberts claimed that the Court’s brief was not to level the playing field, but that in fact is what we need. Nobody, be they liberal or conservative (like the Koch brothers), should be able to disproportionately influence an election merely because they’re rich. If one needs spending caps, then they must be sensible ones, affordable by the average American.
As Justice Breyer said in his dissent:
The anticorruption 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.
Where enough money calls the tune, the general public will not be heard.
Welcome to the plutocracy.
Yeah, welcome to the plutocracy indeed. This is terrible news.
….ah boy!!!
Indeed they did screw up, and I fear things are only going to get worse (Hobby Lobby, etc.).
It just baffles me how anyone can obtusely argue that politicians are in no way beholden to their campaign contributors. The floodgates are now open to unlimited bribes, what could go wrong? What we need are set state funded campaign finances for all candidates that can show sufficient public support, not a plutocracy.
If you want to exercise your “right to participate in electing our political leaders” then cast your vote. Your one vote that is the same as everyone else’s.” Somehow dwarfing my ability to participate in elections to practically nothing in comparison to the immensely wealthy is just fine. Go figure.
I read an interview with McCain and Feingold in which they described the ignorance/idiocy of conservative supremes with respect to how elections really work. The only real question is whether the system is more one of bribery or extortion?
That is a fantastic link. Thank you for that.
Politicians now are going around begging for money, making pre-made bribe suggestions to “donors”, or perhaps extorting money for favors, as you say. My mind is blown.
Without campaign finance reform, our system of governance is irreparably broken.
+1 on the awesome link! I hope everyone could listen to that.
Sic Semper Tyrannis
What you Americans need are some strict constructionist judges who will go by what the constitution actually says, and not indulge in this sort of judicial activism by extending “speech” to unlimited campaign funding.
” . . . what the constitution actually says . . . .”
This of course that the document is crystal clear. Constitutional lawyer experts disagree on what it actually says.
“This of course ASSUMES . . . .”
I’m becoming more and more bloody attention-deficited.
They didn’t screw up. It’s all a part of their well orchestrated plan… and money… lots of money in their pockets.
I hate to get overly dramatic, but, especially coupled with the out-of-control spy agencies and the FBI’s perfect 151-0 record in its own investigations of killings by its officers, this is real death of the Republic stuff.
The Supremes have just declared that we shall chose “our” leaders by an open bribery contest. Whoever gets the most bribes wins.
Whether as a result of some conspiracy theory or honest but misguided patriotism or mere incompetence doesn’t really matter any more. The United States no longer have a government of the people, by the people and for the people. The only miracle is the continuing consent of the governed, but who knows how much longer that will last?
b&
It’s government of and by private corporate tyranny.
It’s a bit more complex than that…more like a clash of the Titans, with all of them feeding on the people.
b&
I think I’ve seen To Serve Man on the shelves of a few plutocrats.
It’s their Bible. In the case of Idi Amin, literally.
b&
I may disagree with your definition of belief (elsewhere 😉 but I could not agree more with this belief of yours.
Death of the Republic, unless constitutional amendments clarify:
Corporations are not people/persons/etc.
Money != “speech”
Dollars != Votes
The revolution will be streamed on YouTube.
Corporations = people. Can you imagine what George Orwell might say about this twisted equivalency?
The only good that can come of that ruling is that somewhere, out of the depths of humanity will arise the next Orwell, or Hitchens, eloquent enough to expose the silliness and evil of that decision in such a motivating way that people band with her to say “NO!, that will not stand!”
I don’t think the problem is lack of exposure. I think the problem is a mixture of a few things.
First, those who’re speaking out against the problem are in a real bind. Speech alone isn’t enough to change the problem. One can try to work within the system to bring about change, but the first rule of the system is the preservation of the system. And, because of that first rule, attempts to work without the system, whether peaceful or otherwise, are guaranteed to draw the full fearful wrath of the system upon the reformers.
That leads us to the next group of people: those who sincerely wish change, but don’t see what they can possibly do and are afraid of the consequences if they try. Those people are numerous both within and without the system.
Then we get to those solely within the system; they’re in two camps. First are those most directly personally profiting from it — the Koch Brothers, General Alexander, and the like. They’ll fuck over anybody who stands up to them, and do it with a smile. And then there’re all their toadies, the cannon fodder who charge into battle with a smile upon their faces. Some think that they’ll find their own way to greatness by following in the footsteps of the masters; others are simply so fucking stupid that they swallow the propaganda of the masters wholesale.
The entrenched power structure is too powerful right now to be directly challenged. Fortunately or tragically, depending on which angle you might wish to look at it, tyrannies such as the current one are brittle and vulnerable to internal strife, factionalism, and turf wars. Once it is sufficiently weakened from its own corruption, then the people may both have sufficient leverage to again take back their own as well as the courage to do so.
The biggest question is how bad it’s gonna get before that happens, and how bloody it’ll be when it does.
Oh — and, by the way, about the same time as it happens, nobody will be able to afford to buy petroleum any more, which means they won’t be able to afford to buy food grown with fertilizer, either. Won’t that be fun!
b&
“the first rule of the system is the preservation of the system”
Yep. And a similar rule applies to any organization that outlives its founders. Why does it exist? To exist!
Well, plenty of organizations manage to avoid the bureaucratic nepotistic despotic sinkhole. The Royal Danish Orchestra has been performing concerts in Copenhagen for over half a millennium, and its primary function is still to perform concerts.
b&
Optimist! 🙂
I wouldn’t be too sure. Google is one of the Titans fighting over the food supply of the people. If it gets to the point of revolution, Google may well find DMCA-like excuses to protect its food supply. Or maybe they’ll calculate that they can eat more people by trying to selectively promote which parts of the revolution to stream. Or maybe the NSA will threaten to reveal Larry Brin’s midget pr0n stash unless he pulls the plug on YouTube, and so on.
The long and short of it is that the Titans control the lines of communication. If we are to have hope of reestablishing the will of the people, the people will have to reestablish their own communication system. That’s what the Internet was supposed to be, but that table got turned. The next most promising alternatives are ad-hoc store-and-forward WiFi mesh networks, and things like the Tor project.
For practical reasons, mesh networks are one of the more promising ways to push the Internet to the developing world; we may luck out and be able to retrofit such a thing to the developed world.
Tor probably wouldn’t survive an attempt to legislate it out of existence. Until recently, I’d have suggested legislative attacks on something like Tor would be too dramatic and over-the-top to be palatable, but “they” really aren’t pretending very hard any more.
Cheers,
b&
Agreed… I’ve witnessed too many legislative attacks against the right to communicate securely to believe Tor has any greater chance.
Pretty soon we’ll be back to relying on patterns crocheted into our blankets, a’la the character in Dickens’ “Tale of Two Cities.” Or speaking Pig Latin… I hear no one can crack that. 🙂
What’s really scary is that the intelligence agencies have moved beyond that, to tracking webs of associations. They don’t even have to know what you say; just the fact that you’re in contact with other “undesirables” is enough to get you on the shit list.
And what’s really really scary is that we’re all carrying around location trackers all the time in the form of cellphones, so even using manual typewriters for samizdat publications is going to put you in jeopardy unless you remember to leave your phone at home. Oh — and, by the way, all new cars have trackers in them (“OnStar”), so you better not drive. And face recognition is coming to security cameras, so you better not walk, either….
I honestly don’t know how we get out of the mess we’re working ourselves into.
b&
Here we go: http://www.ginandtacos.com/2014/04/02/no-limit-soldiers/
The named plantiff in this case, Shawn McCutcheon, happens to be my first cousin. Not looking forward to Thanksgiving dinner this year! Maybe my anger and dismay will have abated by then.
Wow… vicarious brush with infamy. Good luck!
Do us all a favor and “accidentally” pour the gravy boat all over his head, will you?
b&
Create a table centerpiece consisting of a cornucopia overflowing with Monopoly money and emblazoned with “Corporations are people, my friend!” – Mitt.”
Were I in your position, I’d be contemplating the influences affecting your cousin’s upbringing. (Will everyone be of a mind to not bring up this SC decision at the Thanksgiving table so as to keep the peace? Will your cousin be hard-pressed not to succumb to his inner zealot and bring it up?)
Blah, what a bad decision. I guess the long-term recourse is better political education of the voting body. These contributions only work because advertising works on people to change their voting behavior. Get them to be educated, critical thinkers, and (hopefully) advertising dollars will be a lot less effective.
And now for a quibble…
Maybe it shouldn’t happen in an ideal democracy, but I think historically it has always been the case that democractic politics have been disproportionately influenced by the powerful…and this has very often been ‘official’ or systematic, not just a bug in a government that the designers did not intend. IOW the current American preferential treatment of monied interests is not the Democracy exception, its the Democracy norm. Even if you go back to the original Athenian form of direct democracy, you see there a system in which this is the case. The Athenians divided male citizen voters into four classes based basically on wealth, and while every male citizen had an equal vote, the higher classes had more power in other ways (for example, members of the lowest class were not allowed to stand for certain offices).
I’m not supporting it. We should fight to make the system more egalitarian. But we should also be aware that democracies have struggled with this issue as long as there have been democracies, and the typically solve it imperfectly.
Indeed. Does anyone know what analysis has been done to assess how much a candidate’s advertising budget really does affect the result? It would be very clear if in every seat (insert appropriate US term here) the one with the biggest budget always wins, but I’m guessing the effect will be tad more subtle than that.
I don’t have the figures off the top of my head, but there is a very strong correlation between campaign funding and election results. It’s no guarantee, but it’s generally the single most important factor.
But even asking the question is to miss the elephant in the room. Elections generally come down to a Titanic battle between two challengers, and only the two challengers who can amass huge fortunes by hook or crook make it into that ring. Neither you nor I could even theoretically get elected to public office past the suburban city council level. The only people actually eligible for public office are millionaires and the whores of corporations and / or millionaires.
That’s the real disconnect here. Your personal expertise, character, experience, and plans for the future are all irrelevant. You don’t even get a chance to swing the bat unless you can amass an huge fortune.
In a civilized system, we’d have public financing of campaigns; any “contribution” to a candidate or politician would be considered bribery (including paying for or otherwise providing advertisements, etc. supportive of a candidate); eligibility for public funding would be determined by signatures gathered by unpaid volunteers; candidates would be forbidden from spending their own money; and all candidates who met the signature threshold would receive equal funding. That is, the playing field would be perfectly leveled, and the candidates would be left to compete solely on their ideals and ideas and ids.
Of course, there’s no way to get there from here without a major revolution (whether bloody or not).
b&
Here is an article from 2012 which basically says, “not much.” It includes a GOP advisor, Dem advisor, and independent (academic) advisor, and they pretty much all say that there is no strong causal correlation between spending and winning (at least not for most of the range; the Dem seems to say that you need some minimal amount to be viable). The first two (the GOP and Dem advisors) says that money makes a difference in a number of peripheral ways.
But its still a problem. I would much rather have a successfully elected official “in the pocket of” a rich donor to the tune of $2,600, than have them in the pocket of that donor to the tune of $26,000 or $2,600,000. AIUI, this court ruling keeps the $2,600 cap on direct support in place, but it is now possible for a rich donor to donate $2,600 to eric directly, then another $2,600 to ericPAC, then another $2,600 to the defeatericsopponenPAC, and so on ad infinitum. Putting eric much more in the pocket of that donor.
Forgot to add, even if advertising doesn’t really have any effect on the result, as long as candidates believe that it does it still has a corrupting effect because it inevitably buys influence.
Those who wrote the US Constitution and were the earliest politicians were also elitist. I believe that they would have found the idea that the poor (let alone blacks and women) might have a say in government to be repulsive, “mob rule” I believe they called it.
I don’t think having no limits to contributions is as bad as letting people contribute to candidates for whom they are not eligible to vote. One side effect of the hidden/laundered political contributions is that foreigners can easily influence elections.
The real problem though is that people are swayed by the political advertising. It would help if we had decent news sources that debunked at least the worst stuff, but guess who owns most of the media. As long as people are lazy and stupid, the problems remain.
This would further disenfranchise people who are not allowed to vote. Permanent residents and felons who have served their time, for instance. Though voting laws vary by state, so in some cases both of these groups may be able to vote in local elections, its federal law that permanent residents cannot vote in federal elections. If you believe in “no taxation without representation,” limiting campaign contributions only to voters is a step in the wrong direction.
I should add, however, that the “ineligble to vote = ineligible to contribute” concept has it’s advantages. A key one being it would squash all corporate campaign contributions. 🙂
I think what Brian is getting at is ‘absentee donors’ e.g. some billionaire living in New York ‘buying’ every congressman in Oklahoma.
The answer to Eric’s problem is surely to allow permanent residents (who I imagine pay full taxes?) to vote.
Yes, that’s what I meant. I think the issues that Eric brings up are valid but separate.
My wife is Japanese, yes, she pays taxes, and no, she doesn’t vote. When I lived in Japan, there were foreign residents who wanted to vote (and were allowed to vote in local elections in some areas) but I thought it was a bit hypocritical. You should become a citizen if you want to vote (making citizenship easier to obtain is another issue). While I was in Japan, I did vote — in the USA, via absentee ballot.
And I agree that (hopefully reformed) former convicts need to have their full citizenship rights restored.
Disgusting.
Politicians should, like scientists, be made to have to write proposals (like NSF, directed research, NASA, NRO, DARPA, etc.) and if their proposal gets accepted they qualify for contribution funds.
It’s really worth going back to reading about the transition of the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire.
“That’s a bizarre twist, because it isn’t immediately obvious that such donations constitute “speech” …
The problem, of course, is that—at least in America—money talks…”
Make up your mind ;>
This is bad news for almost everybody, not just liberals. It is just that most conservatives are too blind or stupid to realize it.
Yeah, this is an example of unintended consequences. Conservatives have had a decades-long goal of stacking the Supreme Court to roll back Roe v Wade, and now that they’re close to achieving that, they discover that fundamentalism is a stupid dog that goes around biting people at random.
Truly a sad day. They say it was an issue of freedom of speech. Unfortunately poor people’s free speech is limited to the reach of their voice through cupped hands while the very rich can amplify theirs through stereo speakers the size of a large city.
There’s also an assumption that capacity for free speech is equally rationed. A corporation’s activity (including its hiring and remuneration practices dear Walmart) may limit the capacity for free speech of a great number of individuals.
There’s also an assumption that capacity for free speech is equally rationed. A corporation’s activity (including its hiring and remuneration practices dear Walmart) may limit the capacity for free speech of a great number of individuals.
“the number infinity”
All I can say is….infinity is not a number.
@Brian – “letting people contribute to candidates for whom they are not eligible to vote”. A commenter on this decision on another site mentioned this. A law limiting contributions to those who can vote for the candidate would also cut out Citizens United contributions since corporations can’t vote, my friend.
What Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr meant was “There is no right in our democracy more basic than the right to buy whatever leaders you can afford.” Makes me want to move some place else!
Are U.S. emigration numbers on the rise the last few years?
Why not just prohibit advertising and direct funding of any publicity? Endorsements could still be given, but those would have to be private and impartial.
The counterargument is that advertising is speech. If I buy a 30-second TV spot to tell you what I think, I am clearly trying to communicate my political opinion to other voters. Now, its speech only the rich can afford, but in reality elinating it would not make everyone equal. Pretend for a moment that the ONLY political speech you allowed was walking door-to-door to share your opinion. Would that help the poor? No. They don’t have the time to take days off work or evenings away from the house to do that. That would still favor those who have lots of free time – e.g., the rich. Or take blogging. Let’s say you limited campaiginng only to private blogs. Well, in that case one can argue “why should political speech rules favor those with the net savvy and motivation to set up blogs? That’s unfair to the elderly, the poor, and the luddites!”
The bottom line is that there are very few ways to allow political free speech which won’t favor some group…and the poor are pretty much always going to get screwed, because even when they can afford to take advantage of those speech avenues, they are probably too busy trying to survive to do so.
IMO the ideal situation is one in which all forms of communication are allowed (so, yes, you can advertise), but which prevents a few people with lots of time or money or other resources from monopolizing that form of communication. I don’t know how to do that. But reasonable donation limits seems to me closer to that ideal than what SCOTUS just did. Another possible way would be a fairly massive, progressive tax on campaign contributions. Such as: first $2,000, special tax free. Next $20,000, 20% tax. Next $50,000, 50% tax. Any donations above the $100k mark…90% tax. This would no prevent the rich from monopolizing the airwaves, but it would drastically change their ‘return-on-investment’ calculus. Now buying $200k worth of political influence costs you $2 million instead of $200k.
Except that it doesn’t:
http://rangevoting.org/Levitt94.pdf
Quite a lot of reading in the link there.
I can give at least one example where a late spending SuperPac spent about $682,000 on an attack ad campaign and drove the margin from -8% to -14%, making a particular election completely unrecoverable at the eleventh hour.
Start the player at 32 minutes, or start reading the transcript at “Act Two. PAC Men.”.
Even if election results are not directly tied to spending, it is pretty naive to think that giving someone’s campaign a massive donation is not going to get you anything at all. Raquel Alexander, tax professor at the University of Kansas, estimates that for every dollar, on average, firms spend on tax lobbying they receive $220 in tax benefits. Politicians want donations, and it is not too hard to convince them to change complex things like tax codes that average people are going to have trouble understanding. The politician gets the donation without negative press, the lobbyist gets the tax break for their employer, and the little people with no lobbyist money get nothing.
As your Tea Partiers like to say – the United States is not a democracy, its a republic. Looks like they were correct. The the Roman Republic was, I believe, essentially run by a limited group of very rich families.
A number of my younger (under 50) public law colleagues in New Zealand reflect a view that Bills of Rights should give judges more powers to declare laws to be invalid and Canada is much admired in this respect. Unfortunately the power crazed US Supreme Court is where this can lead unless there are other controls. Of course in the US if you did not have said court and constitution the d*g squadders would turn you into a theocracy to match Brunei.
As far as I can see the only real protection is an informed public with strong political representation – something the US never seems to have had but which did exist in the UK/Australia/New Zealand with the Labour Party-union nexus for much of the last century. This of course vanished in the 1980s when the Labour parties in all three countries sold out to, or were bought by, big business.
Interesting you should mention Brunei. In the light of the Supreme Court’s latest decision I had the Sultan of Brunei down for the next President of the USA. Just think how rich he could get with Congress, the Senate and the Supreme Court in his pocket…
(Oh, and he just introduced sharia law. I’m sure the d*g squadders wouldn’t object since it’s compatible with what they all believe deep down anyway. Won’t that be fun… 😉
Fortunately, the “Ahnie amendment” would have to pass first.
U.S.A. R.I.P.
Maybe not next week or next month or next year, but at the rate we’re going, with this as the latest signpost, before too long:
U.S.A. R.I.P.
So let me sketch this broadly:
The demographics of the USA are, by and large, changing in favour of the Democratic party (fewer old white men, more of everybody else).
The way the Rep. could address this is to change their policies so as to become more attractive to non-white old men. This is unlikely in the short term but given a few more election defeats, possible.
However with this ruling, the Reps could instead drum up a lot more money for election campaigns – given that the GOP tends to be supported more by rich old white men than the Democrats.
So what we could be looking at for the future is lots more nasty (and nastier) campaigning by a very rich, very out of touch, but very well funded Republican party?
If so, I weep for America.
I wuz a-thinkin’ earlier today – what if the 99% congenially acquiesced to the 1%’s holding such wealth, so long as the 1% held their wealth (beyond the first $5M) in the form of physical private and personal property, and had to tend to and maintain it themselves? I.e., they themselves had to mow the yards and clean the toilets and wash their own drawers, clean up their own kitchens, etc.