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US Supreme Court Expected Political Ad Transparency
T Murphy writes "The Supreme Court, when ruling that corporate and union political donations were allowed under free speech, assumed the source of the donation would be disclosed immediately under current donation laws. Due to loopholes, this has not been the case, eliminating the hoped-for transparency the Supreme Court ruled to be vital to democracy. Justice Kennedy, who sided with the majority on the ruling, has been called naive for his expectation that there would be greater transparency. In the meantime, campaign spending for House candidates alone is expected to reach $1.5 billion."
Kennedy has always attempted to be a fair mediator between the left and right impulses on the Court. But he really blew it on this one. His attempt at moderation in this case has taken an already out-of-control problem and made it much worse. This ruling will ensure that individual citizens are forevermore completely and totally drowned out in our government by corporate interests and their puppet foundations/non-profits. It was almost that way *already*, but now the big interests won't even have to *try* to hide their bribery. And, thanks to this, nothing short of a Constitutional amendment will ever stop corporate control of the government now (and good luck getting a 2/3's majority in a Congress owned by those corporations). Thanks Anthony!
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I call bullshit. The court knew exactly what it was doing and knew that loopholes big enough to drive a dump truck full of money through were in place.
When they made the ruling, I agreed with their judicial logic, but that was a case where very clearly the ruling was not in the good of the general population.
The Supreme Court needs to concerns itself with protecting the rights of the individual, not the good of the general population. Otherwise we'll end up with a tyranny of the majority.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
The problem is not corporate/union donations to individuals, the problem is one of transparency. Focus on that and on closing the "loopholes" mentioned in the summary, rather than beating your chests about the supposed unfairness surrounding the act of individuals joining together to pool their resources for political change. Anything else is merely a red herring.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
Contributions may only come from registered voters (and with the current $2000 limit)
That would exclude money from corporations.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Just for reference:
The Canadian election system limits campaign spending to roughly $20 million per major party. The full amount of money allowed in our election is somewhere around $60 million. It costs more to actually run the polling booths. We have a population roughly one tenth of the US. Taking a rough stab at it, you're spending $2.5 Billion for your midterm elections. Or about four times the amount per capita as us.
Additionally, in our system, a large percentage of that is publicly funded. And the maximum corporate donation is $1000. We have problems with corporate interests and lobbyists in Canada. You guys don't have a problem with it: you're OWNED by corporate interests.
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Perhaps you're not aware, but the Supreme Court didn't "make [a law] that depend[s] upon [an]OTHER law". The Supreme Court doesn't make laws, period.
The Court did apparently make assumptions about the implications of a particular interpretation, but that's pretty much unavoidable. It speaks to the excessive complexity of our body of laws that they could not predict the outcome correctly.
While I disagree with the Court's ruling, the I do not find such severe fault as you do with the specific detail of meaning (but apparently failing to say in a binding way) "...following the same rules as everyone else".
I agree that this goes beyond naive. It is almost unbelievable that the Supreme Court would expect greater transparency where it is not explicitly required.
The only thing that makes it believable is the rash of other outrageous -- I will go so far as to say stupid -- Supreme Court decisions recently. I won't go into those, but even so I suspect the older members of the Supreme Court of gradually increasing senility, and the newer members of not having properly studied history... in addition to being overly-politically-motivated. Properly speaking, politics should carry no weight in court decisions. I know that is an idealistic dream, but still that is the ideal.
The thing that makes this ruling by the Supreme Court so outrageous on its face is that corporations simply don't have "rights". They have the legal privilege of acting in business matters as a person. That is all. They do not have a "right" to vote, they do not have a "right" to bear arms, they do not have a "right" to free speech! Sure, individuals within corporations have the right of free speech, but that is not the same thing, and restricting corporate donations does not infringe on that right.
No, it's called corporate oligarchy.
You spelled "plutocracy" incorrectly.
Increasingly, it looks like the U.S. is a republic in name only. These groups spend money on advertising because they believe it's effective and they are probably right. Effectively, the United States is allowing it's wealthiest citizens to buy the laws they favor.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Back in January 2010, Obama gave the State of the Union right after the Court handed down the Citizens United decision. Obama told Congress, with several of the Supremes sitting in the front row, that the decision would allow foreign corporations to influence US elections, which most Americans still realize is a terrible development. Justice Alito, who had just decided in the majority to allow corporations "free speech" by spending unlimited money in US political campaigning, was mad: he angrily mouthed "not true". The corporate mass media attacked Obama for "picking on the justices" by warning Congress and "embarrassing" the court, but of course failed to examine whether it was true.
Less than a year later, we see it was totally true. We see that foreign corporations have invested huge amounts of money campaigning in the 2010 election. Republican candidates have gotten hundreds of $millions spent to elect them, sponsored by corporations including many foreign ones. The "US" Chamber of Commerce (Inc.) collects money from lots of foreign corporations, especially Indian ones that want US jobs shipped there, foreign banks like Credit Suisse and HSBC that want financial reform repealed, and even corporations owned by foreign kings, like the Emir of Bahrain. Foreign kings are spending more in US election campaigns than US citizens.
Whether you think that's OK or not (it is very not OK), Alito was totally wrong. And a jerk about it. Not surprising, since Alito was installed by Bush. Alito swore in his Senate confirmation hearings that he would respect established law, but his Citizens United decision overturned lots of established law, went against the basic understanding that corporations are not people, and recklessly unleashed foreign corporate power on US election campaigns.
He should be impeached. Then he'll be free to skip the State of the Union the way he plans to from now on because he can't stand criticism of his abominable rulings.
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make install -not war
Agreed, the real problem here is corporate personhood (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood).
Businesses have something approaching the full rights of a human being, except, as the quote goes "They (corporations) have no soul to save and they have no body to incarcerate."
Combine this with the ideas of limited liability, proprietary knowledge, and the common practice of boards of directors being friends with the executives they appoint, and what you have is a class of corporate management run amok with little or no accountability to shareholders. Management has access to billions of dollars to spend towards their own interests, which in many cases are not the interests of the shareholders.
That said, I believe the government does have the authority to dissolve corporations, so a repeat felon corporation could be dissolved or fined into non-existance, although I don't know of any time this has happened before. The US guidelines to sentencing organizations (http://www.ussc.gov/2009guid/CHAP8.htm) mention fining an exclusively criminal organization of all its assets, but I see no mention of dissolving repeat offenders. Maybe someone else can chime in here.
Corporations, as an entity made up of people, have just as many rights to speech as any other "entity made up of people". Trade unions, for example.
If the National Education Association can dump tons of money into campaigns, and the SEIU (Oregon state employee union), and the UAW, then so should GM and other corporations be able to do so.
We currently have an incumbent who is painting his opponent as "bought and paid for" because his campaign got a few thousand from a company while the rest of his money came in $100 and similar donations from a large number of people. The incumbent, however, is backed by many of the large unions and has gotten the vast majority of his money from them. Bought and paid for, he says?
Now, you may claim that the unions are speaking with the voice of the members, but that is far from true. They speak with the voice of the leadership. The members are lucky if they can get their politically-based dues back without repercussions.
Far from it. That is why I did not say one word about voluntary collaborations of people formed for specifically political purposes.
Unions are, for the most part, involuntary groupings formed based on employment or occupation, having no political purpose behind them. No, "collective bargaining" is not a political purpose, it is a commercial one.
Then the same rules should apply to an individual who has access to union dues. Those are just as much "corporate assets" as "company money", and in many cases less so. If I own a company then those corporate assets are, indeed, mine.
Each corporation has a stated purpose for existing ...
Just as each union has.
That's your opinion, but not the law. I suggest you contact Ben and Jerry's and tell them that their donations to civic causes are not allowed because they do not fall within the scope of "ice cream business". Or Progressive Insurance, which has that name not because they sell progressive insurance.
Again, your opinion. In my opinion, the government has no right, and indeed no Constitutional authority, to tell me that I cannot spend the corporate assets of a company I own in any way I see fit. And for the potential pedant, I'll add "that is legal for any other citizen to spend his money."
How so? Do you understand that there are corporations that are based on religion operations? How does the freedom of expression of a corporation in any way limit your civil rights?
It's not a big logical step from there to "Corporations have the right to bear arms". That's a scary idea.
How, exactly, does a "corporation" bear arms? Do you mean the people working at a corporation? Yes, they still have their individual rights. They do not lose their inalienable rights when they are hired.
Do you mean "bear arms as part of the corporate operation"? Briggs and Wells Fargo and other armored car services come to mind as corporations that "bear arms" in that sense. Do those corporations scare you? I don't believe that the individuals in that corporation bear arms in violation to laws applicable to individuals, but I can't testify to that. I'm rarely scared by a passing fellow with a gun and a moneybag. YMMV.
Or do you mean the corporation can "bear arms" in some other way? The Remington corporation comes to mind as a corporation that "bears arms" in a generic way -- boxes and boxes and boxes of guns sitting in warehouses. So too, Walmart, K-Mart, Bi-Mart, Gander Mountain, and any other retail corporation that stocks them.
Slippery slope arguments are often silly and convoluted, but in this case it's really *not* a huge jump from "Corporations have *this* Constitutional Right" to "Corporations have all Constitutional rights". One really does imply the other.
I am most disturbed not by the idea that corporations have the rights, but the idea that it is a "slippery slope" to think that having one right means one has them all. Yes, having one right means one has them all. That's part of them being "inalienable".
It is a rare human being who has "a single opinion", or even unchangeable opinions. If we make a "unified, consistent set of opinions" a litmus test for having rights, we've removed any concept of "inalienable" or even "rights".
And, if we make "unified opinion" a litmus test for "corporate" rights, we eliminate trade unions from the playing field of political speech, since the members of such unions rarely, if ever, have a single opinion about any political action.
Anecdotal, but my mom was unable to get her dues back from the Washington State Teacher's Union, when she opposed their political spending.
Comment of the year
I agree that corporations and unions should be treated the same for the purposes of political donations. However I think you will find that all but one union has revenues of less that $20M/yr and the vast majority can only dream of revenues in excess of $1M/yr. The one union with revenues in exess of $20M/yr rakes in $175M/yr which in the grand scheme of things is peanuts. The notion that they can compete on an equal footing with corporate donations in a $1.5B campaign is laughable, the average US CEO's remuneration of $8.5M dwarfs the yearly revenue of all but a handfull of unions.
Note: The source for the union figures is the US DOL, they have a web app where you can look these things up but I used my fragile memory since I can't be bothered finding the link.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.