Last week the Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 decision it is a violation of the First Amendment to prohibit corporations and labor unions from airing ads that support or oppose a specific candidate. This decision has garnered strong reactions from both sides of the aisle.
Politico quotes President Barack Obama as saying the ruling “strikes at our democracy itself,” while Republican representative Mike Pence said the ruling “takes us one step closer to the founding father’s vision of free speech.”
That anyone, anywhere has said anything positive about this decision is baffling. There is no question about it: the ruling is terrible. Allowing large multinational organizations to spend millions of times more money than the average citizen will ever see in order to flood the airwaves with ads in support of their interests is a terrifically bad idea if you’ve got an understanding of “democracy” that’s even remotely grounded in reality.
It is also absurd to think not allowing this is somehow a violation of free speech. The assertion that our founding fathers had anything like this in mind when they penned the Bill of Rights is beyond the pale.
In order to understand why this ruling is so terrible we’ve got to take a closer look at the role money plays in politics. Let’s take the U. S. House of Representatives. Since 2000, there have been 2,175 seats up for election in the House: 435 every two years.
Guess how many of these races were decided by cold, hard cash.
Did you guess 2,062? Because, according to data available on OpenSecrets.org, that’s the number of House seats since 2000 that have been won by the candidate who spent the most money in their race. In the Senate, the numbers are only slightly better. Of their 170 seats that have been up for election in the same period, 141 were taken by the bigger spender.
Think about that. In the last ten years, 94.8 percent of House seats and 82.9 percent of Senate seats have gone to the highest bidder. Now think about what unfettered corporate spending in support of individual candidates means.
It means the corporations get 412 Representatives and 83 Senators. And we get the remainder.
Democracy and free speech, indeed.
But this decision very well may, as many have pointed out, only represent a shifting of money that is already in the system. 527 organizations, named after the section of the tax code that spawned them, are not regulated by the Federal Election Commission. Which means they can get however much money they want from whomever they want. They’re only allowed to advocate for or against issues, not candidates. But when you only have two candidates with opposing views on an issue, advocating for that issue is tantamount for advocating for a candidate. So it is quite possible this decision will, for the time being, change very little.
The reason it is a terrible decision in spite of that is because it is an explicit endorsement of unlimited corporate spending in the political arena under the guise of promoting free speech.
Let us hope corporations do not flood the campaign trail with more money than it is already awash in. Let us hope whatever well-meaning legislators find some other way to restrict corporate money in the political sphere. Let us hope this ruling does not, as the New York Times put it, “thrust politics back to the robber-baron era of the 19th century.”
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Mesocyclone 2 years, 3 months ago
While I agree with the premise that politics and money are tied too closely, I disagree with the notion that businesses should not be allowed to spend money on ads in support of a candidate who will defend their interests, as long as it is the business footing the bill for the ads with their own private funds, no public funds are involved, and employees who work for the business are not coerced into voting against their conscience for the candidate officially supported by the company. Show me in the Constitution which Articles and which specific Clauses imply that the federal government has the authority to prohibit businesses from spending their own money on ads that support a particular candidate. There is an important difference between spending money for an advertisement that supports a candidate, and putting money directly into a candidate's pocket. Corporations can spend all the money they like running ads for a candidate, but at the end of the day, it is the voters (we, the American people), who cast ballots at the booth, and so instead of blaming and punishing the Big Evil Rich Corporations for spending money on ads that support particular candidates, why don't we look in the mirror at ourselves, the American people, at our own collective apathy, ignorance, lack of doing the research on the candidate's background, and basically a general lack of effort on our part to be regularly active in the political process except every four years at the Presidential election. Why don't we stop voting for the same two major political parties, and start voting our consciences for the 3rd Party candidate whose views most closely line up with our own views. Why don't we stop drinking in all the propaganda that CNN, FOX, and NBC routinely saturate us with, and do our own homework on the candidates running for office and make our own informed decisions. Every candidate running for office has their own website. A candidate's positions and voting record are pubic information. It's a Google search, folks. We have the power to vote in 3rd party candidates if we really want, but instead we keep collectively deciding as a nation that we're going to keep voting in the Democrats or the Republicans. Is this not the definition of insanity? Trying the same thing over and over again and expecting different results? If we don't like the way things currently are, then here's a novel idea, at the next election, vote 3rd party! Do your own research, inform and spread the word to all your family and friends, and vote your conscience! And if you don't do these things, then don't gripe and blame the businesses and the politicians for your own lack of initiative to be informed and politically active. Yes, money has corrupted the political process to an extent, but we also keep voting in the same two parties, and then we wonder why we're in the mess we're in.