Good news, everyone! The Supreme Court has struck another blow for the rights of our most precious resource, Ridiculously Wealthy People in America to practice free speech by direct contributions to candidates and parties. Lyle Denniston at SCOTUSBlog:
The Supreme Court pressed ahead on Wednesday with the majority’s constitutional view that more money flowing into politics is a good thing — even if much of it comes from rich donors. By a five-to-four vote, the Court struck down the two-year ceilings that Congress has imposed on donations to presidential and congressional candidates, parties and some — but not all — political action groups.
The main opinion delivered by Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., said confidently that corruption in politics will be kept in check by caps — left intact — on how much each single donation can be. Removing the ceilings on the total amounts that may given in each election cycle will not undermine those limits, Roberts predicted.
Boy, nobody's going to bother giving a bunch of checks for $2,600. That would mean writing. RIch people hate writing!
The decision was not as sweeping as the Court’s ruling four years ago, removing all restrictions on what corporations and labor unions can spend of their own money in federal campaigns (Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission), which has led to billions of dollars spent on politics. Even so, the practical result of the new ruling is almost sure to be that wealthy individuals will be able to spread their money around among more candidates and political groups.
Donors will get into legal trouble, the ruling emphasized, only if they demand a specific favor in policy or legislation in a direct exchange for the money they give. That is the only kind of corruption that the First Amendment will allow the government to attack, the decision stressed.
The Chief Justice’s opinion said that other recent changes in campaign finance law will work to reduce the risks of abuse, and it offered several other ideas for new limits that it implied might be constitutional. Whether the votes are there in Congress to pass any of those suggestions is problematic.
So, outright bribery is illegal. Anything up to that point impinges on the free speech rights of rich people.
By the way, Justice Thomas made a point of writing a separate opinion that all campaign limits should be eliminated, and our elites should simply be able to purchase politicians outright as our forefathers intended, or something. Don't like it? The Chief Justice's opinion states that unlimited money in politics is basically vile speech, but must be protected anyway.
“Money in politics may at times seem repugnant to some, but so too does much of what the First Amendment vigorously protects,” Roberts wrote. “If the First Amendment protects flag burning, funeral protests and Nazi parades — despite the profound offense such spectacles cause — it surely protects political campaign speech despite popular opposition.”
Awesome. Replace "Money in politics" up there with "Racism" or "Misogyny" or "Antisemitism" and you see where this is all going. And so even cursory limits on buying candidates are now gone, just in time for the 2014 campaign season. Anything short of outright pay for play is now legal and it's open season for the super rich to finish buying our political system.
"In a series of cases over the past 40 years, we have spelled out how to draw the constitutional line between the permissible goal of avoiding corruption in the political process and the impermissible desire simply to limit political speech. We have said that government regulation may not target the general gratitude a candidate may feel toward those who support him or his allies, or the political access such support may afford. They embody a central feature of democracy—that constituents support candidates who share their beliefs and interests, and candidates who are elected can be expected to be responsive to those concerns."
"You give a politician money to support an issue, they support the issue" is a central feature of democracy, yay! So that means, what exactly?
Until today, federal laws prevented an individual from directly giving more than $123,200 to political candidates and committees during any two-year election cycle — an amount already so high that only a few hundred donors reached it in the 2012 election.
After today’s ruling in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, a single donor will be able to give $3.6 million dollars in one election cycle — money that political parties can funnel into specific campaigns with the full knowledge of who gave it.
May the best money/speech win, gentlemen. Chuck Pierce sums it all up:
The five-vote majority in favor of virtually unlimited corporate and individual spending in our elections is a rock solid one. Four days after almost every Republican candidate danced the hootchie-koo in Vegas to try and gain the support of a single, skeevy casino gazillionnaire, the majority tells us that there is no "appearance of corruption" in this unless somebody gets caught putting a slot machine in the Lincoln Bedroom on behalf of Sheldon Adelson. Money talks. Big money repeats itself, over and over, age after age.
And Republican National Committee chair Reince Preibus thinks the ruling is awesome.
"It's not like people are going to be able to write out million-dollar checks to the Republican Party or to an individual candidate," Priebus said Wednesday, a few hours after the ruling, in an interview with MSNBC. "All we're saying is the idea that you have aggregate limits -- in other words, you can't give the full amount to ten candidates running for office around the country, or you can't give the full amount to the Congressional committee, the Senate committee in the RNC, doesn't make any sense."
No, just checks for $123,300. Freedom!
Oh and one last thing, this is the same exact Supreme Court that said that the 15th Amendment is antiquated and doesn't really protect the right of minorities to vote, by the way, when it struck down part of the Voting Rights Act. Money's more important than black people voting, or something.
Just like our forefathers intended, if you recall. America!
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