Campaign Payola Lives On

In one of the most disturbing Supreme Court decisions in some time, 5 justices voted to overturn Campaign limitations for huge corporations and unions.

The 5-to-4 decision was a doctrinal earthquake but also a political and practical one. Specialists in campaign finance law said they expected the decision, which also applies to labor unions and other organizations, to reshape the way elections are conducted.

“If the First Amendment has any force,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority, which included the four members of its conservative wing, “it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech.”

Justice John Paul Stevens read a long dissent from the bench. He said the majority had committed a grave error in treating corporate speech the same as that of human beings. His decision was joined by the other three members of the court’s liberal wing.

I’d personally like Justice Kennedy to explain to me how a huge multinational corporation is an ‘association’ of citizens. The ruling literally opens the floodgates to big money. Here’s two responses from two very different politicians. This quote comes from the NYT article referenced above.

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader and a longtime opponent of that law, praised the Court’s decision as “an important step in the direction of restoring the First Amendment rights of these groups by ruling that the Constitution protects their right to express themselves about political candidates and issues up until Election Day.”President Obama issued a statement calling on Congress to “develop a forceful response to this decision.”

“With its ruling today,” he said, “the Supreme Court has given a green light to a new stampede of special interest money in our politics. It is a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans.”

Politico suggests the decision will help more Republicans than Democrats to raise funds.

The decision, handed down in a special session of the court, is generally expected to boost Republicans more than Democrats, because corporations and corporate-backed outside groups tend to align with conservatives and also often have access to more money than unions or liberal outside groups.

“No sufficient governmental interest justifies limits on the political speech of nonprofit or for-profit corporation,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority.

In a stinging dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that the ruling “threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions across the nation. The path it has taken to reach its outcome will, I fear, do damage to this institution.”

NPR points to one part of campaign finance reform that remains.

At the same time, NPR’s Peter Overby points out that one important limit remains intact: Corporations still cannot give money directly to federal candidates or national party committees. That limit dates to 1907. The justices also upheld some other restrictions, including disclosure requirements for nonprofit groups that advocate for political candidates.

The original case before the court seemed an improbable vehicle for such a dramatic re-examination of campaign funding regulations.

Brought by Citizens United, a nonprofit group, against the Federal Election Commission, the case presented a seemingly straightforward question: Do campaign finance restrictions on corporate spending apply to Citizen United’s plan to run advertisements for an anti-Hillary Clinton documentary at the peak of her 2008 presidential run?

But the high court ended up in a much broader examination of constitutional issues that questioned the entire system that has been built up over decades to regulate the role of corporate money in politics.

Marc Ambinder at The Atlantic explains what this means to our current financing system which brought about the creation of PACs.

This basically eliminates a middleman: before today, corporations and unions had to set up PACs (political action committees), filed separately with the IRS, that would receive donations. And they did. Corporations and unions spend millions of dollars on elections. Now, however, the accounting firewall is gone, and Wal-Mart or the Service Employees International Union, for instance, can spend their corporate money directly on candidates.

We might as well borrow the jacket labeling idea from NASCAR and assign each candidate a corporate sponsor logo. This is just one more step towards ensuring we’ll all be slaves to big Oil, big Defense, Big Finance, and Big Medicine. Who owns your Senator and Representative?