Congress Shall Make No Law

[rowyn]

This is why I don't like campaign finance reform laws.

Those cases have also spawned complex, multifactor tests applied by a government bureaucracy to restrict many entities and forms of speech. There are different rules for over 70 different entities, from corporations to partnerships, and the FEC has varying rules for 33 different forms of political speech. Those exceptions mean that while some corporations are prohibited from engaging in political speech, others are not. While General Motors is prohibited, General Electric, which owns NBC and MSNBC, is not because of the exception in the law for political speech by media corporations.

"Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech" is such a pleasantly simple statement. Easy to understand. That's what I like about the Constitution -- it's short and to the point -- and hate about modern law, which is pretty much incomprehensible to everyone. :/

Comments

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

A lot of the laws like that get around the constitution by using the broad powers granted to tax and spend ('applied uniformly' and 'in the public good' are the only restrictions) to make... extremely powerful suggestions for what people should do. I think the campaign finance laws promise a huge subsidy for candidates that adhere to them, but it wasn't huge enough to make either Obama or McCain (who WROTE them) actually do it.

I don't know what mechanism they use to be technically constitutional while restriction people who aren't candidates, but there's probably something or someone would have at least tried to challenge it by now.

It's sad because even though they're really skeezy, without them the huge problem with democracy that's glaringly obvious in retrospect would devour the entire political system and turn it into a festival of corruption and bribery...

Well, okay, actually it didn't even slow that down. But that's what it was supposed to prevent. /:3

[rowyn]

Campaign finance reform is pretty much an ongoing battle between the people passing laws to (theoretically) stop bribery and corruption, and people finding loopholes in the laws, which spawns more laws to close the loopholes, which spawns more loopholes, etc. I think we're well past the point of diminishing returns on the issue, and getting to the point where it'll a crime for bloggers to post on political issues (because someone might've paid them. Or they have an unfair advantage because lots of people read them.) x.x

And the various campaign finance laws have been challenged, lots. I think they withstand challenge because the courts have ruled that spending money <> speech (so you don't have a right to give money to your favorite campaign or issues), and that the first amendment doesn't apply to corporations? I don't think the Supreme Court has weighed in on McCain-Feingold yet.

The process of the government bribing people into doing what it wants by making it really costly not to isn't really the heart of campaign finance reform. The heart of it is (a) banning contributions in excess of $X and (b) banning groups from doing anything that might influence a campaign and exceeds in value the allowed contribution.

[octantis.livejournal.com]

I'd prefer that neither General Motors nor General Electric get to influence politics as corporate entities leveraging financial might. The people IN the corporations can say what they want. I'd also rather that NBC and MSNBC just report what's going on.

But I'm probably being naive.

[rowyn]

I kinda look at it this way:

1) if I want to say "Health care reform is a great idea!", that should be legal.
2) if I want to write an essay about why health care reform should be done, that should be legal.
3) if I want to make a documentary dramatizing the benefits of health care reform, that should be legal.
4) if I need to get money to fund my documentary, that should be legal.
5) if I want to air my documentary during an election month, that should be legal.
6) the difference between "the owners of GM fund my documentary" and "GM funds my documentary" and "NBC funds my documentary" and "I fund my documentary" is not particularly meaningful.

Under current law, somewhere around steps
3-5, the actions described become illegal, and I just don't feel happy about saying "the type of speech you want to make is too valuable and has too much influence on the political process, so we're going to criminalize it." :(

[octantis.livejournal.com]

I don't like it either, but I don't think the differences between those things you described are meaningless either.

There's a line to be found somewhere here, maybe even a really fuzzy one that makes things difficult. It might be that the defining factor is motive. Sure, if you'd like to make a documentary about health care that is meant to provoke thought or even just express your opinion, I'd ideally like you to be able to have the resources for it wherever you might find them. But I also really wouldn't like, say, the board of directors of Eurocorp being able to throw the weight of their corporation behind a giant campaign to push through a health care change that would only benefit Eurocorp at the expense of everyone else. I don't want to say that the type of speech they would make is too valuable and would have too much influence on the political process, but then again I don't want ten dudes to have grossly disproportionate influence based solely on economic might either. And I do believe that the influence they could exert would be substantial and disproportionate.

So it's a conundrum. Some solution other than criminalizing always seems to be better, of course, but I don't know what that other solution would be. I'm hoping some good ideas will come up.

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

Obviously, the solution is to have a computer pick the winner based on what peoples' votes would have been without the influence of advertising and political speech, or the gender, height, and race of the candidate, and so on.

You can use statistical metrics to determine peoples' true poltical leanings based on their habits, and then run a virtual ballot that matches them with the candidate who has the appropriate views based on other algorithms.

The best part is that it'll be so complicated that if it gets it wrong, no one will ever know!

[octantis.livejournal.com]

Haha! Sounds about as plausible as anything I could come up with. XD Bonus: does all the thinking for me!

SCIENCE!

[jurann.livejournal.com]

So, if I get what you're saying... GM should buy CBS (the smallest of the national media outlets anyway) so they can talk about what a jerk Obama was to them. ;D