Submitted by Elaine Magliaro, Weekend Contributor
First, there was Citizens United. Now, we have the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in the McCutcheon case. It does appear that our country’s campaign finance laws may have been “eviscerated”—as noted by Justice Breyer when he wrote that, taken together with Citizens United, McCutcheon “eviscerates our Nation’s campaign finance laws, leaving a remnant incapable of dealing with the grave problems of democratic legitimacy that those laws were intended to resolve.”
Corporations are people…money is speech. The more money one has to spend…the more “speech” one can afford to buy—especially where political campaigns are concerned.
Dahlia Lithwick (Slate), in writing about Chief Justice John Roberts after the court’s ruling in the McCutcheon case, said that it seemed weird: “The man takes the Metro to work, and yet he handily dismisses what every human American knows to be true: That if dollars are speech, and billions are more speech, then billionaires who spend money don’t do so for the mere joy of making themselves heard, but because it offers them a return on their investment.”
Amy Davidson (The New Yorker) said that Roberts relied on a very narrow measure of corruption in the McCutcheon ruling: “Ingratiation and access … are not corruption.” She added that the argument, in effect, is that political parties themselves cannot be corrupted: “There is a clear, administrable line between money beyond the base limits funneled in an identifiable way to a candidate—for which the candidate feels obligated—and money within the base limits given widely to a candidate’s party—for which the candidate, like all other members of the party, feels grateful.”
Roberts wrote, “Congress may target only a specific type of corruption—‘quid pro quo’ corruption.” Roberts explains what isn’t “quid pro quo” with regard to spending large sums of money on elections:
Spending large sums of money in connection with elections, but not in connection with an effort to control the exercise of an officeholder’s official duties, does not give rise to such quid pro quo corruption. Nor does the possibility that an individual who spends large sums may garner “influence over or access to” elected officials or political parties. And because the Government’s interest in preventing the appearance of corruption is equally confined to the appearance of quid pro quo corruption, the Government may not seek to limit the appearance of mere influence or access.
SOURCES
Justice Roberts Hearts Billionaires: The chief either doesn’t believe, or doesn’t care, that money corrupts politics. (Slate)
A Blistering Dissent in ‘McCutcheon’: Conservatives Substituted Opinion for Fact (Moyers & Company)
Justice Roberts Defends the Embattled Rich in McCutcheon (The New Yorker)
The John Roberts Project (The New Yorker)
Elaine – your posters all think that only Republican donors are evil. That is what/who I am speaking to.
Elaine – my mind picks up patterns. When you have a thread (I guess that is what we would call this), you continually fertilize it with more and more liberal postings backing up your original take on the subject. This morning you dropped four new ones? More? You are the only blogger who works like that. Everyone else might (and I say might) add new material if they are refuting a particular argument from somebody.
Where most threads die after a day, you seem to keep yours going, resurrecting it with new (rehashed material). I think you kept that one going for 10 days. I was personally impressed. That was a major effort.
Paul, Wow!!! I am truly impressed by that admission and will bookmark it w/ pleasure.
Certain billionaires are buyers of politicians in both parties. But, I have come to see the dynamic I saw as a PI many times. People are so entrenched in what they believe they could pass a polygraph. That pathology never ceases to fascinate me.
Paul,
I guess you missed a comment that I made much earlier in this thread:
http://jonathanturley.org/2014/04/20/chief-justice-roberts-and-mccutcheon-v-federal-election-commission/#comment-1026890
Elaine M.
Paul,
There are wealthy Democrats/Liberals–as well as rich Republicans/Conservatives–who contribute big money to political campaigns. I’m against big money buying politicians/politcal favors/legislation that benefits them. I don’t care if the wealthiest contributors are red or blue. Their money perverts our system of government.
Chrissake Paul! George Soros is a good billionaire, one of the very few and The Koch Brothers are evil billionaires. Now, drink your Kool-Aid, and shut up!
Paul,
This is a blog–not a major national news network. You can leave as many comments as you like on this thread–as can anyone else. No one is stopping you–except for the spam filter…when it’s cranky.
Paul, You’ve just been given a lot of homework, and “You better do it young man or you’ll be here after school!” Elaine LOVES to still give homework assignments. Occupational hazard.
rafflaw,
I think some right-wingers may find this court ruling could pose a problem at times. They want the wealthy to be able to donate as much as they choose to political parties/campaigns–just as long as the rich people/organizations making donations aren’t George Soros or liberals or unions.
Nick – I don’t do homework.
+++++++++
Elaine – it is nice that you recognize that Soros, liberal pacs and unions donate, too. There is hope for you yet. 🙂
Elaine – and you don’t think constantly linking new sites with the same opinion is tilting the playing field?
Paul,
I see you don’t want to answer the questions that I asked you about George Soros. I guess when you have an opinion on a subject/issue and constantly repeat your talking points it’s called “leveling the playing filed.” Interesting.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/nov/17/fox-news-glenn-beck The right wing is obsessed with George Soros.
Elaine – thought your questions were rhetorical. You got my answer.
Elaine – just leveling the playing field because I think I know where all this is going. If you are progressive, you have a meme that has to be completed if you are talking about money in politics. Just making sure we see both sides of the coin, or maybe the only side of the coin.
Elaine,
Great links! Keep them coming. Especially ones like the Brennan Center article that exposes the nonsense that the Roberts Court spews on campaign finance.
rafflaw – ah yes, the Brennan Center, another Soros funded media tank.
Paul,
You seem fixated on George Soros. Are you a fan of his? Are you going to keep bringing up his name? Are you in favor of his spending millions in campaign donations?
If you don’t want to read what I’ve posted–don’t read what I’ve posted. You’re not the only person who reads this blog. I don’t tailor my posts and comments for you.
Compulsive linking. We need an intervention.
John Roberts’ humiliating arrogance: Wingnuts reveal contempt for democracy
Chief justice’s latest blow to campaign finance usurps the role of Congress, a legal expert explains
JOSH EIDELSON
4/3/14
http://www.salon.com/2014/04/03/john_roberts_humiliating_arrogance_wingnuts_reveal_contempt_for_democracy/
Excerpt:
The Roberts Court’s five conservative justices dealt a fresh blow to campaign finance reform Wednesday, quashing overall limits on campaign contributions.
“The interests of the 99 percent … are going to be further drowned out,” argued attorney Chisun Lee, counsel for New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice. Lee accused Chief Justice Roberts, who wrote Wednesday’s controlling opinion (McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission), of misrepresenting the issues, narrowing the definition of corruption, and substituting the courts’ judgment of the facts for elected officials’. A condensed version of our conversation follows.
What will this decision mean for U.S. politics, and where in particular will the impact be felt?
It elevates the power of the wealthy donor, the person who can afford to spend more than six figures in a federal election cycle … even further above the rest of us in the 99 percent. The court has said that contributing money to buy access to the political process is what democracy is all about. And this furthers the power of elites in American politics today, and we’re going to be working very hard to beat that back.
How is the median American citizen going to be affected by this?
The average American citizen’s voice in politics will have to compete that much harder against special interests, who can now spend exponentially more money to gain influence over the political process. How this will play out in specific policy decisions, no one can say today. But the interests of the 99 percent, or even the citizen of moderate means, are going to be further drowned out by the greater power of wealthy donors.
In that controlling opinion, Justice Roberts writes that, “The Government may no more restrict how many candidates or causes a donor may support than it may tell a newspaper how many candidates it may endorse.” Why do you disagree?
What we disagree with is the elevation by Chief Justice Roberts’ opinion of the right of the wealthy donor to buy influence, to the level of the freedom of the press. And we do disagree that that is what the First Amendment stands for.
Elaine – are you going to roll out every liberal rag this morning? I hate to say this, but if you’ve read one, you’ve read them all.
Legalized Corruption and the Twilight of Campaign-Finance Law
In McCutcheon v. FEC , the Supreme Court finds that those whose lack of money stifles their voices are simply losers in a fair democratic system.
GARRETT EPPS
APR 2 2014
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/04/legalized-corruption-and-the-twilight-of-campaign-finance-law/360051/
Excerpt:
After Wednesday’s execrable decision in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, we are likely to hear more bashing of the Court’s 2009 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. But McCutcheon’s roots lie much deeper than Citizens United, in these words from the Court’s first major campaign-finance decision, Buckley v. Valeo (1976):
the concept that government may restrict the speech of some elements of our society in order to enhance the relative voice of others is wholly foreign to the First Amendment.
Although this passage does not reappear until page 18 of the Court’s four-justice plurality opinion in McCutcheon, they were almost the first words out of Chief Justice John Roberts’s mouth when he announced the decision from the bench Wednesday. They remove any consideration of civic equality, or of a right to be heard as well as to speak, from the ongoing debate about money in politics. Over the years, they have corroded the structure of campaign-finance regulation, and Wednesday, as Justice Stephen Breyer said in a forceful dissent from the bench, they laid it waste.
Roberts said Wednesday that neither Congress nor the states can regulate campaign finance “simply to reduce the amount of money in politics.” This prohibition extends to regulation of contributions, which he said involve “the right to participate in choosing our political leaders.”
All of which means, in effect, that the more money flowing through the system the better. Those who, from lack of money, are muted or excluded from the process are simply losers in a fair democratic system.
Elaine – any liberal candidate who thinks they have gotten too much money can give it back. I am sure they will all do this.
The Pro-Money Court: How the Roberts Supreme Court Dismantled Campaign Finance Law
David Earley, Avram Billig
April 2, 2014
http://www.brennancenter.org/analysis/pro-money-supreme-court
Excerpt:
The Supreme Court’s McCutcheon v. FEC decision further increases the influence of big money in elections. But McCutcheon is just the latest in a long string of cases weakening campaign finance rules. Since Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito joined the Court in 2005 and 2006 respectively, six decisions have significantly reshaped the legal landscape dictating how much big money can flow into political races. Here is some background on what the Court did, how it affected American elections, and what could happen next.
2007: Federal Election Commission (FEC) v. Wisconsin Right to Life, Inc.
The SCOTUS Ruling: The Court struck down a law regulating sham issue ads — television advertisements that clearly target specific candidates, but avoid regulation by posing as “issue” ads. For example, an advertisement referring to a candidate by name close to the election, but instead of explicitly advocating voting for or against the candidate, tells the viewer to “call Rep. Smith and tell him to stop corporate polluters.”
The Majority Opinion: Chief Justice Roberts on the continued regulation of issue ads: “Enough is enough. Issue ads like WRTL’s are by no means equivalent to contributions, and the quid-pro-quo corruption interest cannot justify regulating them.”
The Dissenting Opinion: Justice Souter: “Neither Congress’s decisions nor our own have understood the corrupting influence of money in politics as being limited to outright bribery or discrete quid pro quo; campaign finance reform has instead consistently focused on the more pervasive distortion of electoral institutions by concentrated wealth, on the special access and guaranteed favor that sap the representative integrity of American government and defy public confidence in its institutions.”
The Result: By rejecting Congress’s decision to regulate political spending, the Court encouraged the creation of more and more political ads that circumvent campaign finance law by leaving out “magic words” such as “vote for” or “vote against.” As any voter who lives in a battleground state knows, these ads now dominate many elections, often funded by shadowy groups that do not reveal their donors.
2008: Davis v. FEC
The SCOTUS Ruling: The Court struck down the so-called “Millionaire’s Amendment,” which had permitted congressional candidates facing wealthy opponents who spent more than $350,000 of their own money on the race to raise larger contributions until they achieved parity with their wealthy opponents.
The Majority Opinion: Justice Alito: “While [the law] does not impose a cap on a candidate’s expenditure of personal funds, it imposes an unprecedented penalty on any candidate who robustly exercises that First Amendment right.”
The Dissenting Opinion: Justice Stevens: The law “does not impose any burden whatsoever on the self-funding candidate’s freedom to speak, it does not violate the First Amendment, and . . . it does no more than diminish the unequal strength of the self-funding candidate.”
The Result: Opponents of extremely wealthy candidates are left without an effective way to overcome their significant financial disadvantage. By striking down the “Millionaire’s Amendment,” the Court helped to ensure that Congress would continue to be dominated by the very wealthy, a state of affairs recently described by the Center for Responsive Politics.
What John Roberts Doesn’t Get About Corruption
Quite a lot, it turns out.
By ZEPHYR TEACHOUT
April 14, 2014
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/04/what-john-roberts-doesnt-get-about-corruption-105683.html#.U1UdYF50VhA
Excerpt:
In McCutcheon, as in Citizens United v. FEC, the 2010 case that laid the groundwork for last week’s decision, the lead opinion uses quid pro quo as kind of Latinate talisman that can get judges out of the mess of actually balancing difficult questions of democracy. The problem is that, like a lot of talismans, it looks older and more genuine than it is. It is actually only a few decades old, and doesn’t have the magic they think it does. Until the court mentioned it in Buckley v. Valeo, the 1976 case that struck down expenditure limits for the first time, it was not a major part of corruption law, and until Justice Sandra Day O’Connor was replaced by Samuel Alito, no majority opinion had used it to define the outer limits of corruption.
The chief justice has one thing right: Quid pro quo is indeed a Latin phrase. However, he got almost everything else about it wrong. First, its historical legal roots lie not within corruption, but in contract law. It refers, in that context, to the idea of relatively equal exchange between parties. In the absence of relative equality—quid pro quo—a court might question whether there was an actual contract. If I give you a dollar, and you give me a mansion, our contract would lack quid pro quo.
In fact, the phrase “quid pro quo” appeared less than 100 times in all state and federal bribery and extortion cases before 1976. There are a handful of cases in which the language of quid pro quo shows up in bribery discussions, but not as one of the elements of, or an essential feature of, bribery. Most of the time, though, it was used in the historical “equality of exchange” sense. In cases holding that no quid pro quo was required to prove extortion, the courts meant that the illegal deal didn’t need to be equal or fair.
When quid pro quo was mentioned in the per curiam opinion Buckley, it was not as a definition, but in passing. These are the relevant passages: “To the extent that large contributions are given to secure a political quid pro quo from current and potential office holders, the integrity of our system of representative democracy is undermined.” And: “Assuming, arguendo, that large independent expenditures pose the same dangers of actual or apparent quid pro quo arrangements as do large contributions, § 608(e)(1) does not provide an answer that sufficiently relates to the elimination of those dangers.” Neither of these passages takes on the task of defining corruption by reference to quid pro quo, or explains what quid pro quo means.
No reasonable reading of Buckley limits all corruption to quid pro quo corruption. Elsewhere in the opinion, the court is quite clear that it is concerned with more than quid pro quo, and more than just “explicit and blatant exchanges.” No matter: After Buckley, several of the justices attempted to make the phrase the epitome of corruption, instead of an example of it.
Elaine – regardless of what you and I think about it or what liberal/progressive blogs you post here, it is what it is. George Soros and Mike Bloomberg get to spend more money buying candidates. You could too, if you had the money, actually, your old teacher’s union will try.