Supreme Court strikes down limits on amount of total campaign donations by individuals
Not the ceiling on each campaign contribution, mind you, but their total. The vote was the very familiar 5-4:
Wednesday’s decision in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission…did not affect familiar base limits on contributions from individuals to candidates, currently $2,600 per candidate in primary and general elections. But it said that overall limits of $48,600 by individuals every two years for contributions to all federal candidates violated the First Amendment, as did separate aggregate limits on contributions to political party committees, currently $74,600…
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for four justices in the controlling opinion, said the First Amendment required striking down the limits. “There is no right in our democracy more basic,” he wrote, “than the right to participate in electing our political leaders.”
…The decision chipped away at the central distinction drawn by the Supreme Court in its seminal 1976 campaign finance decision, Buckley v. Valeo. Independent spending, the court said in Buckley, is political speech protected by the First Amendment. But contributions may be capped, the court said then, in the name of preventing corruption. The court added that aggregate contribution limits were a “quite modest restraint upon protected political activity” that “serves to prevent evasion” of the base limits.
Wednesday’s decision concerned only contributions from individuals. Federal law continues to ban contributions by corporations and unions.
Seems to me that the lines that are drawn are quite arbitrary. Leaving aside for a moment the dubiousness of asserting that the capping of campaign contributions actually “prevents corruption” (I maintain that where there’s a will to be corrupt, there’s a way), it seems just as arbitrary to limit those contributions to $2,600 per candidate as to limit them to $48,600 total every two years.
Why one party versus another would be squawking (Democrats) about this decision I don’t know—except of course as all-important theater (“we’re for the little guy, and against corruption”), because there are plenty of rich and mega-rich individuals on both sides that will take advantage of it. Corruption and the buying of candidates for favors will continue apace—as it probably always has, laws or no.
Corruption and power go hand and hand, and the best we can do to prevent the combination in our elected officials is to have an educated and aware populace willing to reject the corrupt (good luck, you say). The other way to reduce corruption would be to limit the power of those elected officials, which would involve limiting the power of government itself. Even that doesn’t stop corruption, of course; the most it probably does is to reduce it in the public sphere a bit and leave it more to the private sphere. Perhaps it merely shifts the balance, which leaves us with the following question: which is worse, public or private corruption? I maintain it’s the former, because the power of the government is greater. On the other hand, we can (at least theoretically) vote the bums out.
The sad thing about this vote was the 5-4 margin. Guess we always knew the 4 Liberal Judges were simply statists in black robes. 🙁 Roberts got it right this time. Doesn’t make up for ObamaCare vote but it was the right vote.
stat·ism (stÄ′tÄz′əm)
n.
The practice or doctrine of giving a centralized government control over economic planning and policy.
Yes, government corruption is worse.
“Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.”–George Washington
Putting DC back into the box of the Constitution would not eleminate corruption, but there certainly would be fewer opportunities for corruption.
As far as political corruption is concerned it’s obviously impossible to eradicate. However, one way of limiting it in DC is through term limits. The problem with that solution is for term limits to pass requires the consent of those people who you are trying to impose the limit on.
Neo’s conclusion that the lines drawn by the Court are quite arbitrary is inescapable and irrefutable.
The arbitrariness of the Court often takes on compromises where principles ought to determine. In that way, the Court is de facto legislating with its compromises that leave principles in the dust.
I mean, overall limits and limits to political party contributions violate the 1st Amendment, but limits to individual candidates do not? Where is logic to be found in this?
“Where is logic to be found in this?”
Principles, logic, and rationality are for people like the tea baggers. 19th century weakness in the meterosexual 21st century.
Without exception, every improvement to the ‘system’ — such as it is — seems to confer even higher restraints upon outsiders breaching the Beltway — or any political office.
Even in modern America, the crony-politician axis is robust.
It’s the number one unifying thread among the Fortune 400, Big Banks, Wall Street, and Big Export, Big Agriculture, Big Pharma, Big Medicine, Big Education, … aka: ‘The Bigs’.
We’ve, stepwise, totally adopted the economic structures of corrupted, imperial Europe.
Our biggest entrepreneurs: drop outs.
If every Big Name came from Ivy, there’d be no surviving its group think.
And how many bribes and media parties do they get, this “Court”, if they file conclusions that their social circle of socialites like?
From today’s WSJ and pasted here with my big Amen:
“If there is no corruption concern in giving nine candidates up to $5,200 each, it is difficult to understand how a tenth candidate can be regarded as corruptible if given $1,801, and all others corruptible if given a dime,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote. “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.” Well said, and we especially like the dig at newspapers that think it’s fine for Congress to limit everyone else’s speech but theirs.
“These usual suspects will now be wailing anew about “big money” in politics, but the reality is that the biggest winners in McCutcheon may be the political parties. The campaign-finance reformers have empowered the wealthy by limiting contributions to parties, which can have a moderating impact on campaign messages. If parties have more money to donate, then Super PACs financed by the superrich might have less influence.
“We wish the Court had gone further and overturned all of Buckley, as Justice Clarence Thomas urged in his concurring opinion. As he put it, Buckley is now “a rule without a rationale” given how much the Court has eroded its original logic. But the Justices didn’t need to go that far to overturn overall donor limits, and Chief Justice Roberts prefers incremental legal progress. Justice Thomas is nonetheless a John the Baptist on political speech, and the current majority may vindicate his logic in a future case.
“We hope it’s soon given the pernicious doctrine laid out in the dissent joined by all four liberals. “The First Amendment advances not only the individual’s right to engage in political speech, but also the public’s interest in preserving a democratic order in which collective speech matters,” wrote Justice Stephen Breyer.
“Collective speech” sounds Orwellian as a legal doctrine that invites government as a leveller of free speech and is alien to the U.S. constitutional tradition. The scary thought is that the Court is only one heart attack away from gutting the core promise of American liberty.”
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The scary thought is that the Court is only one heart attack away from gutting the core promise of American liberty. We survive as the greatest political creation in the history of mankind only by a thread, and the thinnest of threads at that. Obama can still get it done.
Even without Hussein leading the way and taking the frontal blows, the Leftist alliance has vast untapped resources left to mobilize still for the greatest cause of them all: human utopia through human perfect slavery.
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