Maroon Weekly

Any law allowing the national government to restrain how and when any person or group of people can spend their own money on political speech is indeed unconstitutional, dangerous, and abhorrent to our system of government.

Thus the Supreme Court made the right decision recently in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, duly noting that “this case cannot be resolved on a narrower [statutory] ground without chilling political speech, speech that is central to the First Amendment’s meaning and purpose.”

The Court overturned the ban on certain types of interest group advertising within a certain period of time before an election. Under certain provisions of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, “a speaker wishing to avoid criminal liability threats and the heavy costs of defending against FEC enforcement must ask a governmental agency for prior permission to speak.” The ruling also overturned the spending limits imposed on corporations who want to support or oppose candidates with campaign ads. The opinion says, “The Court has recognized that the First Amendment applies to corporations…and extended this protection to the context of political speech

Here is another key passage from the opinion: “Because speech is an essential mechanism of democracy—it is the means to hold officials accountable to the people—political speech must prevail against laws that would suppress it by design or inadvertence…. Premised on mistrust of governmental power, the First Amendment stands against attempts to disfavor certain subjects or viewpoints or to distinguish among different speakers, which may be a means to control content. The Government may also commit a constitutional wrong when by law it identifies certain preferred speakers. There is no basis for the proposition that, in the political speech context, the Government may impose restrictions on certain disfavored speakers.”

The electoral process is not corrupt because money is involved. Money has to be involved because everyone necessarily has to pay in order to get one’s political speech widely disseminated, especially when it comes to TV advertising. The problem with politics is that often the average American doesn’t take the time to study candidates and public policy with careful scrutiny of every political message they hear.

The government merely has an interest in transparency. It doesn’t matter who in America spends money or how much they spend on political speech as long as the public can knows who is spending how much.

Sure, some persons or groups have more money at certain points in time than others and thus have a greater ability to be heard sometimes. But so what? That’s life. The right to free speech is completely different from the nonexistent “right” to be heard by others or the “right” to have your speech amplified relative to someone else’s political speech. No one has a right to stifle others’ political speech by preventing them from spending their own money.

If you want to amplify the ability of your political speech to reach a broader audience, pay for it yourself or raise the money yourself!

Moreover, if a certain party, candidate, person, or interest group (whether leftist or conservative) can’t raise or pool enough money together to compete in the political arena, then the views of that person or association are very likely not that good to begin with! Even policy fools on the left can raise money from the super-rich in America, if not from the American people.

It puzzles me that people on the political left would disagree with the Supreme Court’s ruling. Yes, the plaintiff in the particular case was a pro-life group, but supposed that it was a pro-infanticide group trying to campaign against a pro-life candidate. Leftists and leftist groups should be able to lie to voters 30 days before an election if they want to.

It is the responsibility of voters to be well-informed and sift fact from fiction. It is not the role of government to stifle any political speech by anyone under the false pretense of ridding the system of “corruption.”