With its ruling today, 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. This ruling gives the special interests and their lobbyists even more power in Washington–while undermining the influence of average Americans who make small contributions to support their preferred candidates. That’s why I am instructing my Administration to get to work immediately with Congress on this issue. We are going to talk with bipartisan Congressional leaders to develop a forceful response to this decision. The public interest requires nothing less.Uh-oh! Whenever they use the term “bipartisan” you know they’re trying to sucker us. It’s become as transparent as their disingenuous names for bills like the so called “Stimulus” which was supposed to fund “shovel ready jobs” and instead went to non-existent zip codes. Our unemployment rate went up dramatically.
But why is Obama so upset about the decision? He’s upset by unions and special interests donating large sums of money to candidates? This is the president who took $60 million from SEIU members and was visited by its head, Andy Stern, more than any other person last year. Obama’s “outrage” deserves a closer look.
First, why was this law written? And why did George Bush sign it?
The so called the “Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act” (remember what I said about “bipartisan”?) was supposed to solve campaign corruption and put an end to “soft money” in elections. They characterized it as the influence of the “rich and powerful.” What it did was shut down free speech for certain groups. If you wanted to help or hurt a candidate, support or defeat a law, you had to be a rich individual or a political party like George Soros or the Democrats.
If you and a bunch of people formed a group and pooled your money to support or fight some politician, sorry. If you were a company or corporation trying to fight laws that would have bankrupted or hurt you, sorry. If you were a union, sorry. But it went much further than that.
In typical fashion. the authors of the bill and its supporters puffed themselves up to declare how they were putting an end to corruption in Washington politics. They were going to “clean up the town” which is like saying they’re going to tidy up the sewers. What followed in the bill’s wake is arguably one of the most corrupt periods in American politics: an age of rampant disregard for what the public thinks by feral politicians drunk on their own hubris.
When he was running for president, George Bush called the McCain-Feingold ban on soft money a suicidal move for Republicans. His conservative supporters hated the bill and never forgave McCain. Yet as president Bush signed it, merely complaining that the bill was “flawed,” but those parts he didn’t like would likely be shot down by the Supreme Court. By signing it Bush could look bipartisan at a time when he was attracting major criticism for his actions leading to the pending Iraq war.
The bill was challenged multiple times over the years that followed, and bits of it were chipped away in the courts, but the major provisions survived intact. Until in the last election, a group called Citizens United tried to air a documentary critical of Hillary Clinton inside the timeline prohibited by the law. They challenged the FEC. Thus we come to the Supreme Court’s decision.
Justice Anthony Scalia ruled that the law was unconstitutional on First Amendment grounds:
The Amendment is written in terms of “speech,” not speakers. Its text offers no foothold for excluding any category of speakers, from single individuals to partnerships of individuals, to unincorporated associations of individuals, to incorporated associations of individualsIn a 5 to 4 decision, the provisions about corporations and unions was overturned. Nothing whatsoever about foreign donations. The president was blatantly dissembling on that claim.
Indeed, to exclude or impede corporate speech is to muzzle the principal agents of the modern free economy. We should celebrate rather than condemn the addition of this speech to the public debate.
President Obama and other progressives want you to fear that “evil corporations” will now decide who gets elected. But let’s be real here. The New York Times and MSNBC are part of large corporations and they are quite blatant in their support of candidates, or in attacking others. The law was used in a discriminatory fashion because that’s how progressives see free speech. “You’re free to agree with us.”
Notice that it was the progressive justices on the Court who dissented on this opinion.
The administration had big plans for limiting free speech on talk radio, the internet, Fox News and any other conservative outlets they don’t like. This decision took the wind out of their sails. If the law had stayed they could have used it as a weapon against candidates in elections. Scalia noted that books, TV shows, movies could all be banned as a result. Notice which party likes to ban such things. Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911 could have been banned under the law, but it wasn’t. Despite the fact it was not only false on so many fronts, it was critical of a sitting president during wartime. But Bush let it go. But the FEC, which had Democrats in it at the time, banned the Citizens United Hillary documentary.
Free speech got a reprieve under this ruling. But those who want to block political dissent will not stop in trying to control who can speak and who can’t. They want to pick and choose who wins. The president promised he would “develop a forceful response to this decision.”
We have to make up our own forceful response to to stop any more attempts to steal our liberty by those who would kill it.
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