This morning the New York Times editorials includes an opinion piece from Adam Cohen in which Mr. Cohen recoils in horror at the prospect of the Supreme Court’s rescinding the ban on corporate political contributions:
The court’s conservative majority has been aggressively championing the rights of corporations, but overturning the contributions ban would take it to a new level. Corporations have enormous treasuries, and there are a lot of things they want from government, many of which clash with the public interest.
If the ban is struck down, corporations may soon be writing large checks to the same elected officials whom they are asking to give them bailouts or to remove health-and-safety regulations from their factories or to insert customized loopholes into the tax code.
If the conservative justices strike down the ban, they would be doing many things they disavow. They would be substituting their own views for the will of the people, expressed through Congress. They would be reading rights into the Constitution that are not expressly there, since the Constitution never mentions corporations or their right to speak. And they would be overturning the court’s own precedents.
I have no problem whatever with prohibiting contributions not just from corporations but from anything other than individual constituents. However, it does seem unbalanced to allow political contributions from some institutions and not from others.
I think Cohen has it wrong about the nature of the case before the Supreme Court. Nobody is challenging rules regulating direct contributions to candidates by corporations. The case deals with independent spending on political issues prior to an election. Specifically, a group made a pay-per-view movie on Hillary Clinton that cast her in a negative light. It would be interesting to hear what Michael Moore thinks about whether his production company can air movies containing criticisms of Republican candidates during the “time out” period.
Legal question: under the law (or at least campaign contribution law), how are individuals defined as compared to a corporation, union or other multi-party entity?
Drew, I don’t know the answer, but my assumption from what I’ve read is that there are sets of campaign laws that effect everybody, a higher set of laws for corporations and labor unions, and an even higher set of laws for political action committees.
Also from the fines levied on politicians like Pelosi that help make these laws, I gather the rules are quite obscure.
PD –
You’re right that campaign-finance laws are obscure, and because of that, it’s extremely hard for challengers to unseat incumbents, especially if they’re part of a third-party that doesn’t have the resources to wade through all that paperwork/legalese.
For this and on free speech constitutional grounds, I think there should be no restrictions on political contributions for anybody.