By Charlie Meyer:
A central pillar of this democracy is the concept of “one person, one vote.” OK, I know, the term was originally “one man, one vote,” but leaving out women, slightly more than half of the population, is foolhardy, unless your idea of domestic bliss is a year-round hunting camp. They could become scarce, boys. Living alone with Basset Hounds, I haven’t quite given up on finding the right gal. I’m just a bit short on finding one that wants to put up with me. My social life aside, we have the right and the duty to choose our elected leaders. Our democratic process is the envy of most of the world, until now.
It’s Wednesday as I write this, frantically switching between the word processor and the web browser on my laptop. Apple’s Steve Jobs unveiled the new iPad tablet device, resembling an iPhone fed with way too much Miracle Gro from the Apple gardens in Cupertino, California. OK, I’m a Mac guy, only doing Windows under extreme duress. I’ve been one for more than a quarter-century since the Mac was introduced; a bright point of light in a dark Republican sky then, back when an actor could be President. I’ll admit that hearing what Steve Jobs had to say was further up my “to-do” list than the President’s State of the Union address. OK, I did pause Steve Jobs’ podcast to watch the President. He’s still upbeat, even if the Republicans are bent upon neutering him politically, no matter what is good for America. Mr. Jobs always puts on a good show; he could sell refrigerators to Sarah Palin’s neighbors up there in Seward’s Folly. My point is, ! that in this free society, you and I have a vote. Mr. Jobs, a billionaire CEO, has a vote. Even Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, who looks way too much like Darth Vader without his mask, has a vote. Until the right-wingers on the Supreme Court ruled against common sense restraints against corporate and special interest campaign financing, our vote had pretty much the same clout as the billionaire CEO’s vote. Until now.
The right-wingers Republican administrations put on the Supreme Court apparently want to virtually enfranchise corporate and special interests in their latest decision on campaign financing. The conservatives on the Court have given Dick Cheney’s old pals at Halliburton, and other corporate execs as big a voice in electioneering as their deep corporate pockets allow. Sorry, American elections are not for sale to the highest bidder. Until now.
Near election time, right-wing political groups flood our mailboxes with materials that tend to insinuate that one’s Democratic incumbent/challenger is having a secretive, torrid affair with leftist, subversive femme fatales in the pay of the Evil Empire, or that they will confiscate your shotgun so they can elope with your daughter out of the line of fire. Fathers with sons, and I have one, have long counseled that fathers with daughters, regardless of creed or political belief, have one thing in common: shotguns. American politics generally doesn’t always play nice, nor does it always observe Marquess of Queensbury boxing sportsmanship rules, but it is the environment in which we choose our elected leaders. We have rules to preserve the integrity of the ballot box; it has long been a practice to ban electioneering within a specified radius of a polling station. No political acolyte at the polling place adorned with a “Vote for Smerd” button will be offering ! you a secretive, medicinal swig of Jack Daniels Old No.7 Brand Tennessee Whiskey to help your supposed unease in the voting booth, and vote for their candidate.
There is a legal principle that forming a corporation makes that entity a legal ‘person’, a step removed from its shareholders and investors for the purposes of liability. Is that constructive corporate “person” entitled to all the same Constitutional free speech rights as we flesh and blood persons who generally weren’t the product of billable hours by someone with “Esquire” after their name? No, not in my mind. Unlike our elected representatives. who are supposed to be answerable to “we the people,” the corporation is responsible to its shareholders, who aren’t all of us, or often not even Americans, for that matter. We, through our elected legislators, historically have put limits on corporations, unions, and other special interest groups seeking to influence our vote. The McCain-Feingold Act was enacted because those corporate and other special interest groups sought to influence your vote many times before, not always subtly, nor in our be! st interests. By the way, the McCain who sponsored that bill was Senator John McCain, the Republican who didn’t win the last presidential election. Maybe he didn’t win, in part, because of that wobbly, square wheel from Alaska on his campaign bus. McCain-Feingold provided evenhanded, bipartisan, and common-sense restrictions on electioneering for corporations, special interests, and labor unions. Choosing a candidate is our personal choice that shouldn’t be perverted by oceans of special interest and corporate cash.
McCain-Feingold evenhandedly banned special interests from hijacking our free election process. Flesh and blood persons’ First Amendment rights were never threatened. We are all equal inside that voting booth, or at least we used to be.
Meanwhile, it looks as if I will be eating a lot of peanut butter sandwiches and ramen noodles to afford that sexy new iPad when they go on sale in March. Piglet the Basset Hound isn’t big on sharing her dog food with anyone, even if my vote should be worth as much as billionaire Steve Jobs’ ballot choice.
Congress needs to enact revised campaign financing rules that will pass muster with the Supreme Court. Speaking of the Supreme Court, Associate Justice Samuel “Scalito” Alito needs a trip to the woodshed and lessons in judicial demeanor at a State of the Union Address. Yale must be proud of Alito.
By Stephen Smoot:
It is the end of the world as we know it. Democracy has crumbled and fallen. Panic has hit the streets. Why? The United States Supreme Court ruled that the federal government cannot prohibit corporations from using their general treasury funds to express themselves in a political fashion prior to an election. To listen to Obama, you’d think that the sky had fallen.
The Supreme Court decision, officially called Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission, addressed some troubling aspects of the McCain-Feingold Campaign Financing Act, several judicial decisions, and other laws stretching back to the administration of Theodore Roosevelt. These acts required the federal government to monitor publications, broadcasts, and other forms of speech paid for by corporations if it could potentially reach over 50,000 audience members near an election date. It could literally ban (Supreme Court’s word) political speech in this circumstance. Republicans have pointed out for years that the banning of political speech regardless of who sponsors it flatly violates the First Amendment, especially since American law in most cases treats organizations in the same manner as individual citizens. In Citizens United the Court agreed that Congress could not restrict political expression through corporate or union spending.
Who benefits from this? If you listen to Obama’s hysterics, including his State of the Union cheap shot against one of the primary branches of government, you would believe that oil companies are now well on their way to purchasing elections. He turned this decision into a simple big corporation versus democracy issue. Fact is that major corporations support both parties financially. One has no reason to think that corporately sponsored speech would be much more of a benefit to Republicans than Democrats. Coal companies may tend to back Republicans, but General Electric and others who have invested heavily into green technologies will give more support to liberal Democrats generally. Additionally, labor unions will see prohibitions on their political speech lifted. Many corporations might hesitate to publicly back one party or the other for fear of alienating its market. Labor unions have no such concerns. The balance of political speech now able to be financed a! nd created will probably even out between the two parties.
Some backers of the Supreme Court decision point out that corporate political speech has formed a part of political life for decades regardless of the laws. Are Time Warner, New Corporation, CBS, General Electric/NBC, Disney/ABC, and other entities not large corporations with the freedom to produce politically biased speech to their heart’s content? Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Keith Olbermann, the New York Times editorial staff, and others produce political opinions paid for by corporations that they hope will sway the votes of millions and they speak right up to and including election day. Even the so-called music magazine Rolling Stone, published by a large multimedia firm called Wenner Media LLC, tries to throw its alleged weight into the political process. They usually do so by spasmodically and simplistically attacking anything Republican or capitalist (as if music makers are not capitalists.) Citizens United simply removed the hypocrisy that allowed some c! orporations to finance political speech, but not others.
This case also addressed the larger issues about the law itself. Some believe that the law exists to create a better society and that social goals ought to have priority over rights. In this instance they believed that corporate and union money corrupted the system. That being said, the laws did permit companies and unions to create political action committees as one way to funnel money and influence into the process. In some ways this makes the process worse because voters don’t see “United Mine Workers” or “Massey.” Instead they see a PAC name that they have never heard of and often will not bother to investigate to see where the money really came from. Advocates for campaign finance laws thought they would help eliminate the influence of big business and labor, but actually encouraged them to bury their own influence through legitimate or illegitimate means.
Others believe that rights have a priority over any plans to use law to engineer a better social outcome. Whatever social benefit might come from limiting the monetary influence of corporations and unions, the majority on the court believed that speech rights took precedence. At the end of the day voters make the choice, not the money. Shelley Moore Capito won her first two elections against a Democrat who had almost a 3-1 advantage on her in terms of fundraising. She ran on issues of concern for her constituents, spoke directly to the voters, built up a rapport with them, and won easily. Congresswoman Capito keeps her job by maintaining that strong connection with her overwhelmingly Democratic district.
Big business backed political speech could actually harm a candidate. Gone are the days when General Electric can send a political speaker (in the 1960s, it was Ronald Reagan) on tour to support a party and candidate without accusations flying about corporate control of the process. People have brains and they do get suspicious of those types of relationships. If the day ever comes that corporations and unions obtain a vote for themselves, I will be worried. Until then, I am not concerned about their exercise of free speech.
