If you watch cable TV news or have a Facebook account, you’ve probably heard about the latest Supreme Court ruling on campaign finance laws. And if you heard about it from either of those two sources, you’ve probably heard some politically charged and ludicrously simplistic summaries about the ruling and its potential impact.
On the other hand, when you read more sober accounts of
McCutcheon v. FEC, the dithering isn’t all that far off the mark.
In case yr behind on current events, the decision basically does away with aggregate limits on campaign donations in a given election cycle. Before the decision, the limit was $48,600 to all candidates combined and $74,600 to political parties and PACs. Under
McCutcheon, that limit is now “as much as you want", provided that you stick to the limits for each individual candidate, national/local party committee or PAC.
Which sounds reasonable, until you remember how money actually flows between campaigns, parties and PACs, which is why the aggregate limits were imposed in the first place. Now that they're gone, you can pretty much expect politicians, party machines and Big Money players to get very creative in getting around what few limits remain (which they do already).
As you might imagine, I have mixed feelings about the ruling. On the one hand, I get that rich people have the same free speech rights as anyone else, and I gather that Chief Roberts figures that the 1A only protects you from govt censorship, so it’s not his problem if the poor can’t compete for the ear of candidates.
On the other hand, I really feel that he doesn’t have a full understanding of the implications of money and influence on democracy at the expense of people who don’t have either. I think Justice Breyer got it right in his dissent – money talks, and Big Money talks loud enough to drown out Small/No Money. Free speech rights shouldn’t be based on who has the biggest megaphone. If Chief Roberts really
believes Big Money influence is balanced out by the internet (“Hey, if you have a Facebook page, you have a voice”) and the FEC (which currently
isn’t interested in stepping up enforcing its own rules) or that Congress can always fix any loopholes parties might exploit (
this Congress?), he’s kidding himself.
Anyway, I highly recommend
this post and
this post (both from SCOTUSblog) to get a full understanding of the nature of the decision and the likely impact therein.
And for fun, you can also read
this piece from Jonathan Rauch at
The Daily Beast which argues that the problem isn’t that there’s too much Big Money in politics, it’s that there’s
not nearly enough of it.
Essentially he proposes a tradeoff: let people donate insane amounts of money direct to politicians,
on the condition of full transparency. Every penny has to be publicly accounted for, but at least you know who’s buying influence, and you can base yr vote on that. And it will (hopefully) lessen the influence of super PACs who currently get tons of unregulated secret money and are arguably more of a corrupting influence on politicians than Big Money players who donate directly.
It’s an interesting idea. However, I doubt it would spell the end of super PACs. We’ll probably end up with a system where politicians listen to the 1% AND their super PACs. Which is more or less what we have now.
However, that’s also kind of the point – campaign finance laws weren’t really limiting the influence of Big Money in elections anyway, and that’s never going to go away because campaigns just cost too much money, so we might as well push for a deal to make the process as transparent as possible.
Then again, the current SCOTUS would probably strike that down too.
Mo’ money,
This is dF
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