8 ms·

I knew someone would bring up Citizens United v FEC when I said worst. I know this will be an unpopular opinion on this forum, but I believe that case was decid

• Accujack 6y ago
  Yes. People blame the court for doing the correct (if not right, because courts don't really do "right") thing. The problem is that there's no constitutional amendment making an exception to the first amendment to limit or forbid contributions to campaigns. It should never have been an ordinary law in the first place.
  • ummonk 6y ago
    To be clear, the law does limit contributions to campaigns. What they don't limit is third party organizations spending money on their own ads. Which is as it should be.
  • staticman2 6y ago
    Since money is not speech there is no first amendment issue. There is however a conservative court determined to have the wealthy own politicians.
  • freeone3000 6y ago
    I fundamentally disagree with this, but on different grounds. I absolutely believe that groups of people have fewer rights than individual people. A corporation should have no right against self-incrimination, for instance. An LLC should have no right for freedom of religion. Groups are, by definition, not a monolith, and defending the rights of the group often infringes on the rights of the individual. Extending individual rights to the aggregate is absurd, and the abuses of it lead to the worst outcomes in case-law.
    • SamReidHughes 6y ago
      A church shouldn't have freedom of religion?
      • neuromanser 6y ago
        a church is not a person, it cannot believe in anything. how does a church pray? how does it make a confession? do not antropomorphize companies, it does not compute at all.
        • Thorrez 6y ago
          I agree that the church itself doesn't have freedom of religion. But for the members of the church to have freedom of religion they need to be able to exercise their freedom as an organized group. The end result is the same: the government is limited in what restrictions it can place on the group, because to restrict the group is to restrict the members.
          • mdorazio 6y ago
            I don't understand your argument. The church members individually have the right to practice their religion however they want so long as it doesn't impinge on others' rights or laws. The group aspect really doesn't come into play at all. In the same way, those same individuals can contribute as individuals to whatever cause they choose. The problem is when resources get pooled and an organization rather than its individuals decides where to allocate those resources politically. That's where the parent comment thinks the line should be drawn.
            • rayiner 6y ago
              Very few religious people would consider allowing the practice of religion “without the group aspect” to be “freedom of religion.” That freedom, especially in the United States, necessarily encompasses groups of religious people pooling resources to build houses of worship, educate their children, participate in the community, and advocate for causes.
  • rayiner 6y ago
    > The problem is that there's no constitutional amendment making an exception to the first amendment to limit or forbid contributions to campaigns. Citizens United wasn’t about campaign contributions. It’s already illegal for corporations to donate to campaigns. Citizens United was about whether a 501(c)(4) corporation—just like the ACLU or the NAACP—can be prosecuted for releasing a movie critical of a candidate. Justice Kennedy wasn’t analogizing money to speech—the case was whether the government could control political speech by controlling how a corporation used its money in publishing a movie. Here is the ACLU’s take on a constitutional amendment: https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech/campaign-finance-reform/fixing-citizens-united-will-break-constitution https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech/campaign-finance-refor...
• ecf 6y ago
  Let’s say it loud and clear for everyone to hear. MONEY. IS. NOT. SPEECH
  • ineedasername 6y ago
    I know, and I don't like the decision, but there is a correlation with money none the less. Exercising speech takes resources. I cannot speak to the audience of newspaper readers without either investing capital to create a newspaper or by paying for ad placement in an existing one. Money is not, in itself, speech, but in our society it is integral to exercising that right at any scale much beyond a few individuals. I think the main problem with the decision was the assertion that entities like corporations, rather than simply individuals, have free speech.
    • Lazare 6y ago
      > I think the main problem with the decision was the assertion that entities like corporations, rather than simply individuals, have free speech. The decision did not assert or assume this. It rested on the idea that individual have rights, and they do not lose those rights by acting collectively. If I'm allowed to speak, then I'm allowed to buy and use a printing press so that my speech can be more easily distributed. If I can't afford a printing press, I can go in halves with you, so that we can both print off our pamphlets. If neither one of us can afford a printing press, we can take up a subscription among our friends to buy one. Or to put it another way: The New York Times does not have a free speech right, but the humans who work at and own the New York Times do, and gagging the New York Times would infringe on the rights of those humans. Any law that implies the New York Times can be gagged (eg, because it's a corporation, and thus has no rights) is clearly wrong.
      • staticman2 6y ago
        There is no right to form a corporation in the constitution, so any claim that a corporation has rights is nonsense. And corporations are not just people acting collectively, they are financial instruments that incentivize certain behavior.
• wslack 6y ago
  Giving money is different than speaking. Do we have a right to anonymous speech amplified according to our means?
  • ummonk 6y ago
    Yes, it's called "the press", and freedom of the press is explicitly protected by the government.
• staticautomatic 6y ago
  Corporations don’t have speech interests. The majority’s opinion in Citizens United is premised upon the assertion that they do.
  • dodobirdlord 6y ago
    Sure they do. Corporations are owned by people, and those people have speech interests. If corporations didn’t have the right to free speech then a group of people campaigning for a politics cause would suddenly lose their right to free speech if they formed a corporation to simplify the activities, such as the joint handling of money or purchasing of ads.
    • sjm-lbm 6y ago
      Corporations also get a lot of benefits that individuals or unstructured associations don't - mainly things like liability protection - so it's not like it would be unreasonable to have corresponding limitations on what they are allowed to do. And that's before we get to the point that corporations, as a practical matter, are formed under state laws, so why is the federal government giving them rights? (and that's before the other issues with Citizen's United as a case, regardless of the decision as people usually remember it, but I'm starting to go off a bit..)
      • danhak 6y ago
        > And that's before we get to the point that corporations, as a practical matter, are formed under state laws, so why is the federal government giving them rights? That's an interesting point. Marriages are formed under state law as well, and it doesn't seem controversial to me that the federal government grants that relationship special privileges.
        • Judgmentality 6y ago
          > Marriages are formed under state law as well, and it doesn't seem controversial to me that the federal government grants that relationship special privileges I think the only reason this isn't controversial is because people don't think about it. The fact that people are conditioned to get married, not to mention the tax benefits, is pretty fucking weird if you stop and think about it. Supposedly our country was meant to separate church and state, but it's obvious it was such a new concept that many of the ideas were stolen from the mores of the conventional religions of the time. I mean, why is marriage a legal thing at all? Why is the government involved? It made sense when there was a dowry involved, but today? Nobody cares until they realize what a fucking nightmare getting divorced is, and the number of conditions and loopholes is asinine. It's almost like the lawyers invented it, because divorce lawyers make an insane amount of money on the suffering of others (they are heavily incentivized to push for people to be combative, because they make more money that way - and it's easy to rile people up when custody of children is involved). This is obviously a bit of a rant that went in a weird direction but whatever. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZTOT6DKfZ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZTOT6DKfZ8
• tyre 6y ago
  I would still put Citizens up there. We have rules around elections in the same way that we have some limits on individual speech (yelling fire, and all that) to effect the fundamental right that the First Amendment is meant to protect. Similarly, PACs were an unforeseen (and in some ways unforeseeable to eighteenth century framers) exploit of a well functioning democracy as it relates to people. Kucho vs. Common Cause as well. Gerrymandering is a clear abuse of the system. Kagan’s dissent is heartbreaking.
  • apexalpha 6y ago
    Yeah, but updating the constitution and election laws are congress' job, not the courts.
    • mschuster91 6y ago
      That would assume that there is a working Congress (for the laws) and working intra-state coordination (for constitutional amendments). The reality is that Congress has been locked up ever since the third year of Obama, and since 1971 (26th) there only got one constitutional amendment passed (27th, in 1992). That is the reason why the courts have gotten so important, and why the Supreme Court and other federal justice nominations and their confirmation by the Trump administration will have such long lasting impact - given that there is no input from the legislative, governing has fallen to the executive and judiciary.
      • apexalpha 6y ago
        I understand that, but I disagree you should 'force' the SCOTUS to pick up where Congress stops. Scotus is not where laws or society should be progressing; that should be congress. And of course the founding fathers didn't foresee today's' society, so they included ways to upgrade and amend the constitution and election laws. That congress isn't doing its job is a different debate entirely, but not Scotus' fault.
      • pyronik19 6y ago
        The fact you can't move your agenda forward in the legislature because its "locked up" is a feature not a bug. To then think its appropriate to use the judicial branch to bludgeon your agenda through is an abuse of its intended purpose in our system of checks and balances.
• danaris 6y ago
  The cases that were really decided incorrectly were (and I'm afraid I don't know the actual case names offhand) establishing corporate personhood, and most especially making money equivalent to speech.
• jonstewart 6y ago
  The essential problem, which Justice Kennedy seemed not to understand, is that money is not speech. The easy test to show this as nonsense is quantification, i.e., it’s clearly the case that some citizens have more money than others, but it’s nonsense to think that some citizens have more free speech than others. One of Justice Kennedy’s clerks in 2009-2010 was Misha Tseytlin, a Federalist Society member who undoubtedly helped write Kennedy’s opinion on the Bilski case, which widened the potential for business process patents and considered by many software developers to be a terrible decision regarding the patentability of software. Despite no connection to Wisconsin whatsoever, Tseytlin was later appointed Wisconsin Solicitor General by Scott Walker and worked on many of the voter suppression initiatives in Wisconsin. He’s been party to litigation on behalf of the Wisconsin Tavern League seeking to overturn Governor Evers’s executive order on masks and public gatherings. I’m a part-time resident of the state and grew up there, and it’s distressing to me that a fringe ideologue with no connection to the state continues to do it harm.
  • cabotmoose 6y ago
    Does this quantification argument hold for citizens that are considered public figures? While they might not have more free speech than other citizens, they certainly have a more visible platform to communicate their opinions
    • JetSpiegel 6y ago
      Public Figures != Rich. Bezos has no more free speech than Bernie Sanders, even though Sanders is only a millionaire.
  • specialist 6y ago
    Since Citizen's United, I can think of no effective or fair way to curtail corporate speech. But I can think of dozens of ways to amplify and nurture non-corporate speech. Yes, the torrent of bullshit is crippling democracy. But it's also true that other important speech is still not heard.
  • rhino369 6y ago
    Whether or not money is speech, most of the time speech needs money. Banning spending money on newspaper is banning the newspaper. Banning spending money on advertisement is banning the advertisement. Under the dissenting view in Citizens United, Congress could ban the NYT, WaPo, WSJ, etc. from talking about politics. That's just absurd. Congress could have banned the Federalist Papers! I've always tried to find a middle ground that prevented for profit corporations from spending money. But like 99% of our media is for profit corporations. It doesn't make sense to ban Amazon from political speech, unless they buy the Washington Post, in which case they can do whatever the fuck they want.
• specialist 6y ago
  Yes, and... The only way to win (on campaign spending) is to not play. Moot campaign spending with (lowercase) democratic reforms. Public financing of campaigns, time boxing campaign season, restore fairness doctrine, etc. As Sun Tzu advises, we should not fight on battlefields chosen by our opponents. Fund raising, campaign spending, mainstream media, Freedom Speeches™, presidential debates, ad nauseam, are all tar pits.