I don’t think their arguments are sound because they are trying to combine an originalist viewpoint with a hyper corporate one but in they end are they wrong to recognize cash is king?
Yes. It’s absolute corruption. It’s what let Lonnie buy a presidency.
You’re trying to understand the logic behind motivated reasoning. They knew the conclusion they wanted, so they constructed a fig leaf of an argument that 1/3 of people would cheer, 1/3 would defer to the tortured logic by habit of deference to authority, and 1/3 would protest while being alienated from the whole.
If money is free speech then anyone with more money gets more free speech, which isn’t how rights work. You have the same freedoms and limitations to those freedoms that I do, regardless of who has more money. We’re supposed to be equal under the law, but SCOTUS thinks $ome are more equal than others.
anyone with more money gets more free speech, which isn’t how rights work.
The ones with a lot of money are the only ones who have rights anyway.
I’m not disagreeing with you but you’re looking at it as a matter principle. In practice more money does mean more speech and everything else. I, too, believe that the supreme court should be more principled but I also think the supreme court are people. By that I mean, they are the people who make the rules. They aren’t law makers but they put the laws into practice. I give this court zero credit, I honestly do, but isn’t there something honest about what the court has done? What we are seeing now is the law as they see the law exists. It might be deeply wrong from any one persons perspective but if that’s actually how government functions would the law work if we tried to apply it in a different way? Maybe yes, but I would think you would need other large sweeping changes aswell.
The law would work differently if they, as designated interpreters of the law, interpreted the law differently. If they said you can’t have infinite dark money running campaigns because that violates the rights of poor voters, then things would be very different. Plenty of SCOTUS cases have made significant changes to how the law is interpreted and enforced. Congress also seems to very rarely pass laws to counter SCOTUS decisions. So yeah, if we had fewer federalists and conservatives on SCOTUS and more progressives, I think it would have been decided differently, as well as other significant cases.
It stems back to an earlier problem, which is corporate personhood in general and limited liability in particular.
Donations to political candidates must be public, but donations to organizations need not be. But with the fig leaf of corporate personhood, organizations who take in anonymous donations can act as entities to themselves and donate to political candidates. It’s the same reason a company can go broke and owe their vendors and employees millions while the executives enrich themselves. It all comes back to corporate personhood.
Yes.
Yes. I’d highly recommend checking out the 5-4 Podcast episode about Citizen’s United
I cannot recommend 5-4 enough. For anyone who wants to dive into con law it’s definitely a good place to start. I would also recommend radio labs ‘more perfect.’ It has a really strong start but then starts to meander, tho. Could also try ‘what roman mars can learn about con law.’ None are a substitute for a law degree but should at least give you some insight if you ever want to broach the topic.
Yes
My understanding of the ruling you mean is that it decided that freedom of speech includes the right to spend money in order to speak, which is not an extremely far-fetched idea. You may still think the consequences are bad, of course… but let’s focus on what actually happened.
If you don’t own a printing press than freedom of the press is useless. Thus money is a requiremet for speech.
I don’t know any of their reasoning, but money as a form of speech is just obviously bullshit.
Unfortunately, freedom of speech is the only one of all the basic human rights that Americans seem to know. So whenever someone needs a new right, they have only this to build upon.
(Whenever they want to take away a right from someone, they babble about NatioANAL Security)
