Citizens United

At the SVGOP meeting on Wednesday, the topic of Citizen's United came up. A person in the audience asked for an explanation of it, and a gentleman named Charles gave a brief history of it which made it sound far more reasonable than I'd ever heard it explained before. He said basically that regulations had been put into place to limit campaign contributions, which spawned the creation of PACs and Super PACs. Because these groups were independent of the campaigns, there was no limit on how much money could be donated that way. The Citizens United decision basically reaffirmed the legal right for those groups, corporations, unions, etc. to spend as much they wanted, and to be vehicles for unlimited donations.

Being an Occupy/Bernie Sanders guy, I lean strongly the other way, and had to re-examine my beliefs. You could make an argument that PACs should be made illegal, then it would be up to individuals to spend and say what they'd like directly. I don't think limiting the privilege to outrageously wealthy individuals is preferable to limiting the privilege to unions and corporations; then it would just be the Kochs making ads. You could try to limit contributions based on the type of ads produced, but where is the line between political ads and public awareness campaign? You could say money is not free speech, but then the only wealthy people who do the brainwashing would be Rupert Murdoch and Ariana Huffington who do it as a business; is that any better? Could go the way of the alcohol industry, which doesn't allow consumption of the alcohol to occur on tv. It's a bit absurd, but you could make it illegal for non-campaign groups to mention or show specific bills or candidates, limiting them instead to conceptual descriptions and allowing voters to decide for themselves. That idea's maybe not terrible, but seems mighty heavy handed, and would lead to some probably absurd and confusing ads.

I'm used to arguing that money shouldn't be equated to free speech, and I still believe that not all things should be for sale, but that too could be re-examined. It is unfair that the average person is unable to have the same influence as a wealthy person, but does that mean the wealthy should be handicapped to the level of the poor? It's also unfair that mute people can't physically speak at all, but does that mean we should all be handicapped to the vocal powers of a def person? We're not all educated, should we be limited to the vocabulary and sentence making ability of a Donald Trump? Life isn't fair, and never will be. Maybe focusing on freedoms rather than fairness is the right way to think about it. If that's the case, at this time, the only thing I can think to do is to outlaw the purchase of specific things, and maybe types of ads should be one of those things. How effective are those anyway? I would imagine it's mostly the ground game of a campaign that makes a difference.

What do other countries do? I know some countries only allow campaigning and advertising in a single month. I really like the sound of that, but I have no idea how they enforce the rule. It seems incumbents would really be handicapped in that case.