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by Peter A. Belmont / 2012-10-23
© 2012 Peter Belmont
The Supreme Court has long supported the bad idea that money is speech (especially in political discourse) and Citizens United is only the last in a long and dismal series of such pro-oligarchy decisions. What these decisions come to, ultimately, is that American governments may not do much to take money out of politics.
Under these unfortunate decisions, the very rich may support favored candidates (or, indeed, both major-party candidates) with huge campaign donations. In this way they appear to assure that whichever candidate is elected (and no other candidate has much chance), the political position of these large donors will govern our governors.
The court has recognized that government may make limitations on speech, even on political speech, and the principal categories of allowed governmental restriction are called “reasonable time, place, or manner restrictions on speech.” To date, the court seems never to have allowed a restriction to large political expenditures on the basis of “time, place, or manner” considerations.
Perhaps we can persuade them to do so.
The “Citizens United” decision allows the very rich to spend their money (or their stock-holders’ money in the case of corporations) to communicate on political matters without limit to the amount spent providing they do not coordinate with a candidate. Easy enough to do, even though we don’t know how to “see” such forbidden coordination.
In my view, when a single entity (whether a person, a corporation, or some other single entity) spends massive money to communicate with the public (via TV or newspapers, for instance), what it is doing is hiring a large megaphone or loud-speaker. It constitutes YELLING rather than SPEECH. The money does not show the knowledge or wisdom of the speaker. It just makes the speaker LOUDER.
Just as cities may make rules to prohibit overly-loud noises in public places (such as the streets)—and thereby forbid loudspeakers louder than a given noise limit, even for political speech—so, too, governments should be able to legislate against the spending of large amounts of money for YELLING COMMUNICATIONS—by ANY single entity, whether person or corporation or labor union—as an affront to what might be called NOISE STANDARDS.
This analogy is not perfect. Usually, noise is noise. But in politics, there is a huge difference between the YELLING of a single entity and the coordinated speech of many, many small voices.
If a large number of people, say 1M people each give $10 to a PAC and ask the PAC to spend $10M on a political communication, it is NOT NOISE—or at least not the same kind of noise—because it is really the quiet speech of 1M people speaking at the same time. By contrast, when the CEO of a BIG BANK decides to spend $10M of the BIG BANK’s money to communicate his desire (to avoid a higher PERSONAL income tax, for instance, or to avoid some regulation on his BANK), his $10M expenditure is YELLING.
It should be forbidden.
If the court will not do it, we need a constitutional amendment to do it. I made a possibly clumsy attempt at that here.
Basically I seek a rule setting a CAP on the cumulative annual political spending of human persons—and disallowing anyone else (other than PACs, parties, candidates funded thereby) to do any political spending whatever.
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