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Didn’t down vote, but it was a good idea because the government in citizens united was arguing the FEC (and therefore by extension the president) should have th
by tpmoney 20d ago
Didn’t down vote, but it was a good idea because the government in citizens united was arguing the FEC (and therefore by extension the president) should have the power to preemptively restrict political speech that mentions a candidate within months of an election. I would think given the current state of American politics, the downsides of allowing Trump to suppress all political messaging about him in the months leading up to an election if it was paid for with “corporate” money to be obvious.
But more than that, among the organizations on the side of citizens united and against the government in that case were the ACLU and the AFL-CIO. When the civil liberties people and the unions are all on the same side of an issue as the conservative pundits against the federal government, there’s a very good chance the government is very much in the wrong.
- insane_dreamer 20d agoexcept that the _consequence_ of CU was basically unlimited spending on political campaigns by SuperPACs. the ACLU may have been right about the particulars they were arguing but they missed the bigger picture of how this would open the floodgates of campaign financing
- tpmoney 20d agoThe CU decision didn't foreclose the government from crafting a different law to address the issue in a more narrow and content neutral way, but congress being the dysfunctional clown show that it is, hasn't. CU also didn't really open any floodgates, it left the state of the law in the same state it was 8 years earlier. It's not like the BCRA was a law that had a long and storied history, it was passed and struck down within the span of two presidential terms.
- insane_dreamer 20d agoabsolutely, it's congress' fault too for not creating new election funding laws you're right that CU didn't directly open the floodgates, though it did immediately unlock the option for companies to spend from their general funds without limit But the bigger problem was SCOTUS' decision provided the reasoning that downstream courts could rely on in their decisions, and _those_ opened the floodgates (Speechnow.org vs FEC specifically)