The Supreme Court has made an important ruling on campaign finance.
McCain-Feingold required that [corporations] channel their campaign spending by creating a special fund, known as a political action committee, which can accept donations from employees, shareholders and other affiliates. Advocates argued that the law was a valid way to prevent special-interest funds from distorting elections.
But Justice Kennedy wrote [for the 5-4 majority] that the effort to divide corporate political spending into legal and illegal forms chilled political speech. “When government seeks to use its full power, including the criminal law, to command where a person may get his or her information or what distrusted source he or she may not hear, it uses censorship to control thought,” he wrote. “This is unlawful.”
To understand the background, and to see why this is a bad, needlessly sweeping, decision, read these columns by Stuart Taylor: Campaign money and Chief Justice, and Campaign finance and corporations. Back in September, Taylor wrote:
The Supreme Court, especially Chief Justice John Roberts, is at a crossroads.
The immediate issue is whether to demolish Congress’s overly broad, 62-year-old ban on corporate spending in federal elections or, instead, carve out a sensible exception.
The broader question is whether Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito will aggravate the Court’s polarization and give plausibility to charges of conservative judicial activism by providing the fourth and fifth votes for demolition of the ban, and of two important precedents as well…
Roberts and Alito would thereby be passing up a golden opportunity for principled compromise held out by liberal Justice John Paul Stevens. He credited a National Rifle Association amicus brief, by conservative lawyer Charles Cooper, with suggesting (as its second-favorite outcome) what Stevens called “the wisest narrow solution of the problem before us.” That would be excising with a scalpel, not a meat ax, the one serious First Amendment defect in the campaign finance rules now before the Court.
The defect is Congress’s decision in adopting the 2002 McCain-Feingold law to add to its justifiable ban on “electioneering” broadcast ads by business corporations an utterly unjustified amendment by the late Sen. Paul Wellstone, D-Minn., extending the ban to nonprofit ideological corporations. These include the NRA, the Sierra Club, the ACLU, Citizens United, and other large and small groups of like-minded individuals who want to pool their funds to promote their political views…
The Wellstone amendment’s transparent purpose was, as supporters made clear in floor debate, to muffle criticism (“negative attack ads”) of themselves and other incumbents. The justices should strike down the Wellstone amendment, as Stevens suggested, while leaving intact the McCain-Feingold ban on “electioneering”…
They chose the meat ax.
