Nina Easton writes about so-called reform that’s both anti-speech, and deeply hypocritical:
One narrative of election year 2010 was shaped long before any votes were tabulated. President Barack Obama penned the first chapter with his January condemnation of a Supreme Court ruling that lifted government prohibitions on spending by corporations in elections. The 5-to-4 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission “strikes at our democracy itself,” he said. Democrats and the media followed with tales of horror and fright, warning of corporate super-PACs and foreign donors. You could practically hear the theme from Jaws rumbling in the background….
As constitutional scholar Floyd Abrams recently wrote in the Yale Law Journal, campaign finance reform is considered so sacred that any ruling like this [Citizens United] was bound to be unpopular. The Citizens United decision “was treated as a desecration,” Abrams notes, even though Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority, likened the overturned restrictions to suppression of political speech in newspapers, books, and television….
Nor is the ruling likely to enshrine a permanent tilt in favor of Republicans. (Where was all the media hand-wringing when money from unions and wealthy individuals was gushing on behalf of Democrats in 2006 and 2008?) Campaign money follows the intensity gap — which is on the Republican side this year but was on the Democratic side in the past two elections.
For Abrams’s fine article, see Floyd Abrams, Citizens United and Its Critics, 120 Yale L.J. Online 77 (2010), http://yalelawjournal.org/2010/9/29/abrams.html (“When I think of Citizens United, I think of Citizens United. I think of the political documentary it produced, one designed to persuade the public to reject a candidate for the presidency. And I ask myself a question: if that’s not what the First Amendment is about, what is?”)
Via The absurdity of campaign finance reform – Oct. 29, 2010.