* two thoughts on campaign censorship

Topics: Civil Liberties
03 Nov 2006

From: Ervan Darnell











The major Supreme Court case setting the standards for campaign
censorship was Buckley v Valeo. One of the aspects of the decision was
that a candidate can spend as much of his own money as he wants. The
rationale was that since campaign finance rules were meant to prevent
corruptability, they had no application to oneself. After all, how do
you bribe yourself? That's reasonable up to a point. But how often
does one hear liberals complain about this loophole? To call this a
loophole is to confess that "campaign finance reform" is not about
stopping corruptability but aimly squarely at censorhip (in the guise
of equal time).

On this year's California ballot prop 89 aims to ban donations for
proposition campaigns. What does that have to do with corruptability?
We're talking about propositions directly voted upon and not about
contributions to politicians. Even the fig leaf of preventing
corruption is not available. This is a straight forward effort to
censor corporations (the proposition prohibits nearly all corporate
speech on ballot propositions, but puts no limits on non-profits, i.e.
liberal cause organizations are unlimited while their natural opponents
are muzzled).

How silly the whole distinction between not-for-profit and for-profit
is in any case. What is a corporation but a way to collectively
represent the interest of the shareholders (and possibly employees and
customers)? What is a non-profit cause organization but a way to
collectively represent the interest of the members? "profit" is but an
accounting question of whether people are paid a salary (non-profit) or
paid a percentage of the corporate income (dividends for the
shareholders). Why should such a distinction matter to the group being
able to express its collective opinion? Yes, there is the question
of whether you are pushing product or ideas, but that's about the
consumers, not about the members of the organization/business and their
free speech interests.

A spin on this is the liberal complaint that corporations shouldn't
have rights like individuals. This is complete nonsense. They don't
of course. Corporations do not get a vote at the poll. They do not
have any rights of the accused (criminal actions are still attached to
individuals and corporate liability is handled mostly as civil law
with weaker defendant protections than criminal law). They do not
have any right to free speech beyond what the individual stockholders
who constitute it have.

This goes further too. In many cases, corporations represent the
interest of their customers and not just their board members (even when
their customers may not recognize it). For instance, prop 87 is a tax
on oil companies that outlaws price increases at the pump to cover the
new tax. Now that's obvious nonsense. It's declaring the earth is flat
than proceeding to build a rocket. What will the courts do with this?
Are they now invited to micro-manage gas prices by trying to decide the
source of a price change? Overlooking what an incredibly bad bill this
is, the oil companies have some interest in communication to their
customers (nearly everyone) that prop 87 will raise gas prices. Prop
89 by counting entities (with limits per corporation) skews this in a
very bizarre way. A single organization with 10M 'members' gets only
as much voice as 1000 organizations with 10K members each.

Bottom line: campaign finance reform is all about censorship, not
finance, and is, at least in this case, crafted so as to censor
pro-business voices while leaving liberal cause organizations alone.





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