Every time I see an article explaining why system so-and-so is corrupt, the answer is always "companies lobby politicians with campaign donations".
Why is it so hard for publications to use the word "bribe" instead?
Why is it so hard for publications to use the word "bribe" instead?
which law would be violated?
Though the threat of a lawsuit may be enough.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances"
How would one prohibit lobbying without also prohibiting petitioning for a redress of grievances?
1) Printing presses are expensive and always have been.
2) It is possible to be more effective at things in general by working in a group, especially one with division of labor. Can you imagine a world in which a disorganized mass of individuals without training was more effective at advocacy than the EFF?
What about a body of individuals acting together — viz., a corporation? Do individuals lose their right to free speech in your world when they group together? If so, that seems like it would put power firmly in the hands of the already-powerful.
The idea that corporations always win is obviously wrong; the entire environmental and labor union movements are testaments to how citizen organizing can outweigh corporate interests before the federal government.
Btw, If you want to advance policy around this, I would recommend reading the arguments around it. They are all laid out for the public: https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/pdf/08-205P.ZX
That is untrue.
The court did not rule that "money is speech", nor did it rule that spending money is a protected activity. Rather, it ruled that spending money can facilitate a protected activity, and that laws which restrict people's ability to participate in protected activities are subject to scrutiny.
We can argue about exactly where the line should be drawn, but the framework is in my view obviously correct, and is one which we apply to every other right. Money is not abortion, but that doesn't mean Texas can pass a law saying no one can spend more than $5 on an abortion, because people have a right to choose an abortion, and exercising that right, in some cases, can cost money.
> So much corruption has flowed from that decision that it's almost unbelievable.
Actually, you're right: I don't believe it. In my experience the most strident critics of the decision rarely understand how limited it was, how little it changed, or how weird the rules were prior to the decision. If I had a dollar for every anti-Citizen's United rant that focused on behaviour which had been legal for decades...
That's a great analogy, I'm stealing it.
> This was not a significant concern prior to the Citizens United decision, because corporations had been largely barred from spending money on federal elections. By lifting that ban on corporate political donations, Citizens United changed the equation and made it possible for a corporation that is 100 percent owned by foreigners to participate in U.S. politics.
[0]https://theintercept.com/2016/09/12/foreign-spending-on-u-s-...
In a certain sense, that's technically kind of true. However, here's something else that's true:
Prior to Citizens United, any corporation (including a foreign corporations) could contribute unlimited funds to an American front-group which could then spend the funds on lobbying and massive advertising blitzes, subject to almost zero restrictions (and without disclosing the source of the funds!).
Basically: You couldn't run an ad that says "vote against Obama!", but you could run an ad that says "Obama is ruining America!", as long as it was more than 60 days prior to an election. Even within the 60 day window you could run ads that criticized his policies in detail so long as you avoided mentioning him by name.
The main impact of Citizens United was removing the 60 day window where you could run a massive shadowy ad campaign against, eg, health care reform or gun control so long as you didn't mention the name of the politician advocating for those policies. Now you can run the same ads, but actually say the politicians name.
Of course, under the law, a foreign company spending $50m on political ads hammering Obama (or Romney, or whatever) 61 days before the election wasn't "spending money on a federal election", they were just spending money on issue advocacy which happened to mention a candidate and just happened to be 61 days before an election due to a mysterious coincidence. But if the same ad ran two days later it would be a banned "electioneering communication", unless the same content runs without the name, in which case it's fine again.
In the real world, all those examples are 99.99% the same.
Source: A million places, but this article sums it up nicely: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/22/magazine/how-much-has-citi...
Absolutely incorrect. There are two issues with your claim:
1. The overwhelming bulk of that money comes from individuals, not corporations, and thus was not restricted by the pre-Citizens United rules. (Billionaires have always been free to spend whatever they like.)
2) Much of that money is being spent on activities which did not count as "express advocacy" or "direct electioneering" under the pre-Citizens United rules, and were thus legal for corporate money to fund. (An ad that talks about Clinton being a terrible person but doesn't expressly tell you to vote for Trump was always legal, even if paid for by corporate money, so long as it ran more than 60 days before the election.)
Of the two issues, both undermine your point, but the first is by far the most important. Note, for example, that according to the WaPo, a full 41 percent of that "billion dollars" came from a mere 50 individuals. Corporate money is a sideshow; this election is all about billionaires. And Citizens United didn't change the rules governing individuals.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/the-new-gilded-age-c...
> the outcome is selling our elections to the highest bidder.
Has it occurred to you that much of the outrage over Citizens United has been cynically manufactured by the super-rich to distract you from the actual issue?
Prior to the decision billionaires could spend unlimited funds on almost any part of the electoral process except directly contributing to the actual campaigns of individual politicians, and did so regularly. After the decision, this was still true.
Conversely, I'm aware of no aspect of our political process which is 1) ethically troubling and 2) actually taking place in significant amounts that arose (or increased) only after the decision. The way our elections are bought after the decision(if they are bought, see above) is the same way they were bought before.
> Citizens United just added a littler more money to the pot.
I'm not even aware of evidence it did that to any meaningful extent. We're entering an era of $1 billion dollar campaigns (there was talk of Clinton running the first $2 billion dollar campaign), which is absurdly high, and clear evidence that more money is flowing into the system, but remember: Citizens United didn't change how campaigns are financed, and did not allow corporations to donate to campaigns. We're seeing a lot of extra money in the pot, and a lot of it is clearly not stemming directly from that decision. (I've seen it suggested that campaigns are having to raise more funds to compete with the "shadow" money coming from non-individuals, but as mentioned in an earlier comment, the shadow money is also overwhelmingly coming from individuals, so that doesn't seem to work either.)
People have to register when they work as federal lobbyists. If you look through the rolls you will see that most lobbyists make few if any campaign donations. And most people making campaign donations (especially the big ones) are not lobbyists.
When you see a headline like "Google spent millions on lobbying", none of that money, not one cent, went to a politician or political campaign. The "lobbying spending" that gets reported for companies is the money that paid for salaries, technologies, office space, ads, printing costs, etc.
One of the challenges in the U.S. today is that so few people understand how this stuff actually works.
Asm/C/C++/similar programmers have no problem with the concept of pointers and one or more levels of indirection, but the gap between indirection abstraction and judicial practice likely stems from having to use statistical inference to apply the concept in law enforcement, and that's a judicial show-stopper for generally sound reasons in much of criminal law. We might be seeing some of the complexity of some classes of white collar crime and their fast-moving evolution vastly outstrip judicial concepts rooted in more prosaic criminal activities, with a simple single level of indirection capable of stymieing most laws aimed at sophisticated white collar crime.
Pretty much anytime you see laws and regulations erected to prevent white collar crime above a certain level of sophistication (perhaps way above check kiting, and somewhat below securities fraud), if you look for ways to factor responsibilities and roles between separated parties and add one or more levels of indirection, then you will have found a way to flout law with impunity. As long as you are familiar with the lay of the legal and regulatory land, it is (for programmers) a fairly simple algorithm to defeat these laws. It raises the buy-in cost of the scam, but that just raises barriers to entry to competitors for those who are in on the scam. The scammers are way faster adapting than the judicial system. It is analogous to the cat and mouse game between designer drugs versus drug enforcement agencies, but far more consistently profitable for the scammers, much, much faster evolution on the scammers' side of the equation, considerably more insurance/protection angles for the scammers (in both legal, regulatory and political forms), and immensely more damaging to average people.
There has to be a better way.