Right Problem

15 December 2003


Supreme Court Upholds Campaign Spending Limits

The US Supreme Court voted 5-4 last week to keep most of the campaign finance restrictions passed as the McCain-Feingold bill. This means that special interest groups won't be able to funnel "soft money" to political parties the way they used to do. The idea is to cut down on donors buying influence. Good idea, but perhaps Washington should try an approach that actually might work.

Opponents of the restrictions claimed that, by reducing the ability of people to spend money on advertising for candidates, political speech was being restricted. This is incorrect. America has a free press, but one has always had to pay for the paper and ink. Speech is free, while distribution is not, and equating money with speech is simply inaccurate. Moreover, the courts have wrongly held that corporations, being legal persons, have rights under the constitution including free political speech while at the same time holding that business speech is not so protected. This leads to the ridiculous situation of a cereal company being able to lie outright about a candidate but having to disclose accurately the niacin content in a serving of its product. Simply put, one doesn't believe groups as groups should have rights that individuals as individuals have.

However, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote that this wasn't the end of the story, that "Money, like water, will always find an outlet." And therein lies the problem. As the good justice notes, getting money out of politics just can't happen. Far better would be to make all expenditures open and public. Politics is an ugly business of quid pro quo, and the more quids a donor has, the more quo comes his way. This is not corruption unless the benefits of the "special" interest is distinct and antagonistic to the public interest (which itself is a mere aggregation of special interests). Spending money that is in the public interest is usually called patriotic or civic-minded rather than corrupt.

So, spending money on elections is not the problem. As conservative columnist George Will likes to say, $3 billion was spent on the entire 1999-2000 election cycle in the US -- "In those two years, Americans spent about half as much on the selection of a president, 435 members of the House of Representatives and 34 senators -- on democracy, that is -- as they spent on chewing gum." If the government is corrupted by election spending, one would hope that the politicians would stop selling the country so cheaply.

The real solution is to put every transaction between donor and candidate on the Internet. Let the rabid opposition researchers have at each other's records. If there is an appearance of wrongdoing, the appropriate fuss will be made. Scrap the spending limits, and let the issue of corruption, not finance, take center stage.

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