This isn't strictly illegal in the U.S. due to the Citizens United decision. Because of free speech blah blah blah I can spend an unlimited amount of money for a cause or canidate as long as I don't coordinate with that campaign.
In practice, I'm not sure sufficiently rich people face any practical limits in influencing elections.
You can’t even differentiate between people and corporations. Because otherwise the government could tell the New York Times to stop writing articles against trump. After all they are a for profit corporation.
It’s a tough spot.
It's not a particularly tough spot except from the perspective of very strong textual literalism.
If you happen to want to say something nice about one candidate or mean about another in the airtime you bought it's hard to argue that's not covered by free speech rights.
You can argue that this has perverse effects - but the courts have consistently held that free speech has wide latitude even when it has negative effects. Exceptions are extremely limited and the harm has to be immediate and direct.
Assuming that's not desired, the question then becomes how best to balance free speech with equalizing commercial political speech.
Yes, there are downsides to unfettered speech, but freedom means having to let other people do things I don't like, and in exchange, I can do things they don't like.
If the problem is that money can buy unlimited federal power, then you can limit the federal powers available for purchase without curtailing the freedom of the citizenry to engage in political speech as they choose.
This is an excellent point.
(a) The money has an outsized power to argue for an increase in available powers as I said upthread since I couldn't reply here.
(b) Democracies seem to work better and more stably when votes make a difference. If there's a full house of people wanting to shift in a certain direction the democratic principle is that the shift in that direction should happen. Otherwise democracy becomes a sham and its institutions shed trust. This creates precisely the atmosphere for antidemocratic or unliberal people to gain power. If you can vote for someone who supports your views but they can't implement them while they're operating in the system, why not vote for someone who supports your views and is willing to ignore the system to get it. And what will all checks and balances do in that environment!
If you like liberal government (in the traditional sense not the partisan sense), the most effective way to get it is to encourage liberal preferences in the electorate.
Past that, local elections already matter more in one's day to day life than federal elections, and those votes will have even more value as the role of the states grow.
For instance, this thread is about a state pursuing large tech companies on what can be described as free speech violations.
But I've never seen anyone argue that it's okay for a state government to ban free speech, but it's not okay for the federal government.
Which in my opinion is a broadly false assumption, and ignores the very point of a federal republic, which is federalism. People in different states have different cultures, different norms, different geographies, different natural resources, different pastimes, different porn habits, different cuisines, etc.
State legislatures are closer to their voting populace than federal legislatures, and thus, people's interests can be more directly reflected by voting more locally.
I agree that a state trampling on your rights is functionally no better than if a federal government does so, but you have more recourse against a state government doing so, more opportunities for remedy, and more ways in which to steer the ship right where those violations are regular.
As for having better oversight of state governments compared to federal governments, I think the US, Canada and Australia (i.e. all the major English-speaking federations and therefore the extent of my knowledge) have had significant problems with corruption at a state level but not so significant problems with corruption at a federal level.
Federal systems have important roles especially when -- unlike in the US -- the state borders reproduce cultural or settlement boundaries. But empirically this role is not a protection of rights. If the federal government needs more members of congress to function right, you can't say "oh we've got state governments" -- you've just gotta increase the size of congress. (FWIW, some states like California also need to take this lesson.) And if you need to protect rights, the only place to do that is in the public sphere and the community mind. Every other option might be easier but they're also much more short sighted.
Not so. I'm not advocating the elimination of the federal government, nor am I advocating for a reduction in the role of the courts. The 14th amendment exists, incorporates the inalienable rights in the constitution against the states, and I believe that is just and true.
That said, yes, there are logical, rational disputes on what rights allow one to do or not do, and yes, those rights are treated differently within arbitrary geographical boundaries. This is true today. There are people in jail right now for marijuana possession because they got caught with it in the wrong state, but that pales in comparison to the number of people who were jailed for marijuana because its illegality was imposed upon them by federal decree. Similarly so with immigration, gun rights, and a variety of other topics.
The law isn't settled on every subject, and there are often reasonable interpretations by well-meaning people in either direction. Having the federal government set policy clearly doesn't solve for every edge case, and I maintain that if you are caught up in a "bad place" by an interpretation of rights that disfavors you, it's a lot easier to relocate from say, California to Arizona (or vice versa) than to have to abandon America because it disfavors your rights.
If, for example, states were allowed to implement current TSA procedures as they preferred, you would likely have states competing on rubrics of security, while others competed on efficiency, or perhaps traveler friendliness. Now, instead of alienating travelers from abroad from visiting America, perhaps they are only alienated from flying into certain states.
As for the corruption angle, again, I'm not proposing we abolish the federal government, merely reduce its workload so that it can function better as a watchdog over the states to prevent and squash corruption. Having better representation locally and federally is of course a good thing, and especially so as it better empowers the adversarial system to hone in on those things that we all do agree upon, and protect those rights from being infringed upon.
Lastly, I'm not suggesting that it's a silver bullet, and that any of my ideas "solve" America, but I do think they improve upon the checks and balances that we're used to having, and allow for more freedom within American borders than we currently have, and more insulation from the legal interpretations of presidents as they are elected, and I think that's a net good.
If you live in a state that really believes in state representation, like New Hampshire or Vermont, then your representative likely only has 3 or 4 thousand constituents.
This means I can pop into their office and lodge complaints or show support in person, am more likely to talk to them in town halls, and I'm competing with fewer letters or phone calls for access. I've spoken in person to my state representatives many times on a variety of issues, but I've never gotten better than a (very much delayed) form letter from my federal representatives.
Past that, in many municipalities, your judges and DAs are often elected, meaning you have influence over the course and nature of their platforms. If you want to see criminal justice reform, less qualified immunity for police officers, etc., you have far more capacity for influence over state and local legislatures than you do at a federal level.
I suppose my counterpoint would come from the outsized effect "national level" money can have when it randomly falls on local elections (e.g. $50M on the GA-6 [1] for a special term that only ran until this year).
It seems like there's a certain "supported by people outside of our community" distaste to mega-funding, but I'm not going to kid myself and imagine it's irrelevant either.
I think I'd agree with you more if there were greater voter turnout.
But then, my ideal democracy is a minimal, voter-defense-esque test to register to vote + voting days as holidays + tax rebate for voting. Essentially, everything you could do to increase turnout of informed voters.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia%27s_6th_congressiona...
Past that, voter engagement is a tricky thing. It's easy to know what things we want to vote for, but it's hard to know whether or not those things are economically feasible unless we're economists. Trump's tax cuts, for example, had experts saying that through economic growth would pay for itself, while other experts have said there's no way that's possible. Similarly so with Bernie Sanders' health care proposals. See the recent pension crisis affecting Detroit, and may still cause strife in municipalities all over. Employee pensions are exactly the sort of thing I might vote for, only to find out 30 years down the road that it literally destroyed my town's government.
It's harder and harder to be informed without being a multi-doctorate + JD, and we keep voting ourselves favors from the public largesse without knowing if they'll work or not. Tax too little, and infrastructure and services fall off. Tax too much, you experience capital flight, and infrastructure and services fall off.
The wisdom of the masses isn't always, or even usually wise.
Watching recent history, I have a sneaking suspicion these same issues are why democratic nation-building has been such a failure.
Expecting a country to transition from 0 to democracy in one generation is probably impossible. Especially when it becomes apparent that even elder democracies are mostly held together by the strength of their institutions in times of strain.
Democracy works if everyone is educated, but as you pointed out, encounters substantial issues when (a) the problems at hand are too complex to be understood or (b) the knowledgeable vote (on both+ sides) is drowned out by an easily-swayed vote (e.g. for passion-arousing issues like free trade or immigration).
If I were attempting to build a democracy, I'd instead attempt to compress ~1000 years of European history into ~100 years of gradual government transformation. But probably start with a monarchy...
"If the problem is that money can buy unlimited federal power, then you can limit the federal powers available for purchase without curtailing the freedom of the citizenry to engage in political speech as they choose."
And where do you think that power is going to go? It's not going to disapear into the ether.
I may be missing something obvious, but how do you suggest this could be done?
Limit the scope and power of the Interstate Commerce Clause. Most modern interpretations are based on Wickard v. Fillburn's "Well, if everybody did it, it might affect interstate commerce" interpretation, which I find flawed, and which gives the federal government outsized power over the states. It is through ICC power, for example, that the federal government was putting state-legal dispensary workers in federal prison, for example.
States need to reclaim their 10th amendment rights. We've seen an uptick in that recently, with many states adopting gay marriage in defiance of DOMA, or allowing marijuana usage in defiance of federal law, or more recently with Vermont (or maybe CT?) allowing prescription drugs to be purchased from out of country.
Disallow regulatory bodies from having effective power to make laws. Laws should be made by Congress, and so long as agencies are beholden to the executive, and they can make rules that have law-making power, congress has abrogated its duty, and gives far too much power to <insert president's name here>.
Past that, you achieve electoral results the same way you achieve any political end -- voting in the people who espouse your aims, voting out those who don't. You know who to vote for by maintaining your political savvy, from reading both sides of news articles, by holding both sides accountable, even when you happen to like them, and by being eternally vigilant to the laws, the law makers, and exploring the intended and unintended side effects of "good" laws.
No, that is most certainly a bug. The rise of ALEC in power is in no way, shape, or form a "feature".
"Disallow regulatory bodies from having effective power to make laws."
They already do not have this power. They have the power that Congress delegated to them. And now, you're asking that Congress be the one to take up things like air quality regulations, or food safety regulations. Which, to be honest, has the same effect as saying that you don't want those things regulated at all.
Not liking how something is done doesn't mean it doesn't need to be done.
I'd be a big fan of DACA, for example, or even more open borders, if that could be passed by Congress. I am not a fan of it having been executed though executive order, especially given that it's now become a game of political chicken.
> They already do not have this power
Regulations are legally binding to those that are regulated. Everyone rightly considers net neutrality to be a law, or at least, it was, until the regulatory agency in charge of it decided it wasn't. I'm saying this shouldn't be in the purview of agencies, because that puts it in the hand of the executive branch, which means that Trump has the power to make law, which is expressly not a function of the executive branch.
I'm happy for those agencies to exist. I'm happy for those agencies to be tasked with research, expert opinions, recommendations as to what the laws should be, and even doing the work to draft and submit bills to minimize the workload on Congress, which is their function. I'm not okay with them unilaterally passing regulations without the express (not tacit) consent of Congress. Those regulations deserve more than a public commentary period, they deserve open debate and floor votes with votes on the record for where our politicians stand.
> No, that is most certainly a bug.
Again, I disagree, and I can only assume you're referencing ALEC out of some preconceived notion that I'm not espousing. Regardless, you'll note that I don't go so far as to suggest that gridlock is a feature, but adversarial procedure is, as it means that the legislation that does get past is only that which is tenable to a broad enough faction of the electorate.
The central tenet is "If money can be used to buy votes, then how do you have a democracy?"
Nothing you've said above seems to address that, nor anything I can think of, in a world with an absolute right to spend money to promote ones own or preferred speech.
What is that strong support? We routinely see very well-moneyed campaigns lose. In the very last election in the US the losing candidate outspent the winning one - if you look at Super-PAC spending (which is the one considered most "dark and dangerous", right?) the losing campaign had gathered 3x from the winning one ($189.4M against $59.3M). Somehow turned out having money is not enough. So I'd like to see what you call "strong empirical support".
We see it every so often, but I really don't think we see it often, and we don't see the very well moneyed campaign lose to a campaign run on a shoestring.
Correlation is not causation, but congressional campaigns in 2012 that outspent their opponent won 91% of the time [2].
One of the clearer links is to voter turnout. I've read it takes between $5-20 to reliably motivate a voter to vote. Sans this minimum level of funding, your supporters don't go to the polls, and you don't win.
As for the 2016 election you note, general consensus is that the difference in funding was largely erased by media time (itself one of the primary reasons to spend money in the first place!), where Trump's approach held a clear (and cheap) advantage [3].
More broadly speaking, post-Citizens, we're in an era where we actually don't know how much "money with intent of political influence" is being spent. It's legally debatable enough that a group can now say, "This is my personal or commercial speech, so I'm not registering with the FEC."
[1] http://freakonomics.com/2012/01/17/how-much-does-campaign-sp...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2014/04/04/th...
[3] https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2017/04/election-2016-trump...
Ah, of course, you have the minimum funding to get your message out, I do not doubt that for a minute. There's a minimum level beyond which you can not mount a successful campaign. But beyond that level, the link between dollars and votes becomes much less direct and obvious.
> general consensus is that the difference in funding was largely erased by media time
Yeah, of course, Trump used this trick. But the next one might use another trick. The common thread is that there are many ways to conduct the campaign, and dollars alone do not mean victory.
> we're in an era where we actually don't know how much "money with intent of political influence" is being spent.
Not exactly, but organizations with influence on national scale are not exactly invisible, and their ad spending is not secret too. I mean, you can't exactly hide a public electoral ad, right? And knowing how much ads were run (public info) and what is a typical spot price for an ad (public info), and the same for rallies, etc. one can estimate the spending if not entirely accurately, then with enough accuracy to be able to reason about it, I think. Of course, this does not account for things like free airtime given by networks to a popular entertaining personality or other ways to buy exposure for cheap, but this only underlines the point that dollars is not everything.
As for advertising dollars, you could absolutely hide a public ad in 2016 by buying through Facebook, not declaring yourself, and targeting a subset of users.
And Citizens even gives you (not great, but some) legal cover if you're caught. "My ad was an artistic work sharing my own viewpoint." Done.
State / city level, but someone else tuned me into this still running, funny-but-not-funny story in Seattle, in which an reporter decided to walk up to Facebook and Google and ask for election transparency documents they were legally obligated to provide under a 1977 city law.
Tl;dr, they didn't keep relevant records, didn't have any idea about the law, and are still scrambling to be compliant.
https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2017/12/04/25606100/were-as...
I find it fascinating that the implication is the global company has to be aware of and compliant with any city law that any tiny city council (I am not saying Seattle is tiny, but if Seattle can do it, why Rusty Sticks, Flyover State can't?) passed 40 years ago. I seriously wonder how one can do business in such environment? I guess for a Facebook it's just breadcrumbs and they could hire whatever lawyers needed to fend it off and pay whatever fines they might be assigned without even flinching - but imagine you are just a startup and you have to comply with the same web of laws?
> If the problem is that money can buy unlimited federal power, then you can limit the federal powers available for purchase without curtailing the freedom of the citizenry to engage in political speech as they choose.
That's completely not a solution.
But if Jo Squillionaire wants people to have the freedom to contract their labor to a certain company indefinitely in the future, then Jo Squillionaire has the capacity to advertise enough to buy back that right. But I don't necessarily have the capacity to contradict him.
A more effective solution would simply be to limit a person's capacity to accrue wealth. If there's proper income and/or wealth taxes in place people can be rich enough without being too rich.
I believe this is what Brandberg v Ohio established as the test of "imminent lawless action"
Why is Anderson Cooper allowed to spread his opinions with the aid of a multi hundred million dollar distribution system but I can’t buy 2000 dollars of Facebook ads?
Limits on funding speech are limits on speech.
I know that’s a tangent from your main point but couldn’t resist :).
I entirely disagree. Everyone has the same amount that they can give. Everyone has exactly the same rights.
And if you really wanted to make everyone equal, you'd have to ban celebreties and the media from talking about campaigns. Bill Maher's TV show is worth millions in advertising dollars.
Limit on what? On speaking about politics? On buying ads? On paying people to write about politics? On hiring consultants to develop advertising strategies? On speaking about anything government cares about? So if NYT spends $1000 per subscriber on politicial writer's salaries in March, it has to be shut down until the next January because it's over the political speech limit?
This of course sounds insane, because you can't put limit on spending money on speech without putting limits on actual speech. Because it's one and the same - publishing speech costs money, and money is the way to get speech published.
Fortunately, US still has freedom of speech, which is not measured in dollar limits.
(And clearly they mean a limit on political contributions, which is something that many countries do successfully. Ours used to be one of them. I hope you're not as ignorant on the topic as your hysterical straw man suggests, but if you are I'd suggest a little reading. E.g. this Brookings working group has many perspectives: https://web.archive.org/web/20010406114712/https://www.brook... .)
The fact that you can write stuff on internet forums for free doesn't mean it is free. It means somebody else is paying for it - for example, in exchange for showing you ads (which the advertiser - surprise! - pays for), selling your personal data or sometimes just out of charitable spirit. However, if you need to do a massive communication effort, it is not nearly free. And if you have ever built a campaign site (I have) you know it is nowhere near "free". Your resume shows you participated in multiple internet projects, so I am astonished how you can condescendingly claim it's "free" while knowing full well from your own experience it is nowhere near that. Unless, of course, you want to confine your campaign to /r/irrelevant.
Ah yes, our era's Dred Scott decision.