Citizens to End SuperPACs
citizenstoendsuperpacs.org
citizenstoendsuperpacs.org
I assume from the need to whitelist squarespace.com that this is more likely to due to something done on that platform rather than an intentional decision by a developer, but it's unnecessary for a site with some basic text styling and an image or two not to just render the content without animations when JavaScript is disabled. Has anyone here used Squarespace before, and if so, is this typical for sites made with it?
If politicians are corrupted by people publically saying nice things about them, that doesn't seem a good enough reason to infringe on speech rights. Prosecute the corruption directly.
No, they don't. Most PACs do and are allowed to coordinate with candidate campaigns, SuperPACs are legally prohibited from it, but also regularly do (sometimes with "hacks" like coordination by multiparty public signalling, but also fairly often just by outright violations of the rules, which are poorly enforced -- investigations are rare, and even they occur and violations are found and penalties are imposed, they are too delayed and too small to make it not worthwhile to violate the rules routinely.)
Rampant coordination: https://www.politico.com/news/2024/04/08/super-pac-fec-limit...
Weak enforcement: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/fec-...
(Though I did make a mistake, I misremembered the small fines for soliciting large foreign donations as small fines for coordination; in fact, the FEC has never fined any PAC anything for coordination.)
Maybe you could open up private litigation to enforce it, which reduces the bias problem to the bias of the courts and the usual problems of bias for resources to litigate, which might seem the minimally dysfunctional approach if it wasn't for the Supreme Court being in the middle of a brazen corruption crisis of its own.
This is an area which has a very big quis custodiet ipsos custodes problem, "just enforce the rules" as a solution kind of just skips over the fundamental challenge.
Most countries have decided that during elections people spending huge sums of money is not going to lead to good government, but who knows.
Is the idea that they will raise money and then engage in quid pro quo corruption, thus proving it is possible?
Most campaign funds are spent on ads, and ads don’t really persuade voters. When was the last time a political ad even registered to you? I think campaigns spend a lot of money for the same reason we spend lots of money on interventions at the end of life. It’s more a psychological thing because the stakes are high than the money actually having a major impact on the outcome.
They're not targeting you. Or me. Or 99.9% of the folks on this board. They're targeting their efforts at the undecided middle who are not sure who they'll vote for, or even if they'll vote. The ones who hear "Genocide Joe" or "Von Shitsinpants" and don't apply any further critical thinking.
Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent in swing states just doing "grassroots" get-out-and-vote campaigns.
I think what you're really seeing with these voters is that they don't line up ideologically with either party, so their voting is highly context-dependent. They vote based on their perception of what's going on in the country. My wife and I are going to vote Trump in 2024, after voting for Biden in 2020, because of immigration, affirmative action, New York's prosecution of Trump, etc. The salience of these issues changes from election-to-election. In 2020, Biden was the pro-vaccination candidate, and in 2024, he's the pro-immigration candidate, and those two things cuts in different directions for many voters. But I don't think advertisements can change anyone's views on those issues. Obviously, cable news, Tik Tok, Facebook, etc., shape people's views on those issues (or rather, people's perception of the salience of those issues), but the candidates can't control that.
I think you're correct that the grassroots get-out-and-vote campaigns have a large impact, but I think that's also very different from money spent on ads. That's about each party turning out its base to actually go vote, not really influencing people through mass media. Is it a bad thing that money is spent doing that?
That's a shame. Here's another perspective: Trump has made a career out of, so to speak, defiantly driving as fast as he wants, whenever and wherever he wants. This time, he's gotten a big ticket for going 90 in a 70 mph zone on an interstate highway — sure, it's not a school zone, but it's hard to see the ticket as political persecution.
(And let's not forget that the judge in the NY case bent over backwards to be fair to Trump — not to mention that the jurors, each of whom Trump's defense counsel had a chance to strike, were unanimous about all 34 felony counts.)
That’s utterly unsubstantiated. Trump has been a businessman in New York City for decades and was never prosecuted criminally for anything until he entered politics. It’s also irrelevant. Even if it were true that “he’s gotten away with lots of crimes in the past” that doesn’t justify prosecuting him on a creative legal theory. When a gang member is prosecuted for bullshit, defense attorneys fall over themselves saying that each prosecution must be justified on its own, not the defendant’s uncharged and unproven bad acts.
> This time, he's gotten a big ticket for going 90 in a 70 mph zone on an interstate highway — sure, it's not a school zone
It’s not like that at all. Trump was prosecuted on a creative legal theory—stitching together three different laws which individually couldn’t support a prosecution for either jurisdictional or time-bar reasons—that even CNN’s legal commentator Elie Honig called “unjustified.” https://www.foxnews.com/media/cnn-legal-guru-says-new-york-t...
> it's hard to see the ticket as political persecution.
It is not only a political prosecution, but the bar’s deafening silence is profoundly shameful to our whole profession. Attorneys who do extensive pro bono work getting gang members off on technicalities are looking the other way when New York brings a novel prosecution that they would condemn has it been brought against a violent criminal.
At some point recently, many attorneys abandoned longstanding principles of the legal profession for liberal moral sensibilities. I remember folks at my wife’s old firm, Arnold & Porter, sniffing about how they would never represent Trump. This is a firm that has made its money for decades (and continues to do so) defending Philip Morris against cancer victims. This was before January 6, back when Trump’s biggest crime was being, in their view, “a racist sexist homophobe.” In the new morality embraced by much of the legal profession, that makes Trump worse than a company that peddled poison and killed millions of people over decades.
Big firms should be lining up to work pro bono on Trump’s appeal given the novel legal issues it raises. But they won’t because Trump offends their moral sensibilities in a way that defending gang members somehow does not. It’s sick.
Objection, nonresponsive.
> even CNN’s legal commentator Elie Honig called “unjustified.”
I had to look up Elie Honig, whose name didn't ring a bell.
Another fact: When NYC DA Alvin Bragg initially elected not to bring the charges against Trump, two of his prosecutors in charge of the investigation resigned. CNN's reporting indicated that the internal debate, among prosecutors in the DA's office, wasn't whether it'd be proper to bring charges — that much seemed to be largely agreed, at least by most of the prosecutors — but whether doing so would be a waste of time and taxpayer money, given the need for a unanimous jury verdict and the expected credibility attacks by Trump's lawyers against key prosecution witness Michael Cohen. [0].
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/06/politics/trump-manhattan-dist...
I hold no brief for tobacco companies or their counsel, but I assume that, like the rest of us lawyers, you were taught that in court, everyone is entitled to a defense, even those who ought to be social pariahs for their misdeeds. (That said, I confess I haven't figured out how to reconcile that principle with the kinds of scorched-earth defense that big, wealthy companies typically put on against plaintiffs who clearly have a strong case.)
I'm not pursuaded by this argument. Good luck trying to fight against freedom of speech.
And ideologically biased as well: they really mean "make it so only people with a lot of time on their hands, like us, will be able to participate in politics."