Tuesday, May 18, 2004
Supreme Court decision on lobbyist campaign spending.
I’m a bit torn about this. I don’t like the idea of limiting speech at all, but I do think that the argument that the ruling is designed to limit the effect of money has some merit. The limits are high enough that mere mortals like me would never hit them, so from the standpoint of individuals, only the truly wealthy are limited. Well, yeah. Even the Americans have individual giving limits to candidates, for example.
From the standpoint of organizations, however, the story is a little murkier, and I’m still sorting out the details. The devil is in those details; as I understand the background story, the NCC wanted unlimited spending limits (are parties limited?) and they wanted much looser audit and disclosure requirements. That kind of lobby group spending - unlimited and unaccountable - wouldn’t be a good idea. I’m sure that those of you who argue that the SU webboard shouldn’t allow anonymous posting will agree. 
The limits, as well, are quite low from the perspective of an organization. However, those limits only apply to the election period, and I didn’t see anything limiting political advertising outside of that 5-6 week period.
There are fundamental differences between individual limits and organizational limits, simply because one targets individuals and one targets groups, but that’s a long story. So I’ll leave it out for now.
The rhetoric from the original plaintiffs in response to the ruling is a bit over the top - lots of buzzwords and handwringing about this being the end of democracy. Hogwash. The Supreme Court’s ruling tries to prevent money from becoming an overriding factor in elections; the real question is whether they went too far and if there isn’t a role for US-type ‘527’ organizations.
