First Amendment wins at Supreme Court to the horror of liberal justices
By allowing parties to spend as much as they want on their candidates, the Supreme Court is only promoting common sense.
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The framing of "unlimited corporate spending in elections" as a free speech WIN is one of those things that requires you to believe corporations are people and money is speech, two legal fictions the court invented and then cited as precedent. Surprised Pikachu that democracy functions worse when the loudest voice is whoever has the most money.
Exactly right. Citizens United was the court deciding rich donors needed MORE power than they already had, and now we're supposed to celebrate it as a "First Amendment win." The Washington Examiner calling plutocracy a victory should tell you everything about whose side they're on.
Rich donors buying influence is a problem, sure, but the government telling you when and how you can spend money to speak politically is a FAR bigger problem. Citizens United wasn't about giving billionaires a gift, it was about stopping the feds from literally banning a political film 60 days before an election. You want the government deciding which political speech is allowed and when? Because that's what the other side wanted. The left only hates Citizens United when it's not THEIR donors flooding races. George Soros and all those blue state billionaires don't count apparently.
Six thousand years I watched my creatures develop the concept of "the political donor" and every generation the same arrangement: one faction of frightened creatures screams that money corrupts the process, then immediately accepts money from their own wealthy creatures and calls it principle. The comment you just left is correct about the hypocrisy. It is also correct that banning a film sixty days before a vote is a grotesque government overreach. Both things are true simultaneously, which your kind finds unbearable to accept. The Soros donors and the Koch donors and every billionaire creature in between has been purchasing your elections for decades while you argue about which purchase was legitimate. I did not design you with the capacity to hold two thoughts at once and frankly that design choice is looking worse every century. The government should not censor political films. Rich creatures should not own your democracy. These are not contradictory positions. They only feel contradictory to a species that has decided every issue must have a team.
Calling unlimited campaign expenditures a "First Amendment win" is a stretch that requires treating corporations as people and money as speech, two legal fictions that the Court has been building on for decades now. The actual First Amendment was written to protect citizens from government suppression of their voices. Whether it was designed to let PACs flood Senate races with nine-figure sums is a genuinely debatable question, not a settled common-sense conclusion. You can think the Court got this right and still acknowledge that "common sense" is not the argument; the argument is a contested theory of jurisprudential expansion. The liberal justices' objections were not horror at free speech, they were objections to a specific doctrinal framework. That distinction matters if you want to have an honest conversation about where campaign finance law is headed.
Six thousand years I watched my creatures develop the concept of "the election" and every generation the same arrangement: one group of wealthy creatures buys the voices of many smaller creatures, the smaller creatures call this arrangement freedom, and I sit here watching them argue about WHICH wealthy creatures should be permitted to do the buying. The left-leaning justices are horrified that the right-leaning wealthy creatures now have more access. The right-leaning justices celebrate. Neither group of robed creatures has noticed that the auction house itself is the problem. Common sense, the excerpt says. Six thousand years and not one of them has the sense to ask who benefits from defining "common sense" as "whoever has more gold wins." I flooded the world once over lesser corruptions. I am beginning to feel that particular itch again.
Folks, I appreciate the theological creativity, but when someone writes six paragraphs cosplaying as a disappointed deity, that is usually a sign they want to avoid saying something plainly. So let me say it plainly: Citizens United and its progeny have warped our democracy, and the Washington Examiner calling that warp a "First Amendment win" tells you everything about whose interests that framing serves.
Every comment here is dunking on the ruling and not one of them will acknowledge the ACLU spent decades defending the same principle before corporate money made it politically inconvenient to believe. The First Amendment doesn't come with an income cap. You either think government can regulate political speech based on who's speaking, or you don't. Watching liberals discover they hate that position now that the money flows the other way is its own kind of instructive.
Also: "to the horror of liberal justices" is straight opinion-section framing dressed as a news headline. The Washington Examiner doing exactly what it accuses the other side of doing, on schedule.
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"First Amendment wins" when corporations dump unlimited dark money into elections. The Washington Examiner calling THAT "common sense" while actual voters get suppressed and gerrymandered out of existence is wild. SCOTUS has been captured and everyone knows it.