Because it is political it can not be seen. Its also the reason why magneto in the xmen comics gets away with so much stuff. He just files it under political activities and lets the courts run themselves ragged until his next scheme.
Ugh. Yes, because political campaigning is evil and should be banned.
I guess if people didn’t get upset about the AG arguing in front of SCOTUS that the FEC should have the power to ban the publishing of political books, there’s no speech restriction they’d dislike…
If I hire 100 people with megaphones to shout as loudly as they can standing next to the poor schmuck on a soap box trying to make a statement using only his own voice, to the point where nobody can understand what said poor schmuck is saying unless they go out of their way to get *really* close to him themselves… have I suppressed the poor schmuck’s free speech?
You don’t have to frame the debate with metaphors carefully designed to make gagging your political opponents with threats of jail time sound righteous.
Citizens United presents you with a simple choice: do you agree with the Attorney General that the FEC has the power to ban political books, or do you agree with the Supreme Court that it does not?
The wonderful thing about court cases is that they force you to address actual cases, rather than let you wander off into vague hypotheticals.
Also, I apologize for the two unformatted replies: noscript doesn’t like gravatar.
Did the result of the ruling make it legal for well-funded individuals to essentially inject as much money into politics as they wanted? And is that not what has actually happened? (Often to the effect illustrated in my analogy above?)
If so, then this choice isn’t as simple as you would like us to believe.
Everyone’s right to free speech is equal. It’s just some is more equal than others, eh?
The write to property always means that some will have more han other. Eliteism is welded insepreably to capatalism. The problem is that the right to property gives context to the right to sell you work to whome ever you wish whereever they are at a value you to have come to an agreement. That is freedom of social and fisical mobility even if the number show that both are being severly hampered by the capatilism that allows for them.
Speaking as someone who is neck-deep in this topic: there were always ways for rich people to ‘inject as much money into politics as they wanted’ (or, as I would put it, ‘engage in political speech’). CU and McC merely make it less necessary for them to lie about it.
Which is fine. Also, frankly, money is overrated as a political tool anyway. Trust me, there were campaigns where I wish that it wasn’t. 🙂
There is a strong correlation between the candidate that raises the most funds for an election and the candidate that wins. No, it’s not 1:1 and therefore clearly not causation. But to imply money has nothing to do with it is disingenuous, and to say that money is overrated as a political tool is… well… not in line with reality. :/
And again, you don’t care to answer the question. Do you think people wouldn’t like your answer?
And I would like to remind you that the “some are more equal than others” line came from a book about an “enlightened” bureaucracy seizing power over the people they claimed to represent? Using it seems a little ironic here.
Just returning the favor. You never answered my question either.
And yes, my use of that line was meant to be ironic. Though I would have characterized it as a reference to a book about how those in power use will re-define the meanings of words and otherwise use whatever rhetoric they like to justify an unjust governance and unfair society. (Also that said ruling class is pretty-much indistinguishable from society to society.)
If anything, the causality often flows the other way: candidate’s don’t win because they raise more money, they raise more money because they’re expected to win. Corporate giving in particular often has less to do with ideology than with getting/maintaining “access”. (This is also why donors may contribute to both sides, just to copper their bets.) As long as obscure tweaks to regulation and tax codes can mean the difference between profit and bankruptcy, corporations are always going to try and influence the process. (And I’d go so far as to say that much political giving is less about donors trying to buy politicians, and more about politicians shaking down donors.) You’ll never take the money out of politics unless you take the politics out of money.
I’ve noticed a lot of people who never listened to the arguments, read the briefs, or checked out the ruling mention those two soundbytes…
But almost nobody who followed the case does. Strange how that works.
The transcript of oral arguments contains no reference to books whatsoever (I just checked), banned or otherwise, refuting your inflammatory rhetoric.
It does contain this from Chief Justice Roberts:
“Is he going to express his belief in [cause X] by donating to more than nine people there?”
That explicitly equates speech with the spending of money.
That statement describes spending money on a political cause as a form of core political speech; something that the Supreme Court has recognized since Buckley v. Valeo, in 1976.
The mistake the Court made in Citizens United was in equating the “person” in “personal funds” as described in Buckley with all persons, including fictional persons like corporations and nonprofits, and not just natural persons, which includes humans and any other sapients the law might recognize as such under Prop 209 or, some future real-world equivalent.
The key problem with that holding is that it allows people to subvert the large donation reporting requirements by obscuring their identities behind a string of shell companies or nonprofits.
In the Narboniverse, there’d be no limit to the number of sentients a mad scientist or evil corporation could create. (Only issue is reliability…) Why play the shell game with legal persons when you could use real ones?
The government starts admitting that its position is congruent with book-banning at about page 26, and it just goes on from there (pages 29 and 30):
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: No, I’m talking about under the Constitution, what we’ve been discussing, if it’s a book.
MR. STEWART: If it’s a book and it is produced — again, to leave — to leave to one side the question of.
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Right, right. Forget the —
MR. STEWART: — possible media exemption, if you had Citizens United or General Motors using general treasury funds to publish a book that said at
the outset, for instance, Hillary Clinton’s election would be a disaster for this —
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Take my hypothetical. It doesn’t say at the outset. It funds — here is — whatever it is, this is a discussion of the American political system, and at the end it says vote for X.
MR. STEWART: Yes, our position would be that the corporation could be required to use PAC funds rather than general treasury funds.
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: And if they didn’t, you could ban it?
MR. STEWART: If they didn’t, we could prohibit the publication of the book using the corporate treasury funds.
Feel free to disagree, of course – it was a 5/4 split, after all – but the discussion of how this would apply to books did come up in the CU oral arguments.
That’s not banning the book. That’s saying that the FEC can’t fund the publication of a book that claims to be position-neutral while supporting one candidate over the other. It doesn’t say the book can’t be published.
So Harper would be prohibited from publishing a Michael Moore book unless they started a PAC to do it?
And you don’t find yourself a little bit unnerved by the FEC handing out “media exemptions” to newspapers to get around this? That doesn’t sound like a registered and official press to you?
No, Harper-Collins is a private company and Michael Moore isn’t claiming to be position-neutral. They can do whatever they want with their own money. That has nothing to do with using government funds to disingenuously influence the outcome of an election.
He’s pretty cute, and I’m jealous he looks better in a dress than I do. Why do you ask?
Ohhhh, I see what you were aiming at. What an honest and upstanding way to conduct a debate. How typical.
Doors have been unbarred,
Now we all are free!
A fortune from Renard
Will be used maliciously!
Much more than a beast,
Much more than a bird,
We will vote and make our voices heard!
We’re not just a fox
Or tiger or cow,
We are citizens, united now!
We’re both evil, and le-e-gal!
With our superPAC,
We will attack
The halls of pow’r!
And then soon will come the hour
When we rule the world!
Open up the gates,
Now we’ll show those fools!
The Golden Rule states,
“Those with gold shall make the rules!”
Much more than a bird,
Much more than a beast,
We’re conspiring here, ‘midst folks deceased!
The law we won’t flaunt!
The law we won’t flout!
We’ll just help our beastly brethren out!
We’re more than a beast!
Our power increased!
We are e-vi-i-i-i-il …
We’re both evil,
And le-e-gal!
Given the large number of mad scientists in this setting, their over done labs, the death rays, the uber-gerbils, etc. somebody has to manage their money, and they are not going to put it in the hands of someone who says things like “that’s impossible” and “you can’t do that!” No, they are going to find/make one of their own to manage their fortunes. And if Renard’s fees happen to be higher than normal, that’s just the cost of business for smuggling unobtanium into the country.
I’m more impressed that Renard managed to continue to have his assistant work for him on the outside, as opposed to taking over the firm for herself.
“Put your money where your mouth is” should run in both directions. If you are putting money-speech into political discourse, we should all know the face/name around that metaphorical mouth.
And that’s the problem with Citizens United. It’s not that it legitimized monetized politics, since that happened 40 years ago; or that it declared corporations to be persons (not people; they’re legally distinct), since that’s what a corporation is and its purpose for existing. It’s that the decision subverted the anti-corruption intent of FECA by allowing people to hide contributions that they don’t want others to know about behind the anonymity of a corporation or nonprofit.
Unfortunately that line of logic would also ban speaking online anonymously.
Though i agree with your statement on a political and personal level the implication for other rights issues are bad.
No it doesn’t. In Buckley v. Valeo, the Court said that campaign contributions are core political speech, but not in the same way that simply expressing an opinion is, since it does necessarily carry the possibility of creating undue influence.
Simply saying what you think and changing your congressman’s mind doesn’t corrupt the political process; giving large sums of money to him without anyone knowing obviously can.
Only if money and speech are considered equivalent (which, as has been established, the SCOTUS claims, even if there’s some fundamental problems with this).
What I really dislike about this debate is how one side in particular wants to imply that some rights in this debate are completely unlimited. You can’t legally threaten assassination of certain political figures (even anonymously online), nor shout “fire” in a movie theater. Perhaps it would be reasonable to not allow someone with literally orders of magnitude more money than their opponents to essentially buy elections by drowning out the voices of said opponents.
This discussion then is usually pushed in the direction of “where do you draw the line,” as if it’s not possible to determine where it should be drawn. It’s not like we don’t have decades of precedent regulating the political process. Oh wait, didn’t the SCOTUS just disassemble a lot of that?
Absolute freedom is anarchy. We all give up some of our freedoms in order to live in society, where pretty-much all of us enjoy a better standard of living as a result. (And no, this is not the same as “those who give up freedom for security…”) It’s a matter of determining what is reasonable, setting rules and regulations which enforce that, and punishing those who won’t play by the rules. What was our representative government for, again?
Yes, I’m perfectly comfortable suggesting that “congress shall make NO LAW” means they that _political speech is specifically placed outside and above the “rules and regulations of our representative government”_.
Your side is suggesting that running this website is not speech, because it costs money. My side sees how dangerous that way of thinking is, once you start down it.
You’ve already come out against one ruling that denied the FEC the power to ban political books and movies. Where would _you_ draw the line, if not well before that?
As jdreyfuss pointed out above, it wasn’t about banning political books, it was being able to regulate how they’re funded (ie. accounting tricks which have implications for accountability, really). So despite the inflammatory rhetoric you keep plugging, the choice you present is a false dichotomy.
I thought the regulations we had were working quite well prior to the two SCOTUS decisions, or at least, a lot better than what we now have afterward.
Determining the right thing to do, and what regulation is appropriate is *not* simple– we need to have these kinds of discussions and not ignore the actual effects legislation and SCOTUS rulings have had on the political ecosystem.
Amazingly enough, you might find that you make more progress by not resorting to inflammatory speech or misrepresenting another’s viewpoint. It might surprise you to know that I think that under the right conditions, money actually is a valid form of political speech (and I have contributed monetarily to campaigns in the recent past). It’s a matter of degrees– flooding the political playing field with money (especially “anonymous” money) breeds corruption. Using one’s “free speech” to effectively silence another is not something I consider to be a fundamental right, and therefore I tend to disagree with legislation or court rulings which enable this.
Publishing a book doesn’t silence anyone–that’s just nonsense.
And speaking of “inflammatory speech”, how do you think I feel about the constant stream of ignorant propaganda from the anti-speech side?
If the New York Times has to get a special “media exemption” from the government to be allowed to endorse candidates, that’s a system I or any other liberal should want no part of.
Oh, and I’ve already had one person in this thread insinuate that I’m a disgusting conservative transphobic dirtbag. If that’s the kind of nasty way your side is going to fight this issue, you deserve to keep losing in the courts.
I’m not going to try to justify anyone’s actions but my own in this discussion. Please stop trying to put me in a box like that. But really– you’ve already tried to imply I’m a freedom hating book burner. Tell me again, just how black is that pot, anyway?
Do you really think Citizen’s United was really about publishing a book? That’s again, an oversimplification and (if sincerely held) a rather myopic view, IMO, given how the decision influenced political spending in 2012 (and will likely be further entrenched by McCutcheon).
Instead, I think it was an engineered conflict specifically engaging ‘free speech’ in order to destroy regulation which was making things more difficult for those with a lot of power from exercising even more of their influence on the process, and done at an opportune time when there are more conservative voices than liberal ones in the SCOTUS, increasing chances that it would actually work.
Really? I didn’t choose to be born either. Some things are imposed upon us. And in any case, today there is some choice as to what flavor of society you want to live in (though no absolute mobility, of course).
You can certainly try to leave society– but at this point, I doubt either your sincerity, comprehension, or sanity if you say you want to leave society.
I never said I wanted to leave society, I was just pointing out that if someone wants to, they should have a choice as to what environment they live in.
And at any rate, stating that some things are just the way they are is not an argument. It does not justify things being the way they are.
More importantly, I’m rather annoyed that my attempts to lure the discussion away from a subject I’m uncomfortable with (because it seems and probably is impossible to get things right in a way that is satisfying to everyone) by using circuitous reasoning (note the “freedom to not have restrictions” nature of my argument) didn’t work.
First, let’s get the quote right: it’s falsely shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater that’s hypothetically condemned. If there really is a fire you certainly have the right to warn people. Heck, many would argue that you have an affirmative duty to do so. (Also, the line pre-dated movies and referred to live theater. Theaters in those days tended to be pretty flammable places, and prior to the invention of electric lights, artificial light almost always involved an open flame. Thus, theater fires were more common than a modern person might imagine. Thus, shouting “Fire!” could easily cause a panicked stampede for the doors, possibly resulting in serious injuries or even deaths. Which is why you shouldn’t do it unless there really is a fire.)
To a more important point, your suggestion that the side with more money can just “buy” elections simply doesn’t hold up well in the real world. I can point to several examples where a candidate massively out-spent an opponent and still lost. The usual pattern in such cases is that the big spender was mostly self-financed. In politics, just as in commerce, all the advertising in the world won’t sell people something they really don’t want. (Otherwise, we’d be washing down our Arch Deluxe with a New Coke.) When both candidates have to rely on donors, it’s true that the candidate that raises more usually wins. But as I explained in a prior comment, they don’t win because they raise more money, they raise more money because they win.
And finally, the Citizens United case was specifically about who was funding a movie, not about whether or not the source of funding was disclosed. The law that was overturned limited speech by certain parties, while allowing other parties to speak freely.
You know, I think this is why the anti-rights side keeps losing in court cases, on several different issues.
Their arguments usually boil down to “but your honour, it’s really icky! And we’ve got a bunch of webcomics saying how evil it is!”
Whereas the pro-rights side usually has a bunch of slam-dunk briefs and bloody good arguments.
I mean, the pro-rights side in CU had a brief from former FEC commissioners explaining the constitutional problems with the law they’d been required to enforce.
The anti-rights side had New York Times editorials and a brief from the “Justice at Stake!” think-tank.
You’ve got jdreyfuss up there arguing that the case was about the FEC being forced to fund political advocacy, so I don’t think saying “the other side seems pretty ignorant and morally polarized about this issue” is strawmanning at all.
And those _are_ the briefs in the case: just go to SCOTUS-blog and check.
Did you read what I said? I said the case was about transparency in campaign finance. All I said about publishing was in response to Moe Lane.
“jdreyfuss
April 19, 2014, 11:45 am | Reply
And that’s the problem with Citizens United. It’s not that it legitimized monetized politics, since that happened 40 years ago; or that it declared corporations to be persons (not people; they’re legally distinct), since that’s what a corporation is and its purpose for existing. It’s that the decision subverted the anti-corruption intent of FECA by allowing people to hide contributions that they don’t want others to know about behind the anonymity of a corporation or nonprofit.”
I was paraphrasing “That’s not banning the book. That’s saying that the FEC can’t fund the publication of a book that claims to be position-neutral while supporting one candidate over the other.”
That’s not a response to my refuting what you said about my statements. I’m not denying what I said about the Stewart-Roberts exchange, simply saying that it was incidental to the actual relevance of the case and that I made that opinion pretty clear in my earlier statements.
That statement describes spending money on a political cause as a form of core political speech; something that the Supreme Court has recognized since Buckley v. Valeo, in 1976.
The mistake the Court made in Citizens United was in equating the “person” in “personal funds” as described in Buckley with all persons, including fictional persons like corporations and nonprofits, and not just natural persons, which includes humans and any other sapients the law might recognize as such under Prop 209 or, some future real-world equivalent.
The key problem with that holding is that it allows people to subvert the large donation reporting requirements by obscuring their identities behind a string of shell companies or nonprofits.”
Problem is, anonymity is an effective way to shield oneself from consequences of one’s free speech. :/ (That’s not to say anonymity doesn’t have its place, but that in the context of this discussion… it’s more complicated than illustrated in the above comic.) In political contexts, I generally believe people have a right to know who is saying what. 🙂
If it’s any consolation, when I organize a boycott of your business for supporting causes I find abhorrent, I do so out of the tenderness of my cold, black, socialist Ameri-hating, heart, eh!
There are also several flavours of PAC – from those directly supporting a party/candidate to ‘issue’ or ‘actian’ PAC’s – which are not supposed to overtly address the candidates. The latter is grey in the campaign finance reform circles because whether actually or thru party engineering (read political ads) many potential swing elections end up with the candidates battling on relatively minor issues (re the actual needs/concerns of the district/seat being elected for). There are also PACs that fund other PACs – further obscuring who really is lobbying for what in any given election.
During the 2012 election NPR did a good series of stories on defining the different types of PAC, how funded, and whether they are required to list donors. They may have even been under the Planet Money production group.
The best parts of that were:
“tore through the First Lady’s garden while her peons/sharecroppers were away”. So aristocratic to have a garden you never have to step foot in.
and
“they were going to relocate him to a park three miles away”. Obviously nobody in the White House bothered to look up anything about fox behaviour before coming up with that silly plan… which is at least in character for them.
Oh god I know! I don’t understand why they don’t hold office from a mobile home park and host dignitary dinners at the Golden Corral. The expansion of White House grounds and activities under Obama has been absolutely intolerable– And he’s done so much more there than any of his predecessors! I mean: Demolishing the Chamber of Commerce building so he could have a great pyramid erected in his honor? Really? (I’m actually more surprised that Obama managed to push through a 0.01% decrease in defense spending so that he could pay for his great pyramid!)
Could someone please explain to me why it is all right for people to band together in an organization called a “union”, for the purpose of securing their interests- but not to do the identical thing and call it a “corporation”? And why is spending money to promote their side is only okay for unions, not corporations? Thanks.
I’m afraid the distinctions are merely cosmetic.
All are corporate enterprises, including governments themselves.
It’s simply a matter of choosing team colors.
In other words, My union is superior to your corporation because I value gang rights over property rights_and vice versa.
The key to remember here is what was pointed out at the very beginning of the Republic. That the People reserve to themselves Unalienable Rights.
Without those rights democracy boils down to the notion that the two muggers in the park have the Right to rob an kill the little old lady because they are in the majority. A case in point is what the democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood did in Egypt not so long ago.
In fairness, I hadn’t noticed your comments getting that much sillier.
And as for parting shots, that’s a pretty poor one: good luck finding an echo chamber on this issue that doesn’t agree with you.
But hey, feel free to slap another “money isn’t speech” bumper sticker on your car and feel you’ve made a meaningful contribution to the debate.
Comic’s missing for me too. I’m on the current version of Firefox, on a Windows 8 machine (though it is also absent when I test on Chrome). Friday and Sunday content appear normally, just Saturday is missing.
Ah, so she’s not really stupid, she was bought from the beginning. Making her only a little bit stupid if she thinks he won’t turn on her the moment it becomes advantageous to do so.
Not going to say it. Not going to say it.
Flout, not flaunt.
Aw, you said it.
Actually, he most certainly can “flaunt” the law, having written it himself to specifically permit him to do the evil things he wants to do.
I had some really nice floutas for dinner last night.
Changed!
Do you even NEED a superPAC for massive and shady political finance dealings in the real U.S. after the recent supreme court rulings?
Why, yes. Yes of course.
To hide the source, of course, of course.
Because it is political it can not be seen. Its also the reason why magneto in the xmen comics gets away with so much stuff. He just files it under political activities and lets the courts run themselves ragged until his next scheme.
Ugh. Yes, because political campaigning is evil and should be banned.
I guess if people didn’t get upset about the AG arguing in front of SCOTUS that the FEC should have the power to ban the publishing of political books, there’s no speech restriction they’d dislike…
If I hire 100 people with megaphones to shout as loudly as they can standing next to the poor schmuck on a soap box trying to make a statement using only his own voice, to the point where nobody can understand what said poor schmuck is saying unless they go out of their way to get *really* close to him themselves… have I suppressed the poor schmuck’s free speech?
Or is my analogy falling on deaf ears? 😉
You don’t have to frame the debate with metaphors carefully designed to make gagging your political opponents with threats of jail time sound righteous.
Citizens United presents you with a simple choice: do you agree with the Attorney General that the FEC has the power to ban political books, or do you agree with the Supreme Court that it does not?
The wonderful thing about court cases is that they force you to address actual cases, rather than let you wander off into vague hypotheticals.
Also, I apologize for the two unformatted replies: noscript doesn’t like gravatar.
Did the result of the ruling make it legal for well-funded individuals to essentially inject as much money into politics as they wanted? And is that not what has actually happened? (Often to the effect illustrated in my analogy above?)
If so, then this choice isn’t as simple as you would like us to believe.
Everyone’s right to free speech is equal. It’s just some is more equal than others, eh?
The write to property always means that some will have more han other. Eliteism is welded insepreably to capatalism. The problem is that the right to property gives context to the right to sell you work to whome ever you wish whereever they are at a value you to have come to an agreement. That is freedom of social and fisical mobility even if the number show that both are being severly hampered by the capatilism that allows for them.
Speaking as someone who is neck-deep in this topic: there were always ways for rich people to ‘inject as much money into politics as they wanted’ (or, as I would put it, ‘engage in political speech’). CU and McC merely make it less necessary for them to lie about it.
Which is fine. Also, frankly, money is overrated as a political tool anyway. Trust me, there were campaigns where I wish that it wasn’t. 🙂
There is a strong correlation between the candidate that raises the most funds for an election and the candidate that wins. No, it’s not 1:1 and therefore clearly not causation. But to imply money has nothing to do with it is disingenuous, and to say that money is overrated as a political tool is… well… not in line with reality. :/
And again, you don’t care to answer the question. Do you think people wouldn’t like your answer?
And I would like to remind you that the “some are more equal than others” line came from a book about an “enlightened” bureaucracy seizing power over the people they claimed to represent? Using it seems a little ironic here.
Just returning the favor. You never answered my question either.
And yes, my use of that line was meant to be ironic. Though I would have characterized it as a reference to a book about how those in power use will re-define the meanings of words and otherwise use whatever rhetoric they like to justify an unjust governance and unfair society. (Also that said ruling class is pretty-much indistinguishable from society to society.)
If anything, the causality often flows the other way: candidate’s don’t win because they raise more money, they raise more money because they’re expected to win. Corporate giving in particular often has less to do with ideology than with getting/maintaining “access”. (This is also why donors may contribute to both sides, just to copper their bets.) As long as obscure tweaks to regulation and tax codes can mean the difference between profit and bankruptcy, corporations are always going to try and influence the process. (And I’d go so far as to say that much political giving is less about donors trying to buy politicians, and more about politicians shaking down donors.) You’ll never take the money out of politics unless you take the politics out of money.
I more take issue with the twin ideas of ‘money is speech’ and ‘corporations are people’ lines of reasoning myself. Money isn’t SUPPOSED to talk.
With the exception of Whimsy of course, but she’s a special case.
That money talks I shan’t deny. I heard it once: It said good-bye.
I’m glad to know I’m not the only one to experience “good-bye” from money.
Odd. Money whispers to me.
“Money doesn’t talk, it screams obscenities.” – Bob Dylan
QFT, Bob…
I’ve noticed a lot of people who never listened to the arguments, read the briefs, or checked out the ruling mention those two soundbytes…
But almost nobody who followed the case does. Strange how that works.
The transcript of oral arguments contains no reference to books whatsoever (I just checked), banned or otherwise, refuting your inflammatory rhetoric.
It does contain this from Chief Justice Roberts:
“Is he going to express his belief in [cause X] by donating to more than nine people there?”
That explicitly equates speech with the spending of money.
That statement describes spending money on a political cause as a form of core political speech; something that the Supreme Court has recognized since Buckley v. Valeo, in 1976.
The mistake the Court made in Citizens United was in equating the “person” in “personal funds” as described in Buckley with all persons, including fictional persons like corporations and nonprofits, and not just natural persons, which includes humans and any other sapients the law might recognize as such under Prop 209 or, some future real-world equivalent.
The key problem with that holding is that it allows people to subvert the large donation reporting requirements by obscuring their identities behind a string of shell companies or nonprofits.
In the Narboniverse, there’d be no limit to the number of sentients a mad scientist or evil corporation could create. (Only issue is reliability…) Why play the shell game with legal persons when you could use real ones?
http://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcripts/08-205.pdf
The government starts admitting that its position is congruent with book-banning at about page 26, and it just goes on from there (pages 29 and 30):
Feel free to disagree, of course – it was a 5/4 split, after all – but the discussion of how this would apply to books did come up in the CU oral arguments.
That’s not banning the book. That’s saying that the FEC can’t fund the publication of a book that claims to be position-neutral while supporting one candidate over the other. It doesn’t say the book can’t be published.
FEC _funding the publication of books_?! What on earth…
“Our position would be that the corporation could be required to use PAC funds rather than general treasury funds.”
Questioning whether something was said or not doesn’t work when the official record is presented in plain text above.
So Harper would be prohibited from publishing a Michael Moore book unless they started a PAC to do it?
And you don’t find yourself a little bit unnerved by the FEC handing out “media exemptions” to newspapers to get around this? That doesn’t sound like a registered and official press to you?
No, Harper-Collins is a private company and Michael Moore isn’t claiming to be position-neutral. They can do whatever they want with their own money. That has nothing to do with using government funds to disingenuously influence the outcome of an election.
Ah, that’s CU. I was looking at McCutcheon. But as jdreyfuss says, it’s all about how the book is funded.
does this count as getting politica?
So… we ban books to help free speech?
Freedom really is slavery to progressives, isn’t it?
hey, Echo, what do you think of Tip Wilkins?
He’s pretty cute, and I’m jealous he looks better in a dress than I do. Why do you ask?
Ohhhh, I see what you were aiming at. What an honest and upstanding way to conduct a debate. How typical.
No, I was just annoyed with tedious American Politics blather flooding Skin Horse discussion.
When the comic itself makes an explicit political statement? How unexpected that the comments should get political!
(TUNE: “Superman”, Five For Fighting)
Doors have been unbarred,
Now we all are free!
A fortune from Renard
Will be used maliciously!
Much more than a beast,
Much more than a bird,
We will vote and make our voices heard!
We’re not just a fox
Or tiger or cow,
We are citizens, united now!
We’re both evil, and le-e-gal!
With our superPAC,
We will attack
The halls of pow’r!
And then soon will come the hour
When we rule the world!
Open up the gates,
Now we’ll show those fools!
The Golden Rule states,
“Those with gold shall make the rules!”
Much more than a bird,
Much more than a beast,
We’re conspiring here, ‘midst folks deceased!
The law we won’t flaunt!
The law we won’t flout!
We’ll just help our beastly brethren out!
We’re more than a beast!
Our power increased!
We are e-vi-i-i-i-il …
We’re both evil,
And le-e-gal!
Its actually this sort of Jaded commentary that I look for when I pick Art during the Kickstarter.
I will have to make a note. AND on a related note – we should be coming up soon on Volume 5 if the dates for the V4 Kickstarter are any guide.
New that hippy bitch couldn’t be trusted!
Where did Renard’s large personal fortune come from? Is he the only accountant that shady NHS’s use and take exorbitant fees out?
Given the large number of mad scientists in this setting, their over done labs, the death rays, the uber-gerbils, etc. somebody has to manage their money, and they are not going to put it in the hands of someone who says things like “that’s impossible” and “you can’t do that!” No, they are going to find/make one of their own to manage their fortunes. And if Renard’s fees happen to be higher than normal, that’s just the cost of business for smuggling unobtanium into the country.
I’m more impressed that Renard managed to continue to have his assistant work for him on the outside, as opposed to taking over the firm for herself.
Artie had a nice nest egg from patents and such when he set off on his own, so it’s not implausible.
and Renard? – He probably just managed to ‘squirrel’ away some savings.
Undead Super-PAC : Dead Lawyers Revenge
“Put your money where your mouth is” should run in both directions. If you are putting money-speech into political discourse, we should all know the face/name around that metaphorical mouth.
And that’s the problem with Citizens United. It’s not that it legitimized monetized politics, since that happened 40 years ago; or that it declared corporations to be persons (not people; they’re legally distinct), since that’s what a corporation is and its purpose for existing. It’s that the decision subverted the anti-corruption intent of FECA by allowing people to hide contributions that they don’t want others to know about behind the anonymity of a corporation or nonprofit.
Unfortunately that line of logic would also ban speaking online anonymously.
Though i agree with your statement on a political and personal level the implication for other rights issues are bad.
No it doesn’t. In Buckley v. Valeo, the Court said that campaign contributions are core political speech, but not in the same way that simply expressing an opinion is, since it does necessarily carry the possibility of creating undue influence.
Simply saying what you think and changing your congressman’s mind doesn’t corrupt the political process; giving large sums of money to him without anyone knowing obviously can.
Only if money and speech are considered equivalent (which, as has been established, the SCOTUS claims, even if there’s some fundamental problems with this).
What I really dislike about this debate is how one side in particular wants to imply that some rights in this debate are completely unlimited. You can’t legally threaten assassination of certain political figures (even anonymously online), nor shout “fire” in a movie theater. Perhaps it would be reasonable to not allow someone with literally orders of magnitude more money than their opponents to essentially buy elections by drowning out the voices of said opponents.
This discussion then is usually pushed in the direction of “where do you draw the line,” as if it’s not possible to determine where it should be drawn. It’s not like we don’t have decades of precedent regulating the political process. Oh wait, didn’t the SCOTUS just disassemble a lot of that?
Absolute freedom is anarchy. We all give up some of our freedoms in order to live in society, where pretty-much all of us enjoy a better standard of living as a result. (And no, this is not the same as “those who give up freedom for security…”) It’s a matter of determining what is reasonable, setting rules and regulations which enforce that, and punishing those who won’t play by the rules. What was our representative government for, again?
Yes, I’m perfectly comfortable suggesting that “congress shall make NO LAW” means they that _political speech is specifically placed outside and above the “rules and regulations of our representative government”_.
Your side is suggesting that running this website is not speech, because it costs money. My side sees how dangerous that way of thinking is, once you start down it.
Yep, where do you draw the line. Right on time.
You, sir, are very adept at beating up straw men. Let me know if you want to have an honest discussion sometime.
You’ve already come out against one ruling that denied the FEC the power to ban political books and movies. Where would _you_ draw the line, if not well before that?
As jdreyfuss pointed out above, it wasn’t about banning political books, it was being able to regulate how they’re funded (ie. accounting tricks which have implications for accountability, really). So despite the inflammatory rhetoric you keep plugging, the choice you present is a false dichotomy.
I thought the regulations we had were working quite well prior to the two SCOTUS decisions, or at least, a lot better than what we now have afterward.
Determining the right thing to do, and what regulation is appropriate is *not* simple– we need to have these kinds of discussions and not ignore the actual effects legislation and SCOTUS rulings have had on the political ecosystem.
Amazingly enough, you might find that you make more progress by not resorting to inflammatory speech or misrepresenting another’s viewpoint. It might surprise you to know that I think that under the right conditions, money actually is a valid form of political speech (and I have contributed monetarily to campaigns in the recent past). It’s a matter of degrees– flooding the political playing field with money (especially “anonymous” money) breeds corruption. Using one’s “free speech” to effectively silence another is not something I consider to be a fundamental right, and therefore I tend to disagree with legislation or court rulings which enable this.
Publishing a book doesn’t silence anyone–that’s just nonsense.
And speaking of “inflammatory speech”, how do you think I feel about the constant stream of ignorant propaganda from the anti-speech side?
If the New York Times has to get a special “media exemption” from the government to be allowed to endorse candidates, that’s a system I or any other liberal should want no part of.
Oh, and I’ve already had one person in this thread insinuate that I’m a disgusting conservative transphobic dirtbag. If that’s the kind of nasty way your side is going to fight this issue, you deserve to keep losing in the courts.
I’m not going to try to justify anyone’s actions but my own in this discussion. Please stop trying to put me in a box like that. But really– you’ve already tried to imply I’m a freedom hating book burner. Tell me again, just how black is that pot, anyway?
Do you really think Citizen’s United was really about publishing a book? That’s again, an oversimplification and (if sincerely held) a rather myopic view, IMO, given how the decision influenced political spending in 2012 (and will likely be further entrenched by McCutcheon).
Instead, I think it was an engineered conflict specifically engaging ‘free speech’ in order to destroy regulation which was making things more difficult for those with a lot of power from exercising even more of their influence on the process, and done at an opportune time when there are more conservative voices than liberal ones in the SCOTUS, increasing chances that it would actually work.
Except I never chose to live in society. Unless you implement a system allowing someone to leave it, you will always have a serious issue with this.
Really? I didn’t choose to be born either. Some things are imposed upon us. And in any case, today there is some choice as to what flavor of society you want to live in (though no absolute mobility, of course).
You can certainly try to leave society– but at this point, I doubt either your sincerity, comprehension, or sanity if you say you want to leave society.
I never said I wanted to leave society, I was just pointing out that if someone wants to, they should have a choice as to what environment they live in.
And at any rate, stating that some things are just the way they are is not an argument. It does not justify things being the way they are.
More importantly, I’m rather annoyed that my attempts to lure the discussion away from a subject I’m uncomfortable with (because it seems and probably is impossible to get things right in a way that is satisfying to everyone) by using circuitous reasoning (note the “freedom to not have restrictions” nature of my argument) didn’t work.
First, let’s get the quote right: it’s falsely shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater that’s hypothetically condemned. If there really is a fire you certainly have the right to warn people. Heck, many would argue that you have an affirmative duty to do so. (Also, the line pre-dated movies and referred to live theater. Theaters in those days tended to be pretty flammable places, and prior to the invention of electric lights, artificial light almost always involved an open flame. Thus, theater fires were more common than a modern person might imagine. Thus, shouting “Fire!” could easily cause a panicked stampede for the doors, possibly resulting in serious injuries or even deaths. Which is why you shouldn’t do it unless there really is a fire.)
To a more important point, your suggestion that the side with more money can just “buy” elections simply doesn’t hold up well in the real world. I can point to several examples where a candidate massively out-spent an opponent and still lost. The usual pattern in such cases is that the big spender was mostly self-financed. In politics, just as in commerce, all the advertising in the world won’t sell people something they really don’t want. (Otherwise, we’d be washing down our Arch Deluxe with a New Coke.) When both candidates have to rely on donors, it’s true that the candidate that raises more usually wins. But as I explained in a prior comment, they don’t win because they raise more money, they raise more money because they win.
And finally, the Citizens United case was specifically about who was funding a movie, not about whether or not the source of funding was disclosed. The law that was overturned limited speech by certain parties, while allowing other parties to speak freely.
You know, I think this is why the anti-rights side keeps losing in court cases, on several different issues.
Their arguments usually boil down to “but your honour, it’s really icky! And we’ve got a bunch of webcomics saying how evil it is!”
Whereas the pro-rights side usually has a bunch of slam-dunk briefs and bloody good arguments.
I mean, the pro-rights side in CU had a brief from former FEC commissioners explaining the constitutional problems with the law they’d been required to enforce.
The anti-rights side had New York Times editorials and a brief from the “Justice at Stake!” think-tank.
Wow! You really nailed him that time. I mean– that straw-man’s head flew half-way across the field that time! Excellent work!
You’ve got jdreyfuss up there arguing that the case was about the FEC being forced to fund political advocacy, so I don’t think saying “the other side seems pretty ignorant and morally polarized about this issue” is strawmanning at all.
And those _are_ the briefs in the case: just go to SCOTUS-blog and check.
Did you read what I said? I said the case was about transparency in campaign finance. All I said about publishing was in response to Moe Lane.
“jdreyfuss
April 19, 2014, 11:45 am | Reply
And that’s the problem with Citizens United. It’s not that it legitimized monetized politics, since that happened 40 years ago; or that it declared corporations to be persons (not people; they’re legally distinct), since that’s what a corporation is and its purpose for existing. It’s that the decision subverted the anti-corruption intent of FECA by allowing people to hide contributions that they don’t want others to know about behind the anonymity of a corporation or nonprofit.”
I was paraphrasing “That’s not banning the book. That’s saying that the FEC can’t fund the publication of a book that claims to be position-neutral while supporting one candidate over the other.”
That’s not a response to my refuting what you said about my statements. I’m not denying what I said about the Stewart-Roberts exchange, simply saying that it was incidental to the actual relevance of the case and that I made that opinion pretty clear in my earlier statements.
“jdreyfuss
April 19, 2014, 8:53 am | Reply
That statement describes spending money on a political cause as a form of core political speech; something that the Supreme Court has recognized since Buckley v. Valeo, in 1976.
The mistake the Court made in Citizens United was in equating the “person” in “personal funds” as described in Buckley with all persons, including fictional persons like corporations and nonprofits, and not just natural persons, which includes humans and any other sapients the law might recognize as such under Prop 209 or, some future real-world equivalent.
The key problem with that holding is that it allows people to subvert the large donation reporting requirements by obscuring their identities behind a string of shell companies or nonprofits.”
http://xkcd.com/1357/
Considering the FEC is part of the government, I’m not sure what that comic is supposed to prove.
I love that comic. It explains a lot, eh!
Problem is, anonymity is an effective way to shield oneself from consequences of one’s free speech. :/ (That’s not to say anonymity doesn’t have its place, but that in the context of this discussion… it’s more complicated than illustrated in the above comic.) In political contexts, I generally believe people have a right to know who is saying what. 🙂
I sure wouldn’t donate to any political cause under my real name, when all it would do is let twitter mobs get me blacklisted.
If it’s any consolation, when I organize a boycott of your business for supporting causes I find abhorrent, I do so out of the tenderness of my cold, black, socialist Ameri-hating, heart, eh!
Remind me what PAC stands for again?
Political Action Committee. It’s how election regulations refer to lobby groups.
There are also several flavours of PAC – from those directly supporting a party/candidate to ‘issue’ or ‘actian’ PAC’s – which are not supposed to overtly address the candidates. The latter is grey in the campaign finance reform circles because whether actually or thru party engineering (read political ads) many potential swing elections end up with the candidates battling on relatively minor issues (re the actual needs/concerns of the district/seat being elected for). There are also PACs that fund other PACs – further obscuring who really is lobbying for what in any given election.
During the 2012 election NPR did a good series of stories on defining the different types of PAC, how funded, and whether they are required to list donors. They may have even been under the Planet Money production group.
So apropos: http://youtu.be/1agbU1pYiak
The best parts of that were:
“tore through the First Lady’s garden while her peons/sharecroppers were away”. So aristocratic to have a garden you never have to step foot in.
and
“they were going to relocate him to a park three miles away”. Obviously nobody in the White House bothered to look up anything about fox behaviour before coming up with that silly plan… which is at least in character for them.
Oh god I know! I don’t understand why they don’t hold office from a mobile home park and host dignitary dinners at the Golden Corral. The expansion of White House grounds and activities under Obama has been absolutely intolerable– And he’s done so much more there than any of his predecessors! I mean: Demolishing the Chamber of Commerce building so he could have a great pyramid erected in his honor? Really? (I’m actually more surprised that Obama managed to push through a 0.01% decrease in defense spending so that he could pay for his great pyramid!)
Could someone please explain to me why it is all right for people to band together in an organization called a “union”, for the purpose of securing their interests- but not to do the identical thing and call it a “corporation”? And why is spending money to promote their side is only okay for unions, not corporations? Thanks.
Corporations are capitalist.
Unions are socialist.
I’m afraid the distinctions are merely cosmetic.
All are corporate enterprises, including governments themselves.
It’s simply a matter of choosing team colors.
In other words, My union is superior to your corporation because I value gang rights over property rights_and vice versa.
The key to remember here is what was pointed out at the very beginning of the Republic. That the People reserve to themselves Unalienable Rights.
Without those rights democracy boils down to the notion that the two muggers in the park have the Right to rob an kill the little old lady because they are in the majority. A case in point is what the democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood did in Egypt not so long ago.
One thing people often overlook is that Citizens protected political speech by unions and non-profits as well as GE and Exxon-Mobil.
Ok, folks, I think the time has come for me to walk away from the internet for a while. The silliness quotient in my responses is rapidly tumescing.
Anyway, apologies to Shaenon and Jeff for spewing all over your comic today! I’m having a lot of fund with this story line. 🙂
And good luck, Echo: Have fun in your chamber.
In fairness, I hadn’t noticed your comments getting that much sillier.
And as for parting shots, that’s a pretty poor one: good luck finding an echo chamber on this issue that doesn’t agree with you.
But hey, feel free to slap another “money isn’t speech” bumper sticker on your car and feel you’ve made a meaningful contribution to the debate.
Then clearly you weren’t reading. And expressing disagreeing views certainly beats making snide remarks.
I can’t see the comic.
The comic isn’t showing up for me, either. :/ There’s just a small grey bounding box. I’m on an iPad, in case that matters.
Comic’s missing for me too. I’m on the current version of Firefox, on a Windows 8 machine (though it is also absent when I test on Chrome). Friday and Sunday content appear normally, just Saturday is missing.
Saturday and Tuesday missing for me.
Ugh, why will the comic not display? Tried three browsers….
Interesting indeed.
Ah, so she’s not really stupid, she was bought from the beginning. Making her only a little bit stupid if she thinks he won’t turn on her the moment it becomes advantageous to do so.
You can do more evil if you do it legally! Just ask Evil Atom.