Even President Obama repeated the cliched warning in his State of the Union last week that a recent Supreme Court decision would “open the floodgates for special interests.” But the truth is, big money is already in politics.
As Denver Post reporter Burt Hubbard showed recently, “State candidates, stealth political groups and special-interest political campaigns in Colorado have amassed millions of dollars in campaign donations to kick off the 2010 elections.”
Record-setting collections for state and national races are being backed by the full melange of corporate and private donors — and it all was done before the Supreme Court’s decision. Top donors in Colorado included the pharmaceutical industry, Wal-Mart and Qwest.
We think the high court’s ruling ended laws that basically amounted to censorship. Lifting McCain-Feingold rules will allow greater freedom for political speech.
The justices reversed a restriction on corporations and unions from paying directly for television political advertisements in the days leading up to an election. The limitation doesn’t apply to other forms of speech, and was therefore unfair.
We’ve received dozens of letters from readers who disagreed with our stance. (Many are printed in today’s Perspective.) But we think the high court’s decision has been misunderstood, even by the president, as The New York Times’ Linda Greenhouse demonstrated.
Limitations on direct giving to candidates remain. Laws continue to prevent corporations from giving directly to a candidate, and individuals remain limited in the amount of money they can donate to candidates in primaries and general elections.
McCain-Feingold, passed in 2002, represents but a small part of hundreds of pages of campaign-finance regulations put in place over decades. The rules-upon-rules framework has created a flawed system that runs contrary to the First Amendment.The goal of these regulations is always laudable — that is, to reduce the influence of money in politics — but they’ve been impossible to enforce. No sooner does a rule pop up here than a new kind of political action committee or 527 organization springs up to mask special-interest donations.
So much money is being shuffled around behind the scenes that often voters don’t know who is behind many campaign-style ads and efforts until months after Election Day.
Political experts and academics who have studied campaign laws since the Nixon administration have had a difficult time proving that big donations are as corrupting as conventional wisdom holds.
The public has to remain vigilant, but the high court’s decision should make it easier to be so, as corporations will have to disclose their backing of political speech. Such transparency will be a welcome change.
