Rock, Paper, Scissors, SCOTUS

[ashling]

It is almost impossible to overturn a SCOTUS ruling with legislation. It's like rock, paper, scissors. The legislation restricting corporate money and influence in elections is "rock." The SCOTUS ruling is "paper" and, as we all know, "paper covers rock." The only way to beat the paper ruling of the SCOTUS is to use "scissors."

This can be done in two ways. The first,and most obvious, is by constitutional amendment. An amendment would make the SCOTUS ruling irrelevant, cutting right through it.

But scissors can also be used surgically, not to just invalidate, but to take advantage of a thousand cuts. This could be accomplished through carefully crafted legislation that would make corporate attempts to influence the election backfire on corporations.

One concern is about foriegn influence because corporations can be influenced by their foriegn shareholders in Europe, Israel, Saudi Arabia, or China. This could be a clear and present danger to our national security. This would, then, justify legislation requiring corporations to, for example, file lists of shareholder ownership with the FEC.


And what about the seperation of church and state? If a corpration enters into the political fry, as it were, should not religious stakeholders (through pension funds, or direct investment) be subject to taxation?

:shrug:

[backscatter712]

1. I think I see an opening. Make campaign finance laws compliant with strict-scrutiny standard.

The usual precedents for freedom of speech cases generally require that in cases where the government restricts speech, the restrictions must be narrowly tailored, and be used for compelling state interests (I'm trying to remember the exact cases and case law.)

Previous campaign finance law was fairly broad, and didn't really include justification for restrictions more detailed than "to prevent corporate influence on elections." Now if restrictions were more narrowly tailored, and had more detailed justifications, say a restriction designed to prevent a conflict of interest from occurring with elected officials, or to prevent corporate advertising campaigns from being used to extort and threaten elected officials, then it would be harder for the SCOTUS to justify striking such restrictions.

Edit: Just googled, the doctrine I'm talking about is strict scrutiny. If campaign finance laws can be shown to be justified by a compelling government interest (legislators being able to act objectively when working on legislation, free of bias & influence caused by campaign finance/attack-ad influence), narrowly tailored (the law doesn't throw babies out with bathwater), and uses the least restrictive means, then assuming the Supreme Court actually bothered to keep their rulings consistent with existing case law, the campaign finance laws would be Constitutional.