Money is not political speech. There is a simple explanation why.

[coti]

It's because where political speech is persuasive, political money is coercive.

Do not confuse persuasion and coercion.

[readmoreoften]

1. Sorry I accidentally hit unrec. I meant to hit rec. +1!!!

[WatchWhatISay]

3. So I recced it to offset your mistake

I usually don't fool with that stuff.

[rucky]

5. +1

[elleng]

2. Tell it to the COURT!

(PS, I agree with you.)

[mmonk]

4. The court disagrees with you and so do the monied interests

that made sure they got to the bench.

[Igel]

6. In other words, you want money out of political campaigns.

This, of course, would have to exclude public campaign funding. It would exclude small donations, bundled or not.

So there'd be unfettered political speech without any coercion.

Would candidates be allowed to use their own money? Or would that also be banned? If that's banned, we'd achieve far greater purity of speech, untainted by filthy lucre.

Of course, in either event the dominant way for a candidate's message to get out would be free publicity by media. But, no. Since a front page or prime time story is very much like a front page ad or prime time ad--just one paid for differently--we'd have to conclude that this is a surrogate for campaign funding. After all, if a corporation wants to promote a candidate using its resources they have to pay for it. Whether that corporation is MoveOn.org Civic Action, Microsoft, or the New York Times. Current laws give a privileged status to certain corporations and even individuals, but that's not written in stone.

I guess that we've achieved true purity of political speech when the candidates have no choice but to stand outside on the street, able to get their message out for free to anybody within earshot; when the only publicity that they really get is from word of mouth.

*That* would make for interesting politics.

[coti]

7. No, it doesn't exclude public campaign funding as long as there was a system

in place to allow everyone an equal footing in gaining access to the funds based on the persuasiveness of their political ideas, i.e., through petitions and primaries. When the funds are allotted on a standardized basis, the coercive effect of receiving campaign money from the government is virtually non-existent, even if one assumes that the government is much like a private party with a political interest- which it isn't, exactly.

In fact, the argument I'm making is not that all political money must or even could constitutionally could be banned from politics. All that I'm saying is that donating political money does not carry the same constitutional protections as political speech does because they are fundamentally different from each other. It is absolutely correct and right that political speech carries the full protection of the 1st Amendment and demands strict scrutiny of any law resticting it. But, being coercive, not persuasive, political money does not breed the same intellectual rigor as pure political speech does, and does not deserve the same hefty protections political speech is given.

[coti]

8. More on your points-

Your overall point seems to be that money can not be removed from politics entirely, that it is a tool a candidate must have access to in order to get themselves heard.

I fully agree with what you're saying. It's not even conceivable that money could, as a tool, be totally removed from the political process, and, again, it is not my point that it could or even should be. However, the government can do things to restrict its influence on the quality of our discourse. More generally than in my above post, what I'm saying is that, while political speech can not be regulated by the government except where there is a compelling interest to do so, imbalances in the economic resource candidates use to get their message out constitutionally should be able to corrected, or at least diminished, by it. Take exclusive public funding of campaigns as an example. Although candidates would still have to spend money purchasing advertisements, they would have access to the same amount of money by which they could do so. It would put candidates on the same financial footing and help to expose the public to them and their ideas equally, thus allowing for greater distinction between them on the merits of those ideas.

Basically, the point is that the means by which a campaign is carried out and the message of a campaign can and should be distinguished. They don't have to be treated equally under the law, as the SCOTUS apparently believes.

[Mithreal]

9. The poster you responded to, seems purposefully obtuse.