They're implemented, but the rise of the SuperPAC after Citizens United more or less makes the regulations pointless. I can't contribute more than $2700 to a campaign, but I can contribute $27,000,000 to a PAC that requires only the thinnest imaginable separation from the campaign. Basically, as long as the candidate isn't on TV personally endorsing my check, we're good.
I wasn't suggesting I had one. I'm just pointing out that SuperPACs get around pretty much any meaningful prior attempts at regulating campaign contributions.
I don't think there is an alternative. What is needed in order to solve the problem is a complete overhaul of how campaigns are financed, including making quite a lot of currently protected speech illegal. And that cure may be worse than the disease. Without it though, politicians will continue to require massive quantities of private cash, and I don't see any way to make that not suck for the country as a whole.
What can possibly be done about media outlets, whose owners choose what news gets reported and what slant it takes on so on? The more you restrict the ability of people to pay for advertisements, the more control the media has over what people see.
Like I said, probably nothing can be done that isn't ultimately likely to be worse. Short of people spontaneously becoming smarter, you'd effectively have to outlaw news outlets deemed to be "too slanted", and even if you could do that (you can't), I'm not so naive as to think a government in control of the press would be in any way better.
Basically, it's all fucked, I guess would be my considered opinion. Democracy just doesn't work when half or more of the population can be trivially manipulated into believing anything you want them to believe.
The exact opposite of it: money isn't speech, so restrictions on campaign financing aren't infringements on your free speech rights. Not letting you spend millions on campaign ads is not an equivalent of silencing your political opinion - you can still speak, write etc as a private individual, same as any other citizen.
Can I create a video and post it on my private youtube channel, as a private individual?
Can I spend $10 million creating the youtube video, if I have that much money as a private individual?
Can I organize a group of 10 friends to each spend $1 million on the youtube video?
Can I organize 1 million people to spend $10 each on said video?
Note that under McCain-Feingold (which is the law that was at issue in Citizens United) the answer to the second question is "yes", as far as I can tell: the law instituted restrictions on corporations and unions, not on rich individuals.
Whether the answer is "yes" for the second and third question would have depended on whether youtube counts as "broadcast, cable, or satellite communication" as well as whether a gofundme campaign should fund under the law, and so forth. So it's really not that hard to come up with loopholes around this stuff, if you want to allow spontaneous grassroots production of political youtube videos.
(Also, one person's "political ad" is another person's "documentary", often enough; this goes in both directions.)
>Can I create a video and post it on my private youtube channel, as a private individual?
Yes.
>Can I spend $10 million creating the youtube video, if I have that much money as a private individual?
Yes. However, if it turns out that those ten million were gathered from other friends, explicitly in the goal to make this video without disclosing your donors or ignoring the caps, you should be fined and be made unelectable for multiple years.
>Can I organize a group of 10 friends to each spend $1 million on the youtube video?
Not if that video is part of your campaign, because then the amount each person can donate is capped.
>Can I organize 1 million people to spend $10 each on said video?
Yes.
The only real problem in those four is the third. Because it is infinitely easier to organize only ten friends to donate one million to your campaign than to organize one million people, especially if you're already in the category of people that can afford to blow ten millions like that.
As a bonus, at least having one million people donating to you demonstrates that you actually have people following you.
This was apparently not clear: in all those questions the "I" posting the video is not the person running. That's the context of the Citizens United decision.
Then you are more than welcome to blow as much money as you'd like on your favourite candidate! And since it's on Youtube, noone is "forced" to watch your video, they can always switch to something else.
However, TV and cable channels (as well as press) should have strict equality rules when it comes to candidates for a given period until the elections. What good will your ten million dollars video do on CNN when they are legally obligated to give every candidate the same amount of air time? But of course, you could skirt around it, and make your video subtly hint about said candidate, never mentioning him. But if countries with civil law can manage to make that work when it comes to respecting the spirit of the law, I have no doubt a country with common law will have no issues realizing that this is quite obviously violating the spirit of the law.
There is absolutely no principled difference between youtube and cable channels that I can see; people are easily able to "switch to something else", as you say, in both cases. Or indeed, shut off their TV. Doubly so if we're talking long-form content like that in the Citizens United decision, as opposed to 30-second ad spots.
Why do you think that there is a difference here?
> But if countries with civil law can manage to make that work when it comes to respecting the spirit of the law
For what it's worth, said countries typically have nothing comparable to the constitutional free speech protections the US has, and have no problem with the government imposing all sorts of speech limits that would get laughed out of court in the US.
And as mentioned elsewhere in this thread, speech that is not "for" any particular candidate but "against" a particular candidate is not trivial to apportion in an "equal time" regime.
Most laws have loopholes, just as most software has bugs. You try to anticipate them when you write the law, and you keep an eye on them and amend the law as necessary.
It's not that simple in this case, because for my first question the answer really needs to be "yes" as a clear First Amendment matter: individual political speech is clearly protected, and video is a common "speech" medium nowadays. So that's a "loophole" that is pretty much required by the Constitution.
It's really not clear to me how one can draw a sane line between the first and second question, for this case, unless you want to forbid any political video that actually takes time/effort/money to do research for (see "documentary").
And then the problem becomes that either you privilege the political speech of rich individuals over non-rich ones even more than we already do, or you have to allow non-rich individuals to pool resources to speak.
The "loophole" is then.. what exactly? What form the pooling takes? Whether the pooling is voluntary? Something else? I see a lot of people who are unhappy with the Citizens United decision, but not many proposals for what the law on this should be apart from "political speech from organizations I disagree with should not be allowed". For example, I see lots of "corporations shouldn't be able to engage in political speech" but very little of "unions shouldn't be able to engage in political speech" from Citizens United opponents. Amusingly, I see a fair amount of "unions shouldn't be able to engage in political speech" from people who support the Citizens United decision. And I have met absolutely no one who opposes the Citizens United decision and also thinks Michael Moore shouldn't be allowed to create movies in election years. Though I expect such people do exist; there just aren't many of them.
>corporations shouldn't be able to engage in political speech
Corporations should be able to engage in political speech, as long it is done through their CEO or anyone that represents them officially, who then would be nothing more than just another citizen who happens to own a company, defending its interests. By all means, have an interesting debate, explain your point of view, reason as to why you'd like X or Y.
Money is _not_ speech. By allowing those citizens to contribute financially, in an effectively unlimited way through superPACs and other setups, you are throwing away the very foundation of democracy and equality amongst citizens when it comes to being represented.
>unions shouldn't be able to engage in political speech
Go ahead, same thing, debate! Make yourselves heard, in the streets or on television. But, once again, money can fuck right off.
>you are throwing away the very foundation of democracy and equality amongst citizens when it comes to being represented.
There is no such foundation. You're lying to yourself. At the very least, the owners of media outlets have far more influence than other citizens due to their ability to set the conversation. There is literally nothing you can do to achieve your ridiculous ideal of equality, or to even come anywhere close to it. All you can do is change what rich people have to do to get what they want, and maybe make it more expensive. And by the way, making it more expensive just means the richest get even more of a say.
>money can fuck right off.
So I can't pay someone to build a website that (directly or indirectly) promotes a candidate?
Or maybe your terrible political system has made you jaded and not realize that democracy is still a thing of the people ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Yes, whoever owns CNN can use up all his airtime telling you that X is the greatest vandidate that's ever lived and yes, he will reach more people than I ever will. Yet, his vote has the exact same value as mine.
Impose limits, educate people. You'll see that things will improve. Yes, it's expensive. Yes, it takes some time. But you can either do that, or slump in your apathy and watch your country descend ever lower into the depth of intelligence and be the butt of everyone's joke even more than it is right now.
>Yes, whoever owns CNN can use up all his airtime telling you that X is the greatest vandidate that's ever lived and yes, he will reach more people than I ever will. Yet, his vote has the exact same value as mine.
Interesting logic. Let's try applying it to the completely obvious parallel:
"Yes, whoever owns boatloads of money can use up all his money buying TV ads telling you that X is the greatest candidate that's ever lived and yes, he will reach more people than I ever will. Yet, his vote has the exact same value as mine."
Nothing goes hand in hand with the first. The first is a failed attempt at rationalizing away the fact that there will always be people that have vastly more influence over politics than others do, and that there is no such thing as equality in politics.
The second paragraph as far as I can tell boils down to "educate people" as the answer. Who should be doing the educating?
I think you just ignored my questions about how the specifics of this work. Again, say the CEO decides to create a video to explain his point of view. Is that a problem? Is it a problem if he pays for production of that video? Is it a problem if he gets several people together to pay for the production of that video? Where do you, personally, draw the line?
Making yourself heard on television commonly takes the form of TV advertising, which is all about money, unfortunately.
>Making yourself heard on television commonly takes the form of TV advertising, which is all about money, unfortunately.
Like I answered in your other post, equality of air time for each candidate. I know, you've had twenty something candidates, and it would be hard to make that work. Tough luck, that's the price to pay for a fairer election.
I don't envy your ridiculous two year long campaigns, but at least you'd get some diversity, unlike your two-candidates-blow-100-million-in-total-and-bombard-you-for-months current way of doing it. And who knows, that might even bring you to reform your woefully outdated political system.
Where "air time" means "time across all possible cable channels", right?
And presumably equality of "youtube time" too? How do you even measure this?
Seriously, we're way past there being 5 broadcast TV networks and nothing else where you could try enforcing some sort of mandate.
Keep in mind that Citizens United wasn't even "for" some particular candidate. It was against a particular candidate and wanted to show its movie at a point in time when it wasn't even clear who the candidate's opponents would be. Assuming you imposed the "equality of air time" doctrine in this situation, who's air time would the movie come out of, exactly?
It's easy to just claim the system is broken; figuring out how to fix it sanely is much harder.
(And for the record, I agree that the current campaign lengths and costs in the US are ridiculous. What I don't see is how to make them less so without imposing some pretty totalitarian speech controls, which would immediately get coopted by those in power to completely shut down anything resembling third party candidates.)
Air time means "you wanna talk about candidate X on your channel? Sure, you're just going to match every single minute you spoke about him with every other candidate.". That usually excludes legal trouble because that doesn't exactly count as campaigning for said candidate. I feel like you are seeing it as having an allotted amount of time for each candidate, where every single minute is counted and taken out of their time counter, when the idea is more to be to allow the channels to organise how they wish, but ultimately, in a 24 hour period, they have to fit the same amount for each candidate. (In practice, you do that over a week or a month, but the concept is the same).
YouTube time is different because there's not one single place controlling your entire feed, noone dictating what you are going to watch. You can decide on your own to watch ten hours of your favourite candidate and ignore every other, because you made that choice and noone imposed it on you.
The Citizens United question is a bit tricky indeed, but two things:
- Ultimately, it is the TV channel's responsibility to have aired such a video, and as such should match any time campaigning for a candidate with others. But, like you said, it was more an attack then anything else. Which brings us to our second point:
- Straight up outlaw such clips that are an attack on a candidate. It serves no purpose other than to drive down the level, it makes the campaign absolutely worthless and is a danger to democracy. It is the most basic level, the dark depth of political life. It kills every debate, destroys every effort made to educate people, because ultimately attacks are cheap, entertaining and efficient. It truly makes society worse as a whole, and people stupid. Yes, that's maybe an attack on free speech. I believe keeping a higher level of debate is a tad more important than being able to take a dump on someone you don't like on live TV.
Let me give you examples of where I live, France, to alleviate some of your fears.
We have a council that ensures what is aired is either nonpartisan, or matched, with the ability to shut down entire TV programs if needed. It has not been done in decades, and most of it ends up being fines. The shitstorm that would happen if they did cancel an show would be quite the sight. Attacks are forbidden. Total campaign funds are capped. Campaign clips are of fixed length, are aired something like four times a day, randomly ordered, shown for all candidates. Public TV has an obligation to give financial and material aid for smaller candidates to ensure they can have a clip. You cannot start officially campaigning on TV and in the press before a set date. You could say we have some rather intensive speech control.
This previous election has seen the two traditional parties (LR & PS) failing miserably. The socialist party, one of the most important parties in the country and previous president's party ended up with a pitiful 6.5% of votes. REM, the new president's movement was born out of nowhere barely a year before the elections. FI managed to crystallize the leftist electorate and reach 19%, barely a percent below the traditional conservative candidate. The FN, as much as I despise them for everything they stand for, is not a traditional party. We have communist candidates. Yes, multiple, because the only thing harder than herding cats is getting communists to agree. We have one that intends to go to Mars. Every election, we have a dozen candidates. Every election, debates are held. They're even rather polite, usually. This year, Fillon has been bogged down in embezzlement affairs, Le Pen too. Aside from one deliciously satisfying bash during one debate, an which lasted 3 minutes over a 3 hour long debate, things stayed civil.
And that's just an example of how we do it here, and I definitely not believe it's perfect. Our political system has issues. Plenty of them. Look at other countries, look at how it's done. Improve on it, and take the best from each.
> because there's not one single place controlling your entire feed
That's true with cable too.
> Straight up outlaw such clips that are an attack on a candidate.
What constitutes an attack? Is a clip pointing out that a candidate is wrong on some matter of fact an attack on that candidate? What about a matter of almost-fact (i.e. one where disagreements exist but the preponderance of the evidence is considered to be on a certain side)? This is a serious question; people disagree vehemently on this very matter. As a concrete example, can one point out that a candidate's policies will likely lead to increased atmospheric CO_2 levels? Can one point out that a candidate has not been trustworthy in the past?
I think pointing out potential problems with candidates is _critical_ to democracy functioning. The _tone_ is a separate matter, of course, and I agree that the tone it's often done in is not good for democracy.
I would really like to understand what you consider an "attack" vs "not an attack" and how those definitions match up with how you'd have to define them sanely for an equal-time regime.
> Let me give you examples of where I live, France, to alleviate some of your fears.
France is pretty bad on freedom-of-speech issues, I know; not just in this area. That doesn't mean the US should follow France's lead down that lane.
> We have a council that ensures what is aired is either nonpartisan
Really? And they do this while ignoring their own political biases, including unconscious ones? I am dubious, but it's possible if there is enough of a tradition of doing so that people would be embarrassed to show even implicit partisanship in this situation.
> Attacks are forbidden
"Attacks" defined how?
> Campaign clips are of fixed length
Defined how? Are Michael Moore movies considered "campaign clips"? Should they be in the US?
Again, I agree that the way US elections work is far from optimal. I've just had a hard time finding things to change that would not cause more harm than good, including starting down some seriously slippery slopes to things we have consciously moved away from in the past (e.g. government control over the content of what can be aired on TV).
You're 100% right. What I'd say is that we as a society have to make a choice between preserving the full range of protected speech we all enjoy and curtailing the degree to which the democratic process has been corrupted by the unlimited need for private money to run a campaign.
I'm not personally convinced I know which of those two options is preferable, but those are the options. I am fairly well convinced that you can't do the latter without the former.
Hardly. Some citizens own media outlets and can hire and fire journalists based on their political leanings. Some citizens pay millions of dollars to media outlets for non-political advertising and can adjust their purchases depending on the reporting of the media outlet. Are you going to tell media outlets they can't talk about politics? Or do you disagree that media outlets have influence over elections (at least, more than I do)? I'd guess they have more influence than paid advertisements.
