Friday, February 28, 2014

Campaign Finance and Kai Arrested at the Supreme Court

I'm going to start this blog up again.  I'm planning on blogging on a mix of topics, including legal analysis and my dreams for ways to build better institutions.  I would like to start off by talking about campaign finance and a friend of mine who was arrested for speaking during the oral argument for the Supreme Court case McCutcheon v FEC.  This case involves a conservative businessman from Alabama suing the FEC to try to lift restrictions on his ability to give money to political candidates and parties.  Here is an article on the case and its effects.  I am hopeful that the Supreme Court will not overturn 40 years of precedent, but it is a possibility.  I'm of the opinion that the system is already so broken that, while this would certainly be a step in the wrong direction and have an impact, the overall tenor of the system would be the same... money controls politics.

Anyway, my friend, Kai, was arrested for speaking during court. Here is a Washington Post article on it.  Here is the video of him, a video that is also not allowed to have been taken in the court.  There is a real problem in our society when you are arrested for speaking out of turn but you can legally bribe politicians.  We are a part of 99Rise, which is a movement of people against government corruption.

I have been thinking about the social system of campaigns and campaign finance, and I wish there was a way to change it that did not undermine first amendment rights.  I disagree with the effect Citizen's United has had, it has extended the reach of big money.  And at the same time I would rather expand the right to free speech and change the campaign system in another way that limits how actors behave than do a frontal assault on the logic of Citizen's United and other free speech.  Attacking free speech is a slippery slope, the 1920s saw ridiculous restrictions on speech that I would never want to see happen again.

Just to be clear, I do not think money is speech.  The conduct of spending money may have speech dimensions, but I think it is more akin to commerce than speech.  I think we should consider how we can put restrictions on the flow of money using the commerce clause and in contracts law in such a way that it would be hard to claim that it limits speech.  Hopefully more ideas on how to do that later.