Citizens United, the loony left, and me
May. 25th, 2012 09:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
drwexTL;DR version: Citizen's United is bad law but the Left/Progressive response is overboard, stupid, and not a good idea.
I'm not sure how much background people need - there's a lot of good stuff you can read. Citizen's United, a Supreme Court decision that should have been limited to whether or not a single film could be shown on pay-per-view TV, became a precedent-setting case that has transformed American politics, though not in the way anyone expected.
I don't think anyone expected that over 90% of funding in this election cycle would come from a small number of ultra-wealthy individuals. The entire group responsible for those millions of campaign funds would fit nicely on a chartered 767. Corporations, feared as the primary beneficiaries, have so far stayed clear of this level of buying politics, presumably for fear of public backlash. GE makes nukes and tends to donate heavily conservative/Republican, but probably 40-50% of their appliances are bought by people who vote Democrat and who would presumably be pissed off if the GE SuperPAC was out front airing attack ads for Romney. It's just not good business to get that deep into buying candidates overtly, nor is it really necessary. Search "regulatory capture" for details.
That said, Citizen's United enshrines a fundamental error in our laws. The error is equating money with speech, and thus making it almost unfettered. You can't restrict speech - it's a very bad idea to do so - and if money is speech, this follows from that. Instead, I believe we should legally treat money as property. We have fairly strong property protections in the US (modulo imbecilic decisions like Kelo) but not as strong as speech protections. You can do things with your property but there are ways to restrain what you can do, and I think that's the proper way to think about money in politics, too. I can buy land and build on it but I can't build, say, a fireworks factory on my residential property. Likewise, I should be able to buy politics (ads, time, phone banks, signs, videos, etc) but it should be reasonable to set some limits on such buying.
THAT said, the Left has gone pretty completely off the deep end in response to Citizens United. Their approach seems to (un)hinge on the fact that corporations are treated as persons and given strong personal rights protections as a consequence. In particular, the Move to Amend notion that the right response is to strip corporations of personhood - that is, to restrict the rights of personhood to so-called "natural people" is not at all well-thought-out.
I want corporations (and similar organizations) to have strong Constitutional rights protections. For example, I believe that the police should be required to get a warrant to enter and search a corporate office, just as they do a person's home. I believe that a religious corporation (say, a Catholic school) should be permitted to discriminate in who it hires for certain positions. I believe that nobody but an Orthodox Jewish congregation should be allowed to determine who is "orthodox jewish" enough to be counted as a member. I believe that unions should have rights of peaceable assembly and should be permitted to petition the government for redress of grievances. I believe that NGOs such as the ACLU should have the right to file Freedom of Information requests and that local Town Watch groups should be empowered to enforce things like "sunshine" laws that mandate government meetings be open to the public.
The examples go on and on. If you strip corporations (and by extension other non-natural person-entities) of Constitutional protections then you don't just "fix" the issue of corporations getting over-strong speech freedoms. You end up breaking fundamental principles of national social balance and vesting way too much power in the hands of government.
Which sounds like a funny thing for an old-school commie pinko leftist like me to say, but there it is.
I'm not sure how much background people need - there's a lot of good stuff you can read. Citizen's United, a Supreme Court decision that should have been limited to whether or not a single film could be shown on pay-per-view TV, became a precedent-setting case that has transformed American politics, though not in the way anyone expected.
I don't think anyone expected that over 90% of funding in this election cycle would come from a small number of ultra-wealthy individuals. The entire group responsible for those millions of campaign funds would fit nicely on a chartered 767. Corporations, feared as the primary beneficiaries, have so far stayed clear of this level of buying politics, presumably for fear of public backlash. GE makes nukes and tends to donate heavily conservative/Republican, but probably 40-50% of their appliances are bought by people who vote Democrat and who would presumably be pissed off if the GE SuperPAC was out front airing attack ads for Romney. It's just not good business to get that deep into buying candidates overtly, nor is it really necessary. Search "regulatory capture" for details.
That said, Citizen's United enshrines a fundamental error in our laws. The error is equating money with speech, and thus making it almost unfettered. You can't restrict speech - it's a very bad idea to do so - and if money is speech, this follows from that. Instead, I believe we should legally treat money as property. We have fairly strong property protections in the US (modulo imbecilic decisions like Kelo) but not as strong as speech protections. You can do things with your property but there are ways to restrain what you can do, and I think that's the proper way to think about money in politics, too. I can buy land and build on it but I can't build, say, a fireworks factory on my residential property. Likewise, I should be able to buy politics (ads, time, phone banks, signs, videos, etc) but it should be reasonable to set some limits on such buying.
THAT said, the Left has gone pretty completely off the deep end in response to Citizens United. Their approach seems to (un)hinge on the fact that corporations are treated as persons and given strong personal rights protections as a consequence. In particular, the Move to Amend notion that the right response is to strip corporations of personhood - that is, to restrict the rights of personhood to so-called "natural people" is not at all well-thought-out.
I want corporations (and similar organizations) to have strong Constitutional rights protections. For example, I believe that the police should be required to get a warrant to enter and search a corporate office, just as they do a person's home. I believe that a religious corporation (say, a Catholic school) should be permitted to discriminate in who it hires for certain positions. I believe that nobody but an Orthodox Jewish congregation should be allowed to determine who is "orthodox jewish" enough to be counted as a member. I believe that unions should have rights of peaceable assembly and should be permitted to petition the government for redress of grievances. I believe that NGOs such as the ACLU should have the right to file Freedom of Information requests and that local Town Watch groups should be empowered to enforce things like "sunshine" laws that mandate government meetings be open to the public.
The examples go on and on. If you strip corporations (and by extension other non-natural person-entities) of Constitutional protections then you don't just "fix" the issue of corporations getting over-strong speech freedoms. You end up breaking fundamental principles of national social balance and vesting way too much power in the hands of government.
Which sounds like a funny thing for an old-school commie pinko leftist like me to say, but there it is.
no subject
Date: 2012-05-25 03:47 pm (UTC)That said... yes, I believe that a private organization should be able to discriminate in certain ways, even against people I like. I don't particularly like the way the Orthodox discriminate against women, either, but I get that it's part of their religious beliefs and insofar as that is confined to their internal religious affairs (such as requiring certain attire, controlling who gets to sit where in their buildings) then yes I believe they're deserving of Constitutional protection.
THAT said, I think you (like David) are fundamentally missing the point I'm trying to make, which is that a move to strip all non-natural persons (organizations) of all Constitutional rights is a disastrous over-reaction. By enumerating specific Constitutional rights that I think organizations should have I'm not trying to argue about those specific rights, but to illustrate the point that there are a large package of such rights and it's not a good idea to blow up the entire package in an effort to contain one particular excess.
no subject
Date: 2012-05-25 05:16 pm (UTC)What bugs the hell out of me is that religious organizations demand tax exemptions, and then presume that the government won't have an interest in their affairs. Sorry, but if God, Inc. isn't contributing to the pot (like any good citizen does) then it'll have to suffer some unwanted oversight.
no subject
Date: 2012-05-25 10:46 pm (UTC)what's to stop a group of Catholics (qualifier chosen at random, substitute as you like: Orthodox Jews, lesbian separatists, etc.) from forming an organization then restricting their hiring to only Catholics? or buying only from Catholics?
IMO, when you start dealing as a business, you become subject to the laws that businesses are subject to, previous racial/gender/religious restrictions notwithstanding.
if you don't like dealing as a business, you have the option of staying just an organization that discriminates against certain sets of people, staying out of the public sphere, and the laws involving businesses will leave you alone.
or at least, that's how i wish the world worked. then you wouldn't have Catholic-affiliated
organizationsbusinesses deciding to deny birth control coverage to their employees (for example).