Supreme Court Rules, Freedom Suffers

I very rarely find myself in agreement with a member of the political class including most Presidential positions since they rarely consider the impacts on freedom and liberty when they act or pontificate. However, I do find myself in total agreement with President Obama relative to the recent Supreme Court ruling on campaign financing law. According to a January 23, 2010 Associated Press article, the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 ruling, disallowed parts of a 63-year old law that said companies and unions could be blocked from using their own money to produce and execute campaign advertisements that urge the election or defeat of particular candidates by name. Up until now, under current law, these companies and unions had to use money allocated from employees, not the coffers of the company or union.

It is both President Obama's opinion and mine that this will open up new avenues of campaign financing sources that could overwhelm the voice of the ordinary citizen in favor of lobbyists, special interest groups, large corporations and large unions. In past posts to this blog we reported on how 60% of the House Armed Services Committees were able to trade Defense Department earmarks for reciprocal campaign contributions under the current, more restrictive campaign finance laws; imagine how much easier this has become with this Supreme Court ruling. According to the President, "This ruling opens the floodgates for an unlimited amount of special interest money into our democracy. It gives the special interest lobbyists new leverage to spend millions on advertising to persuade elected officials to vote their way - or to punish those who don't." According to the AP article, he went on to say that "lawmakers who stand up to banks, oil companies, health insurers, and other powerful interests cold find themselves under attack at election time."

This ruling is in direct opposition to Step 7 in "Love My Country, Loathe My Government": "Only allow individual citizens to contribute to political campaigns. This eliminates the contributions of PACS, unions, corporations, and lobbyists. The Bill Of Rights guarantees freedom of speech for individual citizens, not groups of citizens." The purpose of this step and the attendant restrictions outlined in the book was to get the power back to individual Americans, not groups of Americans that have undue sway over political activities. If you believe the concerns of the President and others who have commented on this ruling, this is the exact opposite of what will happen.

This type of ruling will also be counter to Step 8 in "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" which would restrict campaign contributions to a specific House of Representative or Senate race to only those citizens that are to be served by that race, e.g. if a person was running for Senator from New Jersey, Step 8 would prohibit him from receiving financial aid for his campaign from anyone that was no ties to or in New Jersey. As another example, let's assume that a Senator who chairs an important Senate committee, that oversees a major segment of the economy, is up for re-election in Montana. He can now get a totally new and lucrative source of campaign funds from unions and corporations, as a result of this ruling, that have no connection whatsoever to the citizens of Montana. Thus, while he may not be the best choice to represent the citizens of Montana, he is likely to overwhelm a better choice since he is the best choice to represent the economic segment he oversees, a segment that now can contribute much more to the candidate.

This ruling is also likely to make it easier for incumbents to stay in power, in direct opposition to Step 39 which would impose term limits on Congressional seats. History shows us that incumbents, under the current system, are much more likely to receive campaign contributions from non-individual citizen entities than non-incumbents. This ruling will just make this gap in funding much more pronounced, further preventing new ideas and people to serve the country. Given the dire straits the long term politicians have gotten us into today, as reported in previous posts to this blog, imagine how much worse it will be as these incumbents get more and more of the campaign funding dollars thrown at them.

Thus, Obama is probably right when he says it will be harder to enact financial, tax, health care, and energy changes, since these changes will be going up against a much larger set of campaign financing dollars from companies and unions. However, while I agree with him, if he had acted more boldly and Presidential in his first year, he may have been able to make some changes before this ruling. By being more concerned about the pomp of being President (talking about his NCAA basketball picks, jetting off to Europe to promote Chicago's Olympic bid, filming a TV commercial for the George Lopez show, flitting around the world giving speeches, etc.) than the dirty work of being President, he missed his window being able to get some of his "Change" agenda approved before this ruling. By essentially wasting his first year, seeing his popularity nosedive, and wasting his party's dominance in Congress, he now has a much harder battle to get anything of significance done. Congressional incumbents are not likely to tighten up finance campaign laws since this Supreme Court ruling probably makes them more likely to stay in office in the future.

Thus, the basis of Obama's support, the ordinary Americans who may have hoped for fundamental change by voting for him, are likely to be very disappointed. And freedom and liberty in this country will continue to erode at the hands of the political class and their new best friends, the five members of the Supreme Court who voted to throw out the restrictions.


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