{"id":186210,"date":"2014-04-02T18:44:00","date_gmt":"2014-04-02T23:44:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/04\/02\/we-are-all-koch-suckers-today\/"},"modified":"2014-04-02T18:44:00","modified_gmt":"2014-04-02T23:44:00","slug":"we-are-all-koch-suckers-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/04\/02\/we-are-all-koch-suckers-today\/","title":{"rendered":"We are All Koch Suckers Today"},"content":{"rendered":"

The court ruled in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission<\/i>, the Supreme Court gutted campaign finance reform<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Back in October, when the Court heard oral argument in a challenge to the overall caps \u2013 known as \u201caggregate limits\u201d \u2013 on how much an individual can contribute to candidates for federal office, political parties, and political action committees, there wasn\u2019t a whole lot of suspense.  Given the Court\u2019s recent campaign finance rulings, it seemed clear that a majority of the Justices would vote to strike down at least some of the caps; the only real question was whether they would strike down them all.<\/span>

<\/span>Today we got our answer from the Court, and it was a decisive \u201cyes\u201d:  all of the aggregate limits must go.  Let\u2019s talk about today\u2019s decision in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission<\/i> <\/a>in Plain English.<\/span>

<\/span>As I explained in my preview<\/a> of the case in October, there are (at least until today) two kinds of limits on campaign contributions.  The first is what is known as the \u201cbase limits\u201d \u2013 the maximum that you can contribute to a candidate, political party, or political action committee in an election.  The aggregate limits are the second kind:  in a two-year period known as an \u201celection cycle,\u201d you can donate no more than $48,600 to all candidates combined and no more than $74,600 to political parties and political action committees.<\/span>

<\/span>An Alabama businessman named Shaun McCutcheon went to court to challenge the aggregate limits.  He didn\u2019t ask for the right to give more money than the base limits to any particular candidate; instead, he wanted to give money to many more candidates, but the aggregate limits prohibit him from doing so.  That, he argued, violates his free speech rights under the First Amendment.<\/span>

<\/span>Although a lower court disagreed with McCutcheon, he found a more receptive audience in the Roberts Court, which has consistently voted to overturn campaign finance regulations.  Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the opinion for the Court, which was joined by Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, and Samuel A. Alito.  (Justice Clarence Thomas wrote his own opinion saying the Court should go even further, but the Chief Justice\u2019s opinion is the controlling one.)<\/span>

<\/span>\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>

<\/span>Breyer\u2019s dissent lamented that the Court\u2019s decision \u201ceviscerates our Nation\u2019s campaign finance laws, leaving a remnant incapable of dealing with the grave problems of democratic legitimacy that those laws were intended to resolve.\u201d In his view, \u201ccorruption\u201d is not limited to scenarios involving a quid pro quo, which he described as \u201can act akin to bribery.\u201d Instead, it includes exactly the kind of efforts to use money to obtain influence and access to elected officials that the Chief Justice\u2019s opinion characterized as \u201ca central feature of democracy.\u201d This is so, Breyer explained, because if people believe that elected officials only pay attention to big-money donors, they may lose faith in the political process altogether.<\/span>

<\/span>Breyer next contended that the Court is just wrong when it asserts that, even if the aggregate limits are removed, there is still no way to get around the base limits. Here the dissent painted a very different picture from the rest of the Court, predicting that \u201cdonors can and likely will find ways to channel millions of dollars to parties and to individual candidates.\u201d<\/span>

<\/span>Whose vision of the future of campaign finance will prevail \u2013 the dissent\u2019s apocalyptic one or the Chief Justice\u2019s more optimistic one? You can be sure that journalists and election law experts will be paying close attention over the next few years. We can also be confident that the decision today will spawn new campaign finance challenges \u2013 including, in all likelihood, to the \u201cbase limits\u201d themselves. Stay tuned . . . .<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And if this is not bad enough, it looks like SCOTUS will overturn bans on corporate donations to candidates<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The Supreme Court, fresh from its new ruling expanding the political donation options of private individuals, faces a choice this week about its current view on campaign contributions to candidates by corporations.  For weeks, the Court has been sitting on a case that would test a state\u2019s flat ban on corporate donations, and is now set to look at that case in the wake of Wednesday\u2019s ruling in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission<\/i><\/a>.<\/span>

<\/span>The Court, according to its electronic docket, is scheduled to consider at its private Conference on Friday the case of Iowa Right to Life Committee v. Tooker<\/i><\/a>.  That case has been ready for the Court, technically, since November, but so far no action has been taken.<\/span>

<\/span>If the Court\u2019s usual practice is followed, it will have at least three options: agree to hear the case to test the constitutionality of Iowa\u2019s ban on corporate donations, deny review and thus leave intact a federal appeals court ruling upholding that ban, or tell the lower courts to reconsider based on the McCutcheon<\/i> ruling.<\/span>

<\/span>In 2003, in the case of FEC v. Beaumont<\/i><\/a>, the Court upheld the long-standing federal ban on corporations, at least so far as that provision applied to non-profit corporations.  In the new case, the Iowa Right to Life Committee urged the Court to overrule the Beaumont<\/i> decision, arguing that it cannot be squared with the Court\u2019s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. FEC.<\/i><\/a><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Needless to say, we can expect another 5-4 decision allowing rich people to double down on their influence.<\/p>\n

We \u2026\u2026\u2026 are \u2026\u2026\u2026 f%$#ed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The court ruled in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court gutted campaign finance reform: Back in October, when the Court heard oral argument in a challenge to the overall caps \u2013 known as \u201caggregate limits\u201d \u2013 on how much an individual can contribute to candidates for federal office, political parties, and political action …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1094,970,1051,972],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-186210","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-campaign-finance","category-corruption","category-hypocrisy","category-justice"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186210"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186210"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186210\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186210"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186210"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186210"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}