I think the 5-4 podcast is excellent, but I found the Citizens United episode not super convincing. Iām sure Iām in the very small minority here, but I think Citizens United was not a terrible ruling in terms of it being legally justifiable. There are lots of cases like this, where my view of the outcome is different from my view of the decision.
Off the top of my head, bad rulings with good outcomes:
- Roe v. Wade
- Obergefell
Good rulings with bad outcomes:
- Kelo
- Citizens United
IMO, the Shelby County episode or the (first?) 2000 Election episode are both better.
with all due respect, the pope is not sworn to protect the sanctity of the ā¦ checks notes constitution
francis isnāt even his real name!
Iād be interested to hear why you think itās defensible. The whole ruling rests on money = speech, which I think is patently absurd, but even so the court regularly restricts speech in other areas so āno limits at allā doesnāt seem right, even accepting the underlying premise.
If I remember the podcast right, my views line up with the part where they said something like, āThe only aspect of the decision that comes close to be reasonable was ā¦ā.
My view is that itās impossible to distinguish between the expenditures that Iām ok with and the expenditures that Iām not ok with. I absolutely believe that the NAACP should be able to advocate for civil rights, the Sierra Club should be able to advocate for environmental issues, the New York Times or Fox or the WSJ should be able to endorse a candidate, Al Gore et al. should be able to create and distribute An Inconvenient Truth, the SEIU should be able to advocate for workers rights, etc.
And I donāt really see the problem with treating expenditures as being analogous to speech. More accurately, I think itās impossible to distinguish them. Advocacy could occur via economically valuable owned property that doesnāt require literally separable expenditures, like the New York Times publishing an endorsement for a candidate, or through traceable expenditures like An Inconvenient Truth or Fahrenheit 9/11. I think it would be terrible to give states the license to limit corporate speech that way, and is what Alabama tried to do in the 1950s to the NAACP.
So I might not love the current state of money in politics/elections, but Iām not sure what the obviously better alternative is that would allow the type of speech/expenditures/advocacy that I think is worthwhile and necessary.
Meh, my hardcore Catholic parents already think the pope is a treasonous homosexual so I doubt āreal catholicsā would care.
There is a joke here, but it went way over my head. Anyone want to break it down for me.
Iād have to review the decision again but Iām pretty sure the dissent led with āsunlight is the best disinfectant.ā Letting rich guys or even rich organizations spend a ton of money is one thing, letting them do it anonymously is much more problematic.
I hope youāll follow up on this, because Iāve been interested in talking about Citizens United on here for quite a while. I knew Iād be in the minority on this site, but I wanted to flesh out what people actually thought would be a good regulation. But then I just never started that thread.
In any event, I donāt understand the point about spending money anonymously. I think organizations like the NAACP and the Sierra Club should be able to endorse candidates without revealing their member lists. If you mean that the ads should have to say that they were paid for by the NAACP or the Sierra Club, doesnāt that requirement already exist? Even if we tightened that up, I donāt think itās particularly informative to know that āAmericans for America LLCā or whatever paid for something.
Personally I think that what the First Amendment protects is freedom of speech in terms of the free expression of ideas and not in terms of total freedom of content delivery mechanism. Like Iām not allowed to set up a network of loudspeakers through a city and broadcast my ideas at top volume 24 hours a day. I canāt do that because the government determines that it will have a negative effect on the community, essentially. I can say what I like, but the government may make reasonable restrictions on the manner in which I say it.
In this view it would remain unconstitutional to enact laws for the purpose of targeting particular ideas for suppression. It canāt be argued that āthere are limits to how much money people can give political candidatesā targets particular organizations or ideologies, but āthere are limits on how much the NAACP can spend on advertisingā or like āentities incorporated in this place on this particular day canāt do Xā would be unconstitutional on Equal Protection grounds.
Even Second Amendment purists would not argue that the Second Amendment grants private entities the right to own nuclear weapons. Thatās just plainly not the intent of the law. Likewise, the First Amendment was written in a time without mass communication, and the intent of it is to preserve the right to express unpopular viewpoints. The intent is not to enforce the stranglehold of oligarchs over public messaging.
This is exactly the current state of the world in the US:
Government can make time, place, or manner restrictions on speech. But those restrictions have to be content-neutral (outside of some very narrow exceptions like obscenity, fraud, and incitements to violence).
Right. The problem here is Buckley v Valeo where the Court held that since free expression frequently requires spending money (an example they gave was sending a telegram to a public official), therefore the government may not restrict the spending of money in the course of free expression. This is a dumbass argument that is exactly the same as saying that since free expression frequently requires making noise (e.g. speaking out loud), therefore the government may not restrict me from setting up the aforementioned loudspeaker system. Establishing that restriction at a small scale would be an infringement does not necessarily imply that you can generalize up to ridiculous scales. That was my point with the Second Amendment example, that if you establish a right to own a handgun that doesnāt just automatically scale up to being allowed to own a nuclear weapon.
Back when America was Great^ there was much less income inequality.
^the fifties before the votings right act was passed.
In Citizens United, the Court held in part that:
Specifically, the Court echoed Bellottiās rejection of categories based on a corporationās purpose. The majority argued that to grant Freedom of the Press protections to media corporations, but not others, presented a host of problems; and so all corporations should be equally protected from expenditure restrictions.
But the government does treat media corporations differently, all the time. For example, there are parts of the radio frequency spectrum allotted to particular entities. Itās a crime for me to broadcast on those frequencies.
My point (with both this and the loudspeakers example) is that the right to speak freely does not imply a blanket right to broadcast. The government can and does restrict the ways in which people broadcast information. But it would be unconstitutional to do this in order to suppress particular viewpoints or target particular entities.
But itās not a crime for you to broadcast because of who you are (i.e., a non media entity). Itās a crime because you donāt own a license, and that crime would apply equally to media and non-media corporations.
I find myself agreeing with a lot of what youāre saying, but Iām still not sure where you stand on Citizens United. Would you be comfortable with the government prohibiting Ava DuVernayās 13th from airing in the 30 days prior to an election because itās considered āelectioneeringā content?
Nice summary of the church and covid case.
In my dream of collecting and speaking to the Covid-5 they accuse me that gathering them up amounts to a coup and I say that what the federalist society has done over the past 3 decades is the fucking coup.
I wonder if states could come up with a dose time standard. Number of people exposed to, amount of time exposed, average distance of exposure. People x Time over Distance.
Maybe a factor for talking/singing. And if masks are required or not.
Of course these make scientific sense but LoL the Covid-5
This would be a good spot for the Dems to simply start ignoring SCOTUS in Jan.
I havenāt actually read it but apparently the per curiam decision is a lot more reasonable than Gorsuchās concurrence. They leave the door open to restrictions on congregation size and density etc but say you canāt just blanket ban religious services.
I havenāt seen that so itās hard to say, but I think political content would have to be in service of some candidate or party. For the record Australia and the UK among other countries have election blackout laws where you canāt do political ads in the final days before an election. So far this has not led to banning films getting screened.
More broadly I donāt think every bad thing a government could possibly do has to be barred by the constitution.