This is a class blog for the students of POLSCI 426: Congressional Politics at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.
Lawmakers pledge action to limit election spending
An interesting article about lawmakers reaction to the recent Supreme court campaign finance decision. I found this interesting because of John kerry's suggestion that a constitutional amendment might be needed to ensure corporations dont have the same free speech rights as individuals. Any mention of constitutional amendments gets me excited!
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4 comments:
I guess we can safely assume that no corporation will be throwing their money behind Sen. Robert Bennett of Utah, what with his remarks about the ads being "really dumb," and all. Sheesh.
Proposed amendments to the Constitution make me sit up and take note too. It wouldn't be the first time Congress has had to act decisively to circumvent the Court.
"Senators also considered proposals to give investors and shareholders greater power over corporate political spending, or even to amend the Constitution, as they mulled how to respond to the ruling, which effectively lifted restrictions on big business and union election spending."
If I recall someone in class asked a question similar to this, giving shareholders some decision making power in terms of corporate donations would be interesting to say the least.
One must wonder if a constitutional amendment is necessary for this... \
An interesting partial solution would be to go toward a UK system where the major parties (Labour, Tories and the Lib Dems) have free air time on the BBC and ITN.
Since the Supreme Court struck down a fair amount of existing campaign finance reform law, maybe a constitutional amendment is the way to go. Law by itself is apparently not strong enough to protect against unlimited corporate money in elections.
The Problem is getting a Constitutional amendment passed. If the Dems can't get 60 to pass health care, I doubt they can get 66 to move a constitutional amendment. After all, why would the party that stands up for big business vote for something that prohibits businesses from spending their profits on engineering an election.
The only feasable way to fix it is for Congress to pass a series of amendments in corporate law. Making it so shareholders must approve of ads before they air is a good way to curb it as vote by proxy is expensive and time consuming. Making the CEO claim responsibility like the "I'm candidate X and I aprove this message" will make some companies think twice. The best one I heard was prohibiting corperations who have contracts with the government from running any aimed at swaying the election.
Whatever the fix is, it needs to be done. The language of the supreme court gives corporations the same rights as private citizens but law gives them limited responsibilities. Worse yet, it makes no distinction between American corporations, foriegn corporations, and American chartered corporations with a foriegn controlling stake. As the law stands now there is nothing stopping Hugo Chavez from using the coffers of Citgo, an american chartered oil company nationalized by Venezuela, from spending a billion dollars trying to advocate free trade with Venezuela, or killing alternative energy supporters.
It does nothing to prevent Rupert Murdoch, an Australian, from spending Billions in the coffers of News Corp to engineer an ultra conservative platform, as he has shown in the past he desires to do.
There is nothing that prevents China from buying American companies and carpetbombing the airwaves with Pro-China candidates. A true Manchurian candidate.
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