The New Corruption
When it comes time for the inevitable legal challenge to the latest iteration of the First Amendment-trampling legislation known as campaign finance "reform," we hope the Supreme Court takes a careful look at a dispatch in yesterday's issue of Roll Call, a newspaper that covers Capitol Hill. Dating back to their egregious 1976 error in the landmark case of Buckley v. Valeo, the justices have held that the public interest in preventing corruption is adequate to allow limits on campaign contributions, that is, restrictions on political speech that would otherwise be protected by the First Amendment.
Since then, the slope has gotten so slippery that politicians have dropped nearly all the pretense that these rules are about preventing corruption. Instead, they've become increasingly candid about acknowledging that the laws are shaped to protect incumbent politicians. The latest move afoot in Congress is to limit sharply contributions to groups such as Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which are known as 527 organizations. In the Roll Call article, Senator Lott may have been unintentionally candid when, as the paper reports, he said, "his first priority was taking care of this '527 business before we're all embarrassed.'"
Well, the First Amendment protects the freedom of political speech, not the right of politicians to be free of embarrassment.
It also, one would think, protects owners of television stations from laws requiring them to give special discounts to politicians, as does the amendment passed yesterday by the Senate Rules Committee, that, as Roll Call describes it, would require television stations to charge candidates the lowest commercial rate they offer other, nonpolitical organizations throughout the year. Roll Call reports that a similar amendment passed the Senate in 2002 but was taken out by the House of Representatives, as the amendment's sponsor, Senator Durbin, put it, "because they don't buy as much TV time as we do." What's next, an amendment guaranteeing senators the lowest prices available all year on airline tickets? On automobiles?
What these campaign finance laws are coming to be about is the separation of politicians from the rest of Americans as a privileged class. According to these double-standard laws, the First Amendment that protects political speech about issues and legislation doesn't apply when the speech is television commercials criticizing a candidate in the months before an election. According to these double-standard laws, the free market system that ordinarily allows vendors to set a market price for their products doesn't apply if the purchaser is a politician buying airtime in a campaign. These laws are permitted by the Supreme Court as a way of preventing old-fashioned corruption in which the actions of politicians were bought by campaign contributions. But they have warped into their own kind of corruption in which rather than serving the interested public, the politicians are just serving themselves.
