The Supreme Court decision. What it does, and what was being argued.

[cthulu2016]

This post is informational, not argumentative. When saying X is the argument for Y I am not endorsing argument X, or rejecting argument X, but merely identifying the legal arguments in play.

We have a federal limit on how much you can donate to a candidate. Singular. Joe Smith is running for Senator against Jane Doe. You can give up to $2,600 to John Smith. Or to Jane Doe. (Or to both.)

Nobody running for Senate can be bought for $2,600. It isn't enough money to plausibly buy a subsequent decision in office. Nobody will vote one way or another on, say, the Keystone pipeline, for $2,600.

Now, in addition to that cap on what you can donate to Smith or Doe, there is a cap on how much you can donate to campaigns in total. The cap is something like $24K/year, so you can give the maximum donation to only 9 candidates, or half that to 18 candidates, etc..

The Supreme Court held that the total-donation cap is bogus because the idea of the limits was to prevent buying politicians. If you cannot buy an individual for $2,600 then it doesn't matter how many individuals you give $2,600 to. You can't buy any of them.

This is both right and wrong. It depends on what the limits were supposed to accomplish. The RWers defined corruption as quid pro quo. Buying political decision making on a donor to candidate basis. The liberals defined corruption more broadly.

And that is what the case was about.

If we define the purpose of the campaign limits narrowly as preventing Winchester Monopolyguy III from giving a million dollars to Joe Smith to buy Joe Smith's vote on Keystone then the system works. He can only give Smith $2,600, which doesn't buy squat.

If we define the purpose of the campaign limit system more broadly as limiting Monopolyguy's total financial impact on our elections, then the individual cap does not prevent Mr. Monopoly guy from sending $2,6000 to every Republican running on any ballot, anywhere, all the time.

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The effect of the ruling is that you can still only give a candidate $2,600, but there is no limit on how many different candidates you can give $2,600 to.

This was a less impactful decision than Citizens United. But it is impactful, in that it effectively allows de facto donations to a party limited only by the number of individual candidates. You can give $2,600 to every Republican.

It will also, as I wrote about yesterday, probably cause some odd wrinkles.

By making the individual candidacy the sole limiting factor we will see the creative funding of "stalking horse" candidacies, IMO. Rather than forming a PAC to say Obamacare sucks, you can start and Obamacare Sucks party with a slate of candidates who each get $2,600 from a group of 10,000 fat cat donors, and whose ads are really geared more toward electing the Republican candidate but are not limited in the way PACs are. (A candidate for office is free to say ANYTHING, including, "Hey, vote for the other guy." And must be... we obviously cannot limit what candidates say.)

The only trick there is to not accidentally split the Republican vote by having people actually vote for the Obamacare Sucks candidate.

On the other side, this decision also facilitates rat-fucking candidacies... candidacies intended to siphon off votes from the opposition. The Greens for starters, but why not make up your own? The Pro-Choice party. The Working Class Party. The Save Social Security Party, etc..

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1. $48,600 to candidates and $74,600 to state and local political party committees during each two-year

these are the aggregate limits that the supremos said were stifling free speech.

personally, i know it's only the dang gubmint preventing me from spending more than a total of $123,200 every two years, and i have felt silenced because of it. why. it's practically like nazi germany!

if some poor person doesn't like it, all they have to do is write checks totaling more than $123,200 every two years and then they can be heard. see? equal opportunity.

[cthulu2016]

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