campaign finance reform

July 29, 2007

Reality Test
By Wendy Kaminer
If money isn’t speech, as advocates of campaign finance restrictions wishfully insist, then why does your local NPR station persist in conducting those annoying pledge drives? If money isn’t speech, why does Rupert Murdoch want to own the Wall Street Journal? Why do unprofitable political publications require financial angels to survive? Of course, money is speech, in effect, as Harvey observes below, (and as crtitics of campaign finance restrictions regularly point out; we have been having this argument for years.

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campaign finance reform, elections, First Amendment

July 25, 2007

Speech and Money (Go Together Like a Horse and Carriage)
By Harvey Silverglate

There was a show-tune ditty that was popular back when I was a kid, which younger readers might also identify as the theme song to Married With Children. “Love and marriage,” went the lyric, “go together like a horse and carriage. This, I tell you, brother: You can’t have one without the other.” In quite the same way, in the context of electoral politics, you can’t have speech without money.

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ACLU, campaign finance reform, elections

June 27, 2007

The Supremes -- Mostly but Not Entirely Bad News
By Wendy Kaminer
By Wendy Kaminer

Civil libertarians have good reason to mourn the Supreme Court’s latest rulings eviscerating student speech rights and empowering the president to divert public funds to sectarian religious groups. In the wake of the Court’s earlier decision this term upholding bans on second trimester abortions, these cases confirm that the Court is now pretty firmly under the control of authoritarian (not libertarian) conservatives.

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campaign finance reform, censorship, elections

April 27, 2007

Campaign finance insanity and the Supreme Court
By Harvey Silverglate
The Supreme Court heard yet another round of oral arguments April 25th on the ever-perplexing subject of so-called “campaign financing reform” – the efforts by Congress and the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to establish rules to limit, in the pet phrase of supporters of these laws, “the corrupting influence of big money” on our electoral system.

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ACLU, campaign finance reform, elections

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Reality Test
Published 7/29/2007 by Wendy Kaminer
If money isn’t speech, as advocates of campaign finance restri...

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