[aetherson]

The freedom to shout at strangers on sidewalks is a meaningless one in terms of ability to add your ideas to the national political dialog. All meaningful political speech in the modern day has some kind of money spend behind it -- including your posting here on this comment thread. And if we raise the bar from "I guess theoretically this might potentially affect something" to "obviously meaningful speech," then the money spends become quite large.

If the government can restrict any and all money spends on political speech, it can suppress all meaningful political speech. This is the absolute core of the First Amendment.

[chillwaves]

That's absurd. The government can guarantee equal speech instead of allowing some speech to dominate everyone else.

How can the 1st Amendment be protecting the voice of the poor if they have no avenue of expression? And when their views are beaten down by the few rich. That is not at all in the spirit of the first amendment or of democracy.

[studentrob]

> The government can guarantee equal speech instead of allowing some speech to dominate everyone else.

How? What do you mean "the government can guarantee equal speech"? Do you mean they should disallow some speech from dominating other speech? Who decides what to censor, and how is that done, for example, on the internet? Is that not a form of censorship itself?

> How can the 1st Amendment be protecting the voice of the poor if they have no avenue of expression?

How can you say they have zero avenue? They can rally within their community with no money at all. MLK and other civil rights activists made some of the biggest changes in this country through their speech alone, and they never even held office. He may have even received donations or media support from companies employing large numbers of black people. Would you say that is unfair too?

I also want us to find a better way to end corruption in politics. I just don't think it is so simple, and free speech and the ability to spend your hard earned money on what you want, regardless of whether you're poor or wealthy, is the core of the first amendment. I'm not sure about Joe Shmoe CEO + board deciding to donate company earnings, which are not all their own, to a super PAC or secretive non-profit of their choosing. That's ~20 people deciding where the money of 100s of hard working people goes.

Is it easy to fix that? Are laws themselves enough, or do we also need to be able to enforce them? What happens when some business claims their money was not spent in support of a political campaign, but it supports a foreign company who is advertising online?

[aetherson]

The 1st Amendment does not attempt to guarantee equality of "voice," just the opportunity to speak. It especially does not attempt to guarantee equality of voice by silencing some arbitrary group.

And even if it did, which, again, it really does not, it wouldn't do it by the avenue of declaring that "money is not speech" and thus that there are no restrictions on the government preventing people from spending money on speech.