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by logfromblammo
4457 days ago
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If you are referring to in-kind donations, elections laws require that such donations be treated as though the donor wrote the candidate a check, and the candidate endorsed it right back over to them in exchange for the goods and services actually rendered. Direct support to a campaign and political advocacy are two different things. This is why I can believe that the Citizens United case was not completely ridiculous, and that this one is beyond reason. Your right to free speech ends at the tip of your own tongue. If you give your words to someone else, he might not be able to speak them. In the same way, if you give control of some money to someone else, they will be the ones responsible for how it gets spent, not you. They may be under different contractual and legal obligations. As is the case for people seeking public office. They must follow rules that ordinary people will probably never even need to know. |
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No, not really. Giving candidate the money to buy ads and directly buying ads is essentially the same thing from any aspect that may interest us.
>>> Your right to free speech ends at the tip of your own tongue.
This is obviously false. If that were true, we could not have free press, or free TV, or any electronic or paper media. What we would have is what people in USSR had - they were free to talk about politics in their own kitchen, but once they said anything in public or tried any political action, they were suppressed. This is not freedom, this is a mockery of it. And Founding Fathers clearly never intended to treat freedom of speech that narrow - as a freedom to produce any sounds you like with your throat and tongue. For a functioning democracy, much broader freedoms - freedoms to publish your opinion as widely as you can and engage in discussion with as many people as you can, and exercise any political actions you can (excluding violence and other rights violations, of course) - are absolutely necessary.
>>> if you give control of some money to someone else, they will be the ones responsible for how it gets spent, not you
This is false, too. If you give somebody money and say "I want you to hire a killer to murder this guy", you both would be part of criminal conspiracy. That's how mafia bosses get jailed.
>>> As is the case for people seeking public office. They must follow rules that ordinary people will probably never even need to know.
People seeking office have same rights as everybody else - because they are everybody else. Any citizen can seek office and has right to do so. When in the office, they have to accept certain limits that come with the job, but when seeking office they are not under any obligation yet, and have absolutely equal rights with any random citizen. All those "campaign finance" laws are just a futile populistic attempt to control political discourse, and Supreme Court is routinely shutting them down as infringing people's liberties, and rightfully so.