[bring1]

Can somebody explain me why a democracy allows for donations at all? Donations will clearly skew the political landscape towards the people who have money to donate. And those people are more likely to donate with an expected value. So they will try to skew the politics in their favour.

Why would it be bad to forbid any kind of political donation for established parties. I see the need to fund a grow new parties, but established parties should get by with the money they receive from the government.

[Cushman]

Free speech.

In a democracy, if I have a political opinion, I must be allowed to express it. It follows that I must be allowed to pay a spokesperson to express it on my behalf, and it follows from that that I must be allowed to fund an organization with the mandate of expressing it.

That's all SCOTUS' Citizens United ruling was about; there does not seem to be a reasonable way to limit political spending across the board without at some point allowing an unconstitutional restriction on political speech, and that's anathema to our society. (And as CU has demonstrated, the distinction between that and unregulated campaign donations is academic in practice.)

That's not to say that there's no way to draw a line, but so far the anti-finance crowd has been largely unwilling to engage with this argument, and none has been readily forthcoming.

[hayksaakian]

Let's not presume this is all about "free speech". The Supreme Court has placed restrictions on free speech that society has come to accept. (Not that I agree with them).

For example, the supreme court has made exceptions to the 1st amendment for obscenity, of all things.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_excep...

Now that we can recognize the Supreme Court has made exceptions to first amendment, it's fair to dispute whether paid political contributions should qualify as free speech or if it should be forbidden as an exception.

The fact that Citizens United already happened should not stop people from disputing it, or the precedent it set.

[Cushman]

> [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_excep....

speech is unprotected if (1) ... and (2) ... and (3) "the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value"

Political speech especially is sacrosanct in US jurisprudence. It's widely held as the reason we even need free speech. On the balance of protected speech, having a legitimate political message is not a thumb so much as a foot on the scale.

If you grant that money spent to promote a political message counts as political expression, by limiting it we're talking about censoring a lot of speech, across the entirety of political discourse. You will not find any restriction on any speech anywhere in law that even approaches it in scope. And we'll be censoring exactly the speech we feel is most important not to. This will not fly.

So, you need to either come up with a reason not to consider money spent to promote a message as an expression of that message, or come up with a justification for why, despite this being speech with a valid political message, it is vitally necessary that it be censored.

Either of those could plausibly be argued, but the arguments I've seen are mainly along the lines of "Money obviously isn't speech!" and "Clearly, the rich shouldn't be allowed to speak louder than the poor!" In the eyes of Constitutional law, those things are neither obvious nor clear.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Why would it be bad to forbid any kind of political donation for established parties.

Everybody is responding to your question with the generic "free speech" answer. It needs to be fleshed out so everyone can understand it.

What political donations are used for is to buy advertising and get on television, which politicians need to do to get elected. Now suppose we ban political donations whatsoever. Cui bono?

You haven't changed the need for politicians to get their faces on the TV in order to get elected. So now what determines whether they get on TV? They can still buy advertising themselves, of course, but only if the candidate is rich. Not really what we were going for. And even then, who has more power in this scenario? A millionaire candidate who can personally afford to buy some TV spots or the billionaire who owns the local TV stations? And if the prospect of handing Comcast/MSNBC and News Corp that much control over elections doesn't make the point sufficiently, imagine what happens when MSNBC, Fox and CNN are purchased by Exxon, Chevron and BP.

You can't stop people from buying airtime. It only consolidates the power of the people selling it. What you can do is public financing of elections. Public financing doesn't restrict anyone's speech -- the candidate can buy the same ad with money from the treasury as with money from coal producers. But the candidates are going to work for whoever is funding them; if that isn't the general public then it will be defense contractors and Monsanto.

[shetter]

The answer is simple: these are not democracies. Pretty much the only democratic aspect in nowadays "representative democracies" is that every 5 years you get to chose which of 2 leaders you prefer to govern your state/city. That's a little light to call the whole system a "democracy". You'll never make sense of politics if you don't get that.

[notahacker]

An intrinsic part of being a democracy involves people being free to support a cause they want to, including financially.

It's not as if rich people are going to stop spending to influence electoral results in favour of candidates whose policies work in their interests if they're banned from handing the money over directly and transparently.

[jmnicolas]

Well don't underestimate the power of the poor : they are more numerous so a candidate with less money but with a program oriented toward them may eventually win.