[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.