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points by OkayPhysicist 5 hours ago | hide | 0 comments

What's your pitch for reconciling an overturn of Citizens United with freedom of speech and association?

It's a tricky problem. Banning political spending for for-profit organizations is an easy win, but not a particularly big one. The big issue is PACs, and I can't come up with clean line to draw between "me and my friends got together to oppose evil policy XYZ" (which is clear, unambiguous 1st amendment activity) and "me and my billionaire cronies got together to oppose good policy ABC".

Since when are political donations speech? Last I checked, financial transfers involve NO expression of sentiment beyond “I want this person to have my money”. By that same logic all drug enforcement / wire fraud enforcement is also a violation of the first amendment. And why should we allow wealthy individuals to have more “voice” than others? It’s the most anti-democratic setup imaginable.

I would love to know what % of PACs - weighted by size (or “voice”, as you call it) - are operated as truly grassroots organizations with a normal distribution of contribution size. I’d put my money on <5%.

My solution is pretty simple. Do away with political donations altogether. People can still get together and make signs and go door to door for a candidate. And split the cost of pizza among themselves.

Generally PACs don't directly hand much money to politicians or their campaigns. Instead, they make and run ads, they organize speaking events, they spend money instead of some politician's campaign. That's why all the political ads have some "This ad was paid for by Americans for Extreme Goodliness" taglines. They're not being run by the campaign itself (which has limits on its funding, mostly transparency stuff, but not necessarily), they're run by PACs.

And that's basically impossible to curtail, without seriously violating fundamental 1st amendment protections.