Positive Liberty

Meanwhile, for a more, um, Reasonable analysis of the impact of Citizens United:

The prohibition against Congress regulating political speech in any manner whatsoever is as close to a fundamental and nearly absolute Constitutional restriction on federal power as there is. That said, I have never been entirely comfortably with the airy “speech = money” gloss the Supreme Court has used in addressing these sorts of cases. That said, however, I think on balance the Citizens United case was correctly decided.

However, my purely gut-level fear is that the practical effect of Citizens United is not going to be a more corrupt Congress. That’s probably not humanly possible. Rather, it is that however much more money pours into political campaigns as a result of Citizens United will lead to (1) even longer campaigns with (2) even more campaign ads resulting in (3) even more government.

None of these prospects pleases me in the slightest.

Sometimes I blog at Cato@Liberty. Sometimes I blog here. Today wasn’t here’s lucky day.

Open thread below. On campaign finance, the Old Legislators’ Home, or anything else.

Corporations, unions, advocacy groups, nongovernmental organizations and the like are not people. Yes, I know, that sentence merely proves what a keen grasp of the obvious I have. But such organizations are ‘persons,’ at least for certain legal purposes and, more importantly, they are comprised of real people, people who join or participate in or contribute to such organizations for various purposes. Not the least of which are political purposes.

Understood as such, it should come as no surprise that the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that key provisions of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, better known as McCain-Feingold (and more properly understood as the Collusive Incumbent Elected Officials’ Protection Act), violated the First Amendment’s prohibition against restrictions on free speech in general and political speech in particular. Continue Reading »

A Republican has won Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat! And a breathless media is desperate to enlighten us as to what it means.

A commentator on NPR said this means the American public is telling Washington D.C. that they’re not focusing on the right issues. Funny, I didn’t realize the American public as a whole got to vote in Massachusetts elections.

Others are claiming it represents a big shift in Massachusetts politics. Of course four of the last five governors of Massachusetts have been Republicans,* so another Republican winning a state-wide race is in itself no more newsworthy than a dog-bites-man story.

The media and the political junkies who hang on their every word love to discern national meaning in single local elections. But as another famous Massachusetts pol, Tip O’Neill, once said, “All politics is local.” Continue Reading »