Give speech a chance

Published on July 3, 2008 10:40 AM
by Michael Schrimpf

The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle - home district paper of congressional candidate Jack Davis - ran a pair of op-eds (including one by Davis) examining the wider impact of the Supreme Court's decision in overturning the Millionaire's Amendment.  The opinions were predictable.

Davis contends that the current system allows lobbyists to have too large a voice in Washington. Naturally, voters should cast their ballots for him because his wealth allows him to be independent "from status quo politics and fundraising."

A representative of the League of Women Voters predictably counters that the decision makes it easier "to buy a seat in Congress."  But as Justice Samuel Alito suggested in the Court's majority opinion overturning the Millionaire's Amendment, if one believes that contribution limits "make it harder for candidates who are not wealthy to raise funds and therefore provide a substantial advantage for wealthy candidates...then the obvious remedy is to raise or eliminate those limits."

Notably absent from the paper's opinion pages was any suggestion that the best thing for our democracy is a return to First Amendment principles. In the majority opinion, Alito highlights that the Millionaire's Amendment was "a legislative effort to mitigate the untoward consequences of Congress' own handiwork."

A 1995 Wall Street Journal editorial pinned the blame even more directly. "If you don't like the remaining (presidential) field, blame Fred Wertheimer and Common Cause, the organization he until recently ran and still animates, the principal architects of the cockamamie financial gauntlet we inflict on our potential leaders. Common Cause is point-lobby for the goo-goos, that is, the earnest folks always trying to jigger the rules to ensure good government. One of their conceits is that money is the root of all political evil, so they seek salvation in the Sisyphean task of eliminating its influence. The chief result of this is a Fred Wertheimer rule outlawing individual political contributions of more than $1,000 and a bureaucracy called the Federal Election Commission to count angels on pinheads in deciding, for example, what counts as a contribution...

The doleful effect of such limitations were entirely predictable; indeed, they were predicted right here. As early as 1976, when the Supreme Court partly upheld the 1974 Federal Election Campaign Act, we wrote that the law "will probably act like the Frankenstein's monster it truly is. It will be awfully hard to kill, and the more you wound it, the more havoc it will create." In the face of hard experience, of course, the goo-goos prescribe more of the same, to the point where "campaign finance reform" has become the Holy Grail."

Click HERE for much, much more on the pernicious impact of campaign finance "reform."