Info, Law, IP & Ethics

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This past weekend, the Supreme Court ruled to reject corporate spending limits on campaign contributions. For the past several months, I’ve been watching the news about the forming healthcare bill, and for months my frustration with our current campaign structure has been growing. It seems so obvious that partisan politics are only fueled by campaign contributions. The difficulties that the house and senate currently face are exacerbated by the campaign contributions from insurance and pharmaceutical companies. Yet, our government is not doing anything to ensure that it is not influenced by corporate interests; instead, the judicial branch has actually gone so far as to make things worse, uprooting a bill that has been in practice for more than 100 years. For a brief overview of the decision and its effects on the public moving forward, listen to this NPR piece (NPR – Supreme Court Rejects Corporate Spending Limits).

Interestingly enough, the NY Times piece entitled, “Justices 5-4 Reject Corporate Spending Limit” points out that the court overruled 2 important precedents about the first amendment rights of corporations. This is interesting because the courts usually look to past rulings as guidance for the decisions that they make moving forward. It seems all too convenient that this markedly more conservative Supreme Court is passing legislation that will in the long-term likely help republican candidates who are more often awarded large campaign contributions by corporate interests, as opposed to the lobbyists from unions who have less money.

Whether or not a corporation should be viewed as a body with a right to free speech is at the heart of this debate. And while no one is denying that corporations (and the people that make up these bodies) should have a right to free speech, it is most-definitely true that in giving corporations the power to finance campaigns we are giving them a great deal of power that the average American public does not possess. David Kirkpatrick of the NY Times stated it perfectly in his piece entitled, “Lobbyists Get Potent Weapon in Campaign Ruling,” when he said that “A lobbyist can now tell any elected official: if you vote wrong, my company, labor union or interest group will spend unlimited sums explicitly advertising against your re-election.” Corporations have the money, and so now they have the power to sway the public through slanderous marketing campaigns against election candidates and through heavy lobbyist funding to ensure that their corporate interests are supported.

As seen with the recent healthcare reform legislation, when senators and representatives have been given campaign donations from the health insurance and pharmaceutical companies, donations that have ultimately helped them to get elected into office, they are weary to vote against the interests of these companies. The money that corporate America can funnel into lobbying and campaign funding will greatly affect the bills that will be passed in the coming years and months. For example, as Ben Jervey points out in his blog “The New Ideal,” “For energy, climate, and environmental issues, it means that we’re going to see lots of Big Oil, Big Ag, Bit Coal, and Big Chemical money flooding the elections. Now Exxon-Mobil, Halliburton, Dow Chemical, Monsanto, Massey Energy, or any other ridiculously deep-pocketed corporation can spend as much as they want to support candidates friendly to their business interests. Getting any solid climate or environmental legislation passed after these 2010 elections just got a lot harder.”

I for one am extremely disappointed with the court’s decision, and it seems that President Obama is too from his comments in the NY Times piece entitled, “Obama Turns Up Heat Over Ruling on Campaign Spending,” where he said that “This ruling strikes at our democracy itself…I can’t think of anything more devastating to the public interest. The last thing we need to do is hand more influence to the lobbyists in Washington, or more power to the special interests to tip the outcome of elections.” The same article stated that Obama was working Congress on legislation that would reinstate some of the limits that the court lifted, and I certainly hope that the government is successful in reinstating limitations.