By Mark Gruenberg
PAI Staff Writer
WASHINGTON (PAI)--By a 5-4 margin, an ideologically split U.S. Supreme Court on Jan. 21 threw out many of the restrictions on financing political campaigns -- including some limits on corporate and union contributions through their campaign finance arms, as well as bans on spending for ads within 60 days of an election.
The ruling, based on First Amendment free speech grounds, was blasted by labor’s allies in the progressive movement as well as by Democratic President Barack Obama. The labor movement was notably silent, but had opposed the 60-day campaign finance restrictions in a legal brief it filed last year with the High Court.
“The government cannot suppress political speech based on the speaker’s corporate identity,” said Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the court’s 5-man majority, all of whom were nominated to the bench by Republican presidents. Kennedy called the law’s 'censorship” of speech “vast in its reach.”
Justice John Paul Stevens, leading the four dissenters, said, ''The court's ruling threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions around the nation.''
The justices not only threw out the ban on unions and corporations paying for “issue ads” within 60 days of an election, they also tossed part of a 63-year-old law banning firms and unions from using money from their general treasuries -- as opposed to money raised separately and voluntarily by their campaign finance committees, or PACs -- to produce and run their own campaign ads for or against candidates by name.
One of the campaign finance limits the justices left in place was a 100-plus-year-old ban on direct union or corporate giving to candidates. They still have to go through their PACs for those contributions. But analysts expect a flood of money into elections.
Though the AFL-CIO and other unions had no immediate comment on the ruling in Citizens United vs. FEC, then-AFL-CIO General Counsel Jon Hiatt, acting on behalf of the federation, filed a friend-of-the-court brief last year challenging campaign finance law curbs on when union PACs could spend their money on issue ads.
Citizens United was a Right-Wing group whose ads and a film targeted then-Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton. It wanted to spend unlimited amounts of money to publicize the film, but the Federal Election Commission said “no.” Citizens United’s suit to overturn the campaign finance spending limits drew backing from groups ranging from the American Civil Liberties Union to the Chamber of Commerce.
The ban on issue ads “criminalized the AFL-CIO’s use of the broadcast medium as a legislative and policy advocacy tool, falsely characterized substantial labor organization speech on matters of public concern as wholly or substantially electoral, and impaired union political participation as a matter of law,” Hiatt’s brief said.
“Approximately 85 different television and radio advertisements the AFL-CIO had sponsored throughout every year from 1995 through 2001,” were put into the case record before other courts, Hiatt said. Many of those ads “would have been prohibited by” the 60-day ban on issue ads before elections, he added. That’s because those ads “referred to incumbent members of Congress.”
“Because the AFL-CIO and other labor organizations have fundamental interests in communicating with the general public about candidates and elections, it has a commensurate interest in the fate and interpretation of” the campaign finance law.
“The government does not even defend” an “anti-corruption rationale, instead contending that union and corporate independent speech may be prohibited if candidates and officeholders react favorably to it,” Hiatt pointed out.
“But that proposition threatens the established constitutional line between contributions and independent expenditures, and its reliance on the record would justify censorship of speech well beyond even that captured by” campaign finance law “as written. The government cannot demonstrate any other compelling governmental interest in prohibiting union independent expenditures,” he declared.
Hiatt called the campaign finance law’s spending limits that the AFL-CIO challenged “an unworkable censorship regime.” The limits were at the heart of the High Court’s decision.
President Obama, whose campaign set an all-time fundraising record last year was upset. Obama’s campaign did not take PAC money, but union PACs spent their own money on pro-Obama ads.
“The Supreme Court has given a green light to a new stampede of special interest money in our politics. It is a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans,” Obama said.
“This gives the special interests and their lobbyists even more power in Washington -- while undermining the influence of average Americans who make small contributions to support their preferred candidates. That's why I am instructing my administration to get to work immediately with Congress” on “a forceful response to this decision,” the president concluded. ###
Photo: Sam Ruaat/Creative Commons license
