Liberal Angst Over Campaign Finance Reversal Doesn’t Hold Water
Insider Online has some great analysis of the U.S. Supreme Court’s overdue overturn of campaign finance law that has been quashing free speech for years.
One of the important reasons why these unconstitutional laws had to go lies in the fact that while most companies were muzzled by these laws, news companies were under no such prohibition against using their financial resources to exercise their free speech:
Again by its own terms, the law exempts some corporations but covers others, even though both have the need or the motive to communicate their views. The exemption applies to media corporations owned or controlled by corporations that have diverse and substantial investments and participate endeavors other than news. So even assuming the most doubtful proposition that a news organization has a right to speak when others do not, the exemption would allow a conglomerate that owns both a media business and an unrelated business to influence or control the media in order to advance its overall business interest. At the same time, some other corporation, with an identical business interest but no media outlet in its ownership structure, would be forbidden to speak or inform the public about the same issue. This differential treatment cannot be squared with the First Amendment.
And as we all know, most media companies most certainly do have a specific viewpoint they want to get across (usually the liberal one). In fact, in all the howling and wailing over this decision to uphold the First Amendment, who has been at the forefront of the din: the “mainstream” media, of course. They enjoy having the power to push an opinion and agenda while those corporations they despise in their Marxist loathing do not have such power.
Insider Online also points out that Justice Antonin Scalia addressed something I pointed out yesterday: the caterwauling about “corporations aren’t people” doesn’t pass muster. Scalia addresses this in the opinion:
The dissent says that “ ‘speech’ ” refers to oral communications of human beings, and since corporations are not human beings they cannot speak. Post, at 37, n. 55. This is sophistry. The authorized spokesman of a corporation is a human being, who speaks on behalf of the human beings who have formed that association—just as the spokesman of an unincorporated association speaks on behalf of its members.
Let’s face it: McCain-Feingold (aka the Incumbent Protection Act) and laws like it were championed by liberals from the git-go in order to silence those who often reveal their Marxist, anti-American bias (i.e. the evil corporations and private policy organizations), and now that this unconstitutional weapon has been taken out of their hands, they’re crying like the babies they are over the prospect of having to defend their asinine ideas on a more even playing field.
So don’t be fooled by all their faux populist prattle about “big corporations.” In fact, I’m sure most of you won’t be fooled by it. They’ve been drinking their own Koolaid for so long, they don’t realize they tip their hand to us with all their anti-capitalist talk.
We see right through their “emperor’s clothes,” and they don’t even realize it.
Yesterday was a great day for freedom and the American people!
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- McCain-Feingold takes a hit (hotair.com)
- Nader group says let’s change the First Amendment (hotair.com)
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