Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court infamously ruled in Citizens United v. FEC that corporate funding of independent political broadcasts in candidate elections cannot be limited under the First Amendment to the Constitution. In other words, the Court reaffirmed the idea that money serves as a means by which individuals can express their speech. Specifically, corporations are today allowed to contribute indirectly to candidates and interest groups in order to influence the outcome of an election, as a tenet of their right to freedom of speech.
This case and the later SpeechNow.org v. FEC case were lambasted in the national media as opening the door to a flurry of undue corporate influence in our election systems. Political commentators, dissenting Supreme Court Justice Steven Breyer, and even President Obama weighed in criticizing this decision – causing much high-profile drama.
Political liberals and the detractors of this court decision weighed in as well, making documentaries, protesting, and complaining about the McDonald’s-izing of our election system. We must look at the Court decision through an objective lens, though, especially so close to this year’s midterm elections. If we extract the media bias from the hype surrounding the Citizens United case, it’s easy to see that the political situation regarding campaign finance is not nearly as horrendous as it’s been portrayed.
Corporations still can’t contribute directly to candidates – they never could. Moreover, about half the states in the U.S. have no substantial campaign finance restrictions for local and state elections, and the levels of corruption in those states with respect to corporate contributions are minimal compared to the states that do have these restrictions. To be sure, the decision has had a measurable impact on the amount of corporate campaign support in this election cycle – and this will certainly play a role in the outcome of this November’s races. But learned observers know that this is merely psychological: even though corporations had the same rights before as they do now, the media impact of the Supreme Court decision did serve to strengthen the amount of corporate support for certain candidates – the simple awareness of this right to contribute was an enormously powerful factor.
Moreover, if external funding didn’t exist to such high levels, the amount of political and civic apathy in our nation would likely decrease substantially. Voter turnout is barely high enough as it is; why discourage turnout and civic participation by severely restricting the amount of money available for candidate promotion and issue awareness? No, criticism of the Supreme Court decisions regarding campaign financing in the past year is unwarranted – without corporate America, the world’s oldest democracy wouldn’t be nearly as powerful as it is today. So the answer is no, Mr. President: swaying elections with dollars is as old as democracy itself. Unfavorable poll results are probably due to extreme voter dissatisfaction – and, as both parties have said in recent months, that’s what elections are for.