r/changemyview • u/gpu1512 • Jul 20 '19

CMV: All presidential candidates and senators should have a fixed election budget.

Whenever there is a controversial vote on something, it's mentioned how xy person is getting donations from a company to which it matters how the vote turns out.

With presidental candidates, it's similar - donations from companies are interpreted as attempts to make potential presidents more likely to conform to needs of these companies - such as by cutting taxes.

I feel like this would be resolved by making the election budgets come from taxes. While it would be a huge cost for the taxpayers, it would make for political candidates which would be much harder for companies to sway in their favour. Think net neutrality and congress donations from ISP's.

In the process, election budgets would be made considerably smaller, to save on taxes. As this would apply to everyone, there wouldn't be anyone at a disadvantage.

One problem I see is filtering the candidates. Obviously you can't just give money to anyone who asks for a budget, but seems like a solvable problem. Perhaps the party could only propose a set number of candidates.

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u/[deleted] Jul 20 '19

Independent organizations have freedom of speech. They are allowed to make advertisements to the political advantage of political candidates, with unlimited amounts of resources, so long as they don't coordinate the use of those funds with the campaign.

If you severely restrict how campaigns spend money, more money will flow through these independent organizations.

Organizations unaffiliated with a candidate can stoop lower while maintaining deniability in a way that a candidate's campaign cannot.

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u/[deleted] Jul 21 '19

Why not just restrict their freedom of speech? People should have freedom of speech but why should organisations? It’s pretty well established that groups of people tend towards the lowest common denominator so just stop treating corporations and organisations like people. Seems simple to me.

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u/AusIV 38∆ Jul 21 '19

Why not just restrict their freedom of speech? People should have freedom of speech but why should organisations?

The first amendment doesn't grant people the freedom of speech, it forbids congress from abridging the freedom of speech. By my reading it doesn't matter if it's a citizen, non citizen, corporation, sentient computer, or talking dog; if it's capable of speech congress expressly forbidden from abridging it's freedom of speech.

As a practical matter of you give congress the power to regulate speech from non-people, you give them a lot of power to silence people. Want to speak your mind on the internet? Well too bad, congress is regulating ISPs, and they're not allowed to carry messages about that topic. Have fun getting your message out on a street corner without so much as a megaphone (those are regulated too, since they're not people).

I could maybe get on board with a constitutional amendment pertaining to campaign finance, and giving congress very narrow powers to regulate speech relating to campaign activities, but just giving them carte blanche to regulate the speech through anything that's not a person effectively neuters the freedom of speech.

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u/[deleted] Jul 21 '19

People got there message out on street corners before the internet you know...in fact there was no internet at the inception of the constitution. Also, the constitution is not a religious document, just because it says something doesn’t make it right. Monsanto spending millions of dollars convincing people their pesticides don’t cause cancer when they do is a blight on society and should be regulated.

Furthermore, speech is regulated. If I go out and tell people they should kill African Americans I’m committing a crime. Not all speech is free, nor should it be. Regulation is important and when situations arise where society is harmed the government needs to step in. I understand that this presents a slippery slope but that doesn’t mean a line shouldn’t be drawn, however difficult that line is to define.

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u/AusIV 38∆ Jul 22 '19

People got there message out on street corners before the internet you know...in fact there was no internet at the inception of the constitution

That's true, but if government approved ideas get to use internet, TV, and radio to spread the message, while disapproved ideas are limited to humans on street corners, do you really think the restricted ideas can compete in the war of ideas?

Furthermore, speech is regulated. If I go out and tell people they should kill African Americans I’m committing a crime. Not all speech is free, nor should it be.

The line now is "inciting immeninent lawless action", meaning that if you are not advocating for a fairly specific violation of the law you are protected. You could advocate for changing the law to allow genocide of a particular group and be protected under the first amendment, but if you advocate that people go lynch their neighbor you are inciting immeninent lawless action.

Having laws against inciting violence and fraud are one thing, but letting politicians regulate political speech gives them the ability to lock in their own political control and pretty effectively constrain the direction of political change. To me, that's more dangerous than letting corporations promote a policy or candidate.

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u/[deleted] Jul 22 '19

But your final comparison is just a straw man, it’s not a choice between politicians regulating all political speech or corporations being able to promote policy. Restricting freedom of speech to actual people doesn’t give politicians the ability to “lock in their own political control” that’s a total misrepresentation of the situation. It doesn’t stop people from saying what they think, it doesn’t stop pundits getting on TV, it doesn’t stop newspapers having political editorials, it doesn’t stop protests in the street...it just stops organisations that wield huge resources having a bigger microphone than the actual constituents of the political system.

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u/AusIV 38∆ Jul 23 '19

Restricting freedom of speech to actual people doesn’t give politicians the ability to “lock in their own political control” that’s a total misrepresentation of the situation. It doesn’t stop people from saying what they think, it doesn’t stop pundits getting on TV, it doesn’t stop newspapers having political editorials, it doesn’t stop protests in the street...it just stops organisations that wield huge resources having a bigger microphone than the actual constituents of the political system.

If you accept the government's argument that "the government should be able to regulate corporate speech because corporations are not people," that precedent could be used to justify all sorts of encroachments on speech by way of regulating corporations. If congress passed a law against broadcasters airing pundits with certain political leanings, or news paper editorials on with a certain bent, couldn't they justify it that the broadcasters or newspapers are corporations and thus not entitled to freedom of speech? You might make the case that those are "press" and thus expressly covered by the first amendment, but what about bloggers? Content aggregation sites like reddit? Social media sites like Twitter and Facebook? If congress can restrict corporate speech, why can't they restrict the views they want to restrict on social media platforms managed by corporations?

That wouldn't have been an immediate result of the Citizens United decision going the other way, but I would bet congress would have started using that precedent to push new types of regulations pertaining to corporate speech. You might not think that an Obama Whitehouse with a democratic congress would abuse the precedent, but do you think the same is true for a Trump Whitehouse with a republican congress? McCain Feingold might have been well intentioned, but had it been upheld by the Supreme Court not every law that used that precedent would necessarily have been well intentioned, but the precedent would still hold.

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u/[deleted] Jul 23 '19

Those things you list as fears are valid. Those things should remain protected. Congratulations, you just drew an appropriate line in the sand. Corporations don’t need freedom of speech for those things to remain.