In the age of eight-figure checks to super PACs, is it time for a constitutional amendment that could end this dangerous farce? The notion of fiddling with the First Amendment should make anyone nervous — especially anyone who has spent a career benefiting from it. Then again, so does Sheldon Adelson’s $10 million check to Mitt Romney’s super PAC. A system that lets one individual pump so much money into supporting a favored candidate threatens to substitute oligarchy for democracy.
Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe has long opposed such tinkering. But writing recently for Slate.com, Tribe proposed an amendment, since introduced by Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., that would allow “content-neutral limitations” on independent expenditures. Tribe told me he changed his mind because “there’s no serious prospect” that a majority of the Supreme Court “will see the light in our lifetimes.” Meanwhile, he said, the “distortive effects of Citizens United and its aftermath are becoming clearer every week.”
Long-standing problem
For all the lamenting over the 2010 ruling in Citizens United, the trouble began far earlier, in the 1976 case of Buckley v. Valeo. Citizens United and a later appeals court ruling simply made clear that the Adelsons of the world could band together — hence, the super PAC — to spend unlimited funds to elect favored candidates. Buckley erected a distinction between limits on campaign contributions (OK, to prevent corruption or the appearance of corruption) and limits on campaign expenditures (invalid, because they restrict political speech without, the court said, furthering the anti-corruption interest).The contribution/expenditure distinction has been assailed by both sides. Yet there are valid reasons to limit contributions and to offer more leeway on the spending side. For example, the money that poured into Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, in limited donations, reflected his immense popular support. But the distinction collapses in theory, and becomes pernicious in practice, when it comes to independent expenditures. The court in Buckley and Citizens United proceeded from a naively rosy view of the corrupting potential of independent expenditures and an unduly narrow view of the governmental interest in limiting them.
Such spending, the court said in invalidating a $1,000 limit on independent expenditures in Buckley, “does not presently appear to pose dangers of real or apparent corruption comparable to those identified with large campaign contributions.” Presently? What would the court have said about candidates benefiting from $10 million checks? The mere “appearance of influence or access,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote in striking down the ban on corporate independent expenditures in Citizens United, “will not cause the electorate to lose faith in our democracy. By definition, an independent expenditure is political speech presented to the electorate that is not coordinated with a candidate.” Take a look at the incestuous staffing of any super PAC and consider whether you think it operates truly independently — and whether it bolsters your faith in democracy.
