It is frankly challenging to reconcile 1st amendment protections and a CU repeal. I'm not sure what the solution is, but think recent events should show that govt can abuse campaign finance law to pick winners and losers in the town square.
> It is frankly challenging to reconcile 1st amendment protections and a CU repeal. I'm not sure what the solution is, [...]
Reconciliation: Companies aren't human entities.
Non-human entities aren't entitled to 1st amendment protections.
Campaign finance is equally simple: run your campaign on public funding. Give all candidates who meet a threshold equal amounts of money.
I have yet to hear a convincing argument about what benefit a democracy receives from campaigns having different amounts of funding. That feels like the tail wagging the dog (your supporters fund you, so you can spend that money to buy more supporters).
I'm not so convinced about that reconciliation! Most media in general is not conducted through individual entities.
Even the small film maker or newspaper is usually going to be organized as an LLC, even if it is just a single person trying to submit their film to a festival or something. These should be subject to governmental regulation if they touch on political topics? I think this is significantly thornier than you're making it out to be.
> Campaign finance is equally simple: run your campaign on public funding. Give all candidates who meet a threshold equal amounts of money.
Right, where it gets tricky is with unaffiliated individuals and what counts as a campaign expense versus speech or normal business.
If you mandate that non-human entities have an 1st amendment right, you cannot have meaningful campaign finance limits.
Ergo, because it's worth having campaign finance limits, in the interest of allowing the best candidate / idea to win, I think it's worth threshing through stripping 1st amendment rights from non-human entities.
Regarding how one weighs what sort of speech would then be allowed and disallowed is a difficult problem, but the above needs to happen before it can even be started on.
Now, we have a frankensystem where reality (unlimited finance) and policy (limited finance) differ, which is never a healthy state.
my point is that stripping non-human entities of 1st amendment is effectively repealing the 1st amendment in the US, if it allows the government to regulate newspapers/printmakers/movies based on political content. so your point is essentially that campaign finance trumps 1A, which might be true but i am not so sure
What a terrible idea. Giving government the power to regulate newspapers/printmakers/movies can't possibly produce better outcomes than what we have now. Preserving maximum freedom of expression is far more important than any election result.
It's an interesting point. Whether non-human entities are entitled to 1st amendment rights. Since they have the potential longevity that far exceeds humans, and also can't be punished in same manner for potential wrongdoing (i.e. send an entire company or lobby) to prison.
> Non-human entities aren't entitled to 1st amendment protections.
The vast majority of speech that needs to remain protected for speech to remain meaningfully free happens through non-human entities. Removing that protection is an absolutely insane step.
Then we create some kind of liability for that situation. And then we figure out at what assemblage scale multiple people stop being a collection of individuals and start being something fundamentally different.
LLC et al. liability didn't just exist in a tablet given to humanity from god.
It was designed for a purpose, and we could design the same thing for people if we wanted, instead of granting legal corporations individuals' rights.
After some research I realized that since 2010 at least (probably true if you go back a bit, but I didn't) EVERY SINGLE PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN has been fined for major violations of campaign finance laws (usually related to in-kind contributions, or expenses FEC decides to make election expenses later on).
In other words, it seems impossible to run for president without breaking the law.
This is not okay. One of the issues here is that by making candidates break a law, you basically now have some kind of weird leverage over them. You can make threats to prosecute or fine further and thus have them by the proverbial balls. You also naturally push away people who would be wanting to follow the law, which I argue is sorely needed in Washington DC.
This opens the door to a lot of bad bad bad blackmail opportunities.
If no party and no candidate is able to stage a presidential campaign without being fined, ranging from Trump's chaotic, high energy campaigns to Clinton's 'proper' campaign with lots of decorum to Biden's bring-back-normal campaign, then I think something is seriously the matter with campaign finance laws.
