PRESS
RELEASES
from
Institute
for
Justice
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: January 18, 2012
CONTACT: John Kramer
Institute for Justice
Defends Super PACs
Americans Should
Embrace Groups That Speak During Elections, Not Fear Them
Arlington, Va.—The 2012
presidential election is bringing almost daily warnings about the
influence of so-called “Super PACs” on the political process. A
writer in
The Atlantic called
them the “WMDs” of campaign finance and
to
The New York Times they
are “septic tanks into which wealthy
individuals and corporations can drop unlimited amounts of
money.” The attorneys at the Institute for Justice, who argued
and won
SpeechNow.org v. FEC,
the case that recognized that the First
Amendment prohibits the government from preventing the formation of
Super PACs, have a very different view.
Super PACs are voluntary associations that engage in political speech
in campaigns for federal office. They do not make contributions
to candidates. Rather, they make what are referred to as
“independent expenditures”—spending on political speech in support of,
or opposition to, a candidate for federal office. If this
political spending is made independently from a candidate, the Super
PAC may accept unlimited contributions from individuals, associations,
corporations and unions.
“Independent expenditure-only groups—or so-called ‘Super PACs’—are
organizations made up of Americans who have joined together, pooled
their resources and are attempting to persuade voters,” said IJ Senior
Attorney Steve Simpson, who argued
SpeechNow.org.
“These groups
are simply exercising their First Amendment rights to speak out about
politics in the course of a campaign.”
Many commentators claim that Super PACs, because of their ability to
raise and spend unlimited amounts of money, can dominate politics and
“buy” elections. “Political advertising does not buy elections
any more than corporate advertising buys market share,” Simpson
continued. “If it did, we would all be driving American cars and
drinking New Coke. Ross Perot would have been elected President.”
“When people complain that there is too much spending in campaigns,
they are really complaining that there is too much political speech in
campaigns,” Simpson said. “More spending means more information
reaching voters about their political representatives.”
Moreover, independent spending can backfire—the most recent example
being a film made by a Super PAC supporting Newt Gingrich that
criticized Mitt Romney’s business record. “The idea that voters
will simply do as advertising directs them to do is nonsense,” Simpson
said.
“Many of the most vehement complaints regarding Super PACs come from
political candidates themselves,” said IJ Attorney Bill Maurer, who
argued a successful challenge to Arizona’s punitive system of taxpayer
financing of campaigns before the U.S. Supreme Court last year.
“Candidates cannot control the messages from independent expenditure
groups and, ironically, contribution limits make it hard for candidates
to respond by limiting the money they can raise. But the answer
to this inequality is to lift contribution limits, not to violate the
First Amendment in a more even-handed fashion.”
Many members of the media—including Stephen Colbert—repeatedly point
out that Super PACs, which are supposed to be independent, are often
run by associates or friends of candidates, raising concerns that they
are not truly independent. “Super PACs are required to be
independent, but they aren’t required to be ineffective,” said IJ
Attorney Paul Sherman. “The campaign finance reform lobby created
a system that pushes money to third-party groups. Donors are
naturally going to want to give money to groups that will spend it on
effective political advocacy. Of course those groups are going to
be run by people with extensive experience in politics. If
reformers find that system absurd, they have no one to blame but
themselves.”
Simpson concluded, “The problem is not that there’s too much money in
politics, but that politics controls too much money. If we want
to keep people from trying to influence politics, we need to keep
politicians from influencing everything we do. Shrink the size
and scope of government, and you remove the incentive to try to control
it.”
Maurer concluded, “It seems like every election, those pushing for more
restrictions and campaign finance regulations come up with a new
boogeyman that is supposedly destroying democracy. A few years
ago it was 527 organizations and before that ‘soft money’; today it is
Super PACs. What they are really complaining about is that people
are spending money to get their political viewpoints heard. In
the view of those pushing campaign finance restriction, this spending
is corruption; what it really is, is free speech in action.”
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FOR
IMMEDIATE RELEASE: January 18, 2012
CONTACT: John Kramer
Citizens United, Two
Years Later: Institute for Justice Continues
to Defend Landmark Free Speech Ruling
“The irony here is
that people and groups are gathering together to speak out against a
case
that protected the right of people and groups to gather together and
speak out.
We don’t lose our freedom of speech by exercising our freedom of
association.”
Arlington, Va.—Tomorrow,
January 21, 2012, marks the second anniversary of the U.S. Supreme
Court’s landmark ruling in Citizens
United v. FEC. As proponents of campaign finance
restrictions prepare to protest the decision, the Institute for Justice
(IJ), the nation’s only libertarian public interest law firm, is
standing up to defend that ruling.
“Citizens United recognized
that the First Amendment is about protecting speech, not about
protecting favored speakers,” said IJ Senior Attorney Steve Simpson,
who authored the friend-of-the-court brief IJ submitted in Citizens
United v. FEC. “Congress has no more power to ban speech by
American corporations than it does to ban speech from any American who
wishes to add his voice to the political debate.”
Opponents of Citizens United commonly
argue
that the decision is flawed because it held that “corporations
are people.” But as Simpson noted, “Citizens United simply
recognized that corporations are associations of people—and those real
people don’t lose their First Amendment rights merely because they
associate with one another to make their speech more effective.”
“Simply put,” Simpson said, “if individuals have free speech rights,
citizens who band together as unions and corporations also have free
speech rights. We don’t lose our freedom of speech by exercising
our freedom of association.”
Simpson continued, “The irony here is that people and groups are
gathering together to speak out against a case that protected the right
of people and groups to gather together and speak out.”
Opponents of Citizens United
also claim that the ruling held that “money is speech.” But, as
IJ-WA Executive Director Bill Maurer noted, “The Supreme Court did not
hold that money is speech, but that money facilitates speech. If
Congress can control the amount of money you can spend on speech, then
it can ban any speech that carries beyond the sound of your own voice.”
Maurer continued, “The critics of Citizens
United ultimately have a problem with the First Amendment and
the fact that it prevents the government from placing caps on political
speech. They want regulated speech, rather than a free
marketplace of ideas. And for some reason, they trust the
government to set and enforce strict limits on how much speech occurs
in a debate about, of all things, who should govern us. This
viewpoint is completely inconsistent with our nation’s history and
flies in the face of long-established constitutional rights as well as
limits on the power of government.”
IJ Attorney Paul Sherman added, “Absent from almost every attack on Citizens United is any description
of what the case was actually about. At its core, Citizens United concerned a law
that gave the federal government the power to fine or imprison people
if they used money from a corporate or union treasury to pay for
political speech. The government was literally asserting the
power to ban the distribution of a political documentary and even
pamphlets or books. Nothing could be more antithetical to the
First Amendment.”
Simpson concluded, “In our society, the government has no place
limiting certain voices because they might prove too influential.
The Framers recognized that individuals, not the government, have the
right to decide what to say and what messages to listen to. Those
who believe in freedom should defend Citizens
United. If we ignore freedom of speech, we will surely
lose it.”
For more information on Citizens
United, Super PACs, and other campaign finance issues, visit
IJ’s First Amendment blog, Congress Shall Make No Law, at www.makenolaw.org.
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