There’s a campaign finance scandal brewing…
Linda Greenhouse, a former New York Times Supreme Court reporter, wrote an online opinion piece for the NYT detailing a stunning series of events that “brought home … the dimension of our campaign finance problem as no stack of legal briefs ever did.”
After Greenhouse donated to the campaign of a state judge, Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and a congressional candidate, another candidate had the temerity to call her and ask for a campaign contribution.
This will not stand!
Greenhouse, now a Journalist-in-Residence at Yale Law School and board member of the American Constitution Society, took her scandal to the digital pages of the New York Times to scold the Supreme Court for having the temerity to broaden Citizens United v. FEC after the government claimed the authority to ban books.
As Greenhouse attempts to propagate the debunked myth that Barack Obama revolutionized small donations, she bemoans the “insiders’ games” required to raise contributions of $1,000 or more. Greenhouse, by the way, maxed out to Obama’s general election campaign with a $2,300 donation. So much for the small donor…
She bemoans the fact that U.S. House candidates spent $808 million in 2008, about the same amount U.S. newspapers earned in online advertising revenue, to introduce themselves to their potential constituents, inform voters of their policy stances and campaign for office. “That’s a lot of $500 phone calls,” Greenhouse writes, while not mentioning the easiest solution to this government-mandated problem: raising or eliminating federal contribution limits.
To be fair, Greenhouse confesses to a bit of uncertainty on the topic she eventually gets around to addressing (Citizens United v. FEC), admitting that the McCain-Feingold provision at issue in the case’s original argument “goes too far toward suppressing legitimate expression.”
Greenhouse, though, continues criticizing the Court for alternately rushing to decide a Constitutional question and spending too much time deciding Citizens United.
She blames the Supreme Court’s “deregulatory majority: Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr., Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Anthony M. Kennedy” for “a hijacking that has turned a minor case into an agenda-driven vehicle for undoing the status quo.”
Let’s be clear about the Court’s path on ordering a re-argument in Citizens United: at initial oral argument, the government’s attorney stated the previously-unspoken truth that the government claimed broad authority to ban books and virtually all media. This shocking statement is widely recognized as a likely determining factor in the Court’s decision to rehear the case to focus on the First Amendment issues underpinning the arguments. Greenhouse doesn’t address this even as an aside.
Second, for all her concern about Constitutional avoidance and precedent, Greenhouse does not mention that in Citizens United the government has abandoned its “immense aggregation of wealth” reasoning for denying corporations (and unions) First Amendment rights – essentially asking the Court find that independent speech raises a quid pro quo corruption danger contrary to Buckley v. Valeo, the foundation of modern campaign finance jurisprudence.
The real scandal in this story is the constant effort by “reformers” and some allies in the press to willfully obfuscate the facts in Citizens United and other campaign finance cases to mesh with their reverse-Pollyannaish worldview about money in politics.
