Another Blow to Campaign Finance Reform
On June 25th, 2007, the US Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 that a key portion of the McCain-Feingold law had been unconstitutionally applied to the Wisconsin Right to Life group. The ruling is regarded as opening the door to political ads that circumvent campaign finance restrictions.
This is not a surprising outcome. Any attempt to limit election campaign funding is liable to be view as a restriction of free speech. The reformation of our electoral campaign system requires more free speech, not less. That is to say, the root of the problem is the high cost of free speech.
How expensive is free speech? According to The Christian Science Monitor, “in the 2000 election cycle 130 groups spent more than $500 million on 1,100 different ads.” That does not even include what the candidates spent.
As long as huge sums of money are required to win elections, the elected will be beholden to the people/organizations that contributed that money. Limiting the money is limiting free speech. We cannot fix the problem by placing restrictions on the supply side. That leaves the demand side.
All that money, most of it anyway, goes to television advertising. If TV time was free to candidates, they would need only a small fraction of the money they currently require to run for office. Since the airwaves are a public asset, we can mandate that large blocks of time be allocated to free political ads. Yes, this would hurt the broadcasters and they would need to be compensated but, wouldn’t that be less expensive than the continual corruption of our political system?