Campaign Speech Flashcards
Campaign Speech Basics
This is a freestanding doctrine not affecting forums or conduct or anything like that.
Contributions = money you give to candidate that they spend. Gov can regulate this harder using IS as the SoR. Regular generic IS. Gets lighter SoR because of the risk of corruption being high.
Expenditures = money you spend yourself to help candidate. Gov faces SS. There isn’t quite as much risk of quid pro quo here as compared to Contributions.
Corporate Campaign Speech - Citizens United
The question here is: what about corps’ campaign speech? There was a law on the books saying corps and unions can’t make contributions. There was a cap in place. But the corps would set up PACs and have members funnel money into that. The court says that money gives access but access is NOT corruption (cope).
Critiques
- Money is not like other types of speech because it is not equally distributed, so some voices are stronger than others and rich people shouldn’t have stronger speech than anyone else. Apple should not have greater speech rights just because they sell nice computers.
- Corrosive effect of big money, while they get access they are not guaranteed an outcome.
- Shareholders have no skin in the game, because they can easily divest from the corporation, so they aren’t really that affected. Vote with your wallet. Stock can get a little complicated though.
- Created SUPERPACs
Citizens United is actually not the case that gave corps free speech rights. They’ve had them for ages like with commercial speech cases, but limited. NYT and other journalistic corps complicate this matter.
What is a PAC?
PAC = A Political Action Committee (PAC) can make contributions up to the statutory cap and engage in their own expenditures. The PAC can spend as much as it wants and corps can contribute to it.
SUPERPAC = A PAC that only makes independent expenditures. Effectively no caps on money in politics because of SUPERPACs.
Contributions - Intermediate Scrutiny SOR
o Contribution – money that you give to the candidate.
Intermediate scrutiny SOR is given to contribution regulations, because the government has sufficient interest to do so, primarily:
* to combat potential quid pro quo and corruption.
Fund limits
Expenditure - Strict Scrutiny SOR
o Expenditure – money that you personally use for your own activities to support a candidate.
Courts see expenditures as having a higher speech interest, because the individual is free to set out how to ensure its voice is projected.
* Less of an appearance of a one for one trade.
No fund limits
Coordinated Expenditures - Strict Scrutiny SOR
A coordinated expenditure happens when a group pays for campaign speech together. Like when a candidate does not hold a rally himself, but partners with a PAC.
The core issue is that the candidate and the donors are coordinating on what to say and how to say it. Closer to quid pro quos.
These “expenditures” actually fall into the CONTRIBUTIONS bucket and therefore face SS.
