My take is that groups like the Sierra Club, NAACP, NRA, AARP, etc,.,., have provided passion and coherency behind policy debate in America. Without them, it seems like its all just crooked deals made behind closed doors with lobbyists.
What exactly does the First Amendment protect if it doesn’t protect legitimate citizen acitivsts within our political process. And face it, Citizen Activism is dead if the governement can ban mass media advertising!!!
How will this type of law evolve next? What can citizens do besides group together and form petitions—if we can express what it is we want to change to the masses—and hold elected officials acountable with election affecting advertisements the right to free speech, as it pertains to political speech is dead. We may as well all move to Beijing now.
PS: So while the Supreme Court has ALLOWED congress to restrict election affecting advertising…can you also name some of the things we can still do…..?
Justice Antonin Scalia summed up the point in the 2003 case of McConnell v. Federal Election Commission:
Who could have imagined that the same Court which, within the past four years, has sternly disapproved of restrictions upon such inconsequential forms of expression as virtual child pornography, tobacco advertising, dissemination of illegally intercepted communications, and sexually explicit cable programming, would smile with favor upon a law that cuts to the heart of what the First Amendment is meant to protect: the right to criticize the government.
I do not believe that a coproration should have any political rights.
The owner(s) [i.e. human being(s)] should though.
I don’t understand what all the fuss about the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth is. Didn’t these guys all serve in Viet Nam? Do they not have a right to pool their money with other citizens and buy ad time—even ad time for ads that may affect an election. (They stayed within McCain-Feingold by stopping ads 40days before election—just the same as the more mature groups like NRA, or NAACP).
The only reason they had any affect on the election (if they did) was to the extent that their message (i.e. John Kerry was as great a war hero as he claimed, and he as worked against America’s armed forceds time and time again) resonated based on John Kerry’s record.
If their message was crap—in fact to the extent it wa crap—it failed.
The NAACP showed an ad implying that Bush was not for the fullest extent of punsihment on men who committed a horrible act—the truth was Bush was for the death penalty on these guys—while his opponent (Gore ) was not! And the message apparently worked
