Statement by OCPF on Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission
On January 21, 2010, the United States Supreme Court issued an important decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. __ (2010). In Citizens United, the Court ruled that independent expenditures by corporations made to influence candidate elections cannot be limited, because doing so would not comply with the First Amendment. Although the decision concerned application of a federal statute, it also calls into question OCPF’s longstanding interpretation of M.G.L. Chapter 55, Section 8 as prohibiting both contributions and independent expenditures by corporations to support or oppose candidates or political parties.
Section 8 states, in part, that business corporations, and other entities specified in Section 8, may not “expend or contribute, any money or other valuable thing for the purpose of aiding, promoting or preventing the nomination or election of any person to public office, or aiding or promoting or antagonizing the interest of any political party.” (Emphasis added). In light of Citizens United, the office will apply Section 8 as follows: Corporations or other entities named in the statute may still not make contributions to support or oppose candidates or political parties. In addition, if a corporation or other entity which may not contribute under Section 8 makes an independent expenditure, a report disclosing the independent expenditure must be filed, as required by M.G.L. Chapter 55, Section 18A.
If a corporation or its agents make an expenditure not “in concert with, or at the request or suggestion of, any candidate, or any nonelected political committee organized on behalf of a candidate or agent of such candidate” it is an independent expenditure. See M.G.L. Chapter 55, Sections 1 and 18A. On the other hand, a corporate expenditure that is made in concert with, or at the request or suggestion of, a candidate, would be prohibited by Section 8.
Media owns the opinions of sheeple on both sides of the dumbed down coin. I can only postulate as to why TPTB want to tear down the ideals of America in favor of the ideals of Red China but I would bet it has something to do with the problems of controlling large numbers of people.
… that we got you to set us straight…
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p>Whew, that was a close one… but. I can sleep better now.
FUCKING WOW!
The setting is a dark paneled office in the State House (aren’t they all dark paneled?).
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p>Lobbiest: Ok, youse got two choices, vote my way or expect a 100 g’s to roll into mailers, radio, cable and live calls for two weeks before your election…what’s it gonna be?
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p>Medium Shot of Legislator wetting their mid section.
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p>Broadcast media has diminishing returns… relative ease of entry to the market will mean competing visions. If a particular legislator, regardless of the dampness of midsection, can see 100 g’s of oppo coming at him/her… it’s going be relatively easy to pick up a phone and get 100 g’s of counter-oppo going. The result will not be corporate control, but basic, and un-alloyed, cacophony. If anything, this might be the death-knell of ‘traditional’ broadcast media as it (finally) devolves into utter and irredeemable chaos. Demand media, like blogs and podcasts and other such narrow-casting, will continue to concretize against the already delineated lines… and we’ll just hunker down, each within the bunkers that most make sense to oneself, while corporations trade increasingly ineffectual artillery overhead…
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There are plenty of issues that pit deep-pocket companies or trade associations against dirt poor consumer groups or good government types. Sure there’ll be plenty of issues that pit deep pockets vs deep pockets, but way to many instances where one side will have way more money to spend than the other side.
I’ll wait.
vs. workers trying to unionize.
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p>Sorry to keep you waiting.
… you missed the part of the ruling in which unions are as equally freed, as are corporations, to spend large amounts.
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p>still waiting =-)
Wal*Mart has much deeper pockets.
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p>The beef isn’t that there are two sides to an issue, but rather the size of each of the sides.
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p>When Exxon wants to drill more on the North Slope, they (and others in the petrol supply chain) have an awful lot more resources than the wildlife protectionists. That’s the problem — the magnitudes of difference.
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p>Wal*Mart can outspend unions 10:1 and not bat an eye.
…at how quickly parity can be achieved.
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p>Media, however ubiquitous, remains a finite resource: there’s just only so much ad money you can spend before saturation creates the circumstances of diminishing returns. The deeper the pockets, the quicker the time to saturation. We saw this in the special election when the rallying cry turned out to be ‘let’s just get this over with…’
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p>Which magnitudes, while large in principle, don’t particularly translate to comparative advantage when ‘dropping 100 g’s in the last week of the race‘… which was the original assertion in this thread.
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p>To be sure, Exxon has more money to drop on lawyers and other legal efforts to get their way. This is not at issue here and doesn’t, neccessarily, translate as neatly to the efficacy in electoral triumph that was posit’d upthread.
A real-life example: Middleborough and casinos. Expenditure for town meeting votes is unregulated, and the casino backers were flush with the cash they made dealing with apartheid South Africa.
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p>We saw four generations of lawn signs, at least three rounds of door-knocking, signature-gatherers, infrastructure for supporter meetings, etc. It wasn’t just paid media, but basically people being paid for in any other campaign is volunteer work — blanketing a small town with anywhere up to $100,000 of advertising over the last two weeks. And that doesn’t even get into the money that wasn’t visible.
How about utility reform. NStar, National Grid lobbyist advocate for a law that gives them more control over rates. MassPIRG and some other like minded groups are on the opposite side of that.
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p>MassPIRG, et al, are on the other side of the legislative issue… but on the other side of actual rate increases are both citizens and corporations. The largest single consumer of electricity on the planet is… wait for it… Google. Dedicated datacenters, comparatively negligible only a decade ago now account for nearly 3 percent of all electrical usage in the country. Massachusetts has a strong manufacturing base which can be affected by utility rates.
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p>You don’t often hear about it, because they don’t advertise the fact, but businesses are very keen on keeping utility rates as low as possible. You can bet that, should a rate change be in the offing, efforts to raise counter-funds would be swift and efficacious.
First, Google is a strawman–do they have any server farms in MA…they maybe a big customer in CA, but not MA.
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p>Sure business want electric rates down and they would team up with utilities to shift the rates onto consumers. It would be a win-win for them and a big lose for residential users.
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p>I’m done.
I predict that casino gambling is now a near certainty in Massachusetts, among many other significant issues. It will be impossible for any candidate to stand against it for long. But I’ve been wrong about many things before, and perhaps about this as well.
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p>I am impressed that Rob thinks this will somehow help the GOP he supports at RMG. Although our views on desirable public policy are quite different both BMG and RMG are about grassroots bottom-up politics, like most citizen-run political blogs. In general, I’d say that is one of the last things most corporations are interested in.
Weapons of mass distraction, diversion, division. Advancing another perversion to remove people from the higher persuit of caring about their own community.
While I’m somewhat ambivalent about corporations — and unions, too! — spending shareholders’ retained earnings (or union members dues) in ways they may not want, I also think if any person or entity is taxed, then it has the right to political speech, and to spend money to support or oppose policies or politicians which support or oppose their interests.
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p>I cannot see that much difference between political speech from a union, a corporation, or a 527.
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p>Frankly, I rather see and hear pro-casino TV commercials from a casino operator than to hear it from the usual suspects on Beacon Hill whose motivations are usually obfuscated if not totally self-dealing.
If money is equal to speech, then some people’s speech is more equal than others, no?
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p>As exampled above, WalMart can spend a WHOLE heck of a lot more money than a union, or Exxon versus an environmental group against drilling.
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p>Suddenly, the argument likely to win in any scenario is the one with more funds, NOT the one with the better argument.
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p>As we all know, money can obfuscate even factual, scientific KNOWLEDGE and muddy the public opinion waters on issues, a la global warming.
Some people’s speech is more likely to be widely heard.
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p>This has been the case since there has been a 1st amendment: Ben Franklin’s voice was LOUD because he owned a printing press.
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p>I am relatively unperturbed by this decision because speech and being heard are not the same thing, and only the former is constitutionally protected.
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p>Were your argument to be pushed to its logical extreme, all political media of any kind would be banned, because somewhere there is someone who can’t afford to do the same in opposition, and who might want to.
“because speech and being heard are not the same thing” – entry into the “being heard” part of speech is a bar too high for average groups. There is NO competing with corporations for that bar. Not in the modern age.
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p>The practical effect of allowing money to equal speech is that only some people’s speech will ever really be heard.
This is largely a policy position that advocates this “field levelling.” Which is nice enough, I suppose. Would work in much of the world, too.
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p>But we happen to live in a place that made a specific decision to take a rather absolutist position on the matter, which presents a significant barrier to the nice policy: it is an unconstitutional restriction on political speech.
I solved this problem. 🙂
Yes, very clever. But I found the entire discussion of “person hood” and the ensuing legerdemain to be a silly red herring.
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p>A corporation is an association of individuals, all of whom have a constitutional right to free speech. In that respect, it is not different from any other association of individuals, regardless of whether formally organized. A big business, a small business, a partnership, PFLAG, the PTA, the Neighborhood Association Opposed to Whatever Local Government Wants, Sierra Club, IBEW. Anything other than an individual, acting totally alone, has no rights.
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p>If I have the right to speak, and Larry has the right to speak, there is no reason that Larry and I should not also have the right to speak. If Larry and I have the right to speak, there is no way to distinguish Larry and I from Larry, myself, and our co-investors, after we organize ourselves in such a way that we act, collectively, through a board of directors and officers.
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p>In any event, corporations have presses, and their modern equivalents (i.e., media), which is also noted in the amendment, no? Not to mention the cool software that lets my computer–which is not a person and has no vocal cords– to cause words to be converted into sound so that they may be heard and understood by a listener, a process sometimes referred to as “speech.”
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p>If the association of people is not a person entitled to constitutional rights, what other rights do they lack? Can the Commonwealth solve its present financial crisis by confiscating a few office buildings, and selling them at auction? As long as title is held by a corporate entity, the property owner has no right not to have its property taken for public use without just compensation.
you are precisely wrong about this.
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p>Wrong. A corporation is a distinct legal entity, and as such it is very different from “other associations of individuals.” I quoted a 200-year-old case in my post in which Chief Justice Marshall makes precisely that point, and that’s been the state of the law ever since.
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p>You’re also wrong about taking property. You will note, if you read the 5th Amendment carefully, that the bar against taking private property for public use without paying compensation is not limited to persons. Rather, like the prohibition on speech restrictions, it is something that the government simply may not do, regardless of who or what owns the property.
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p>I don’t think you read my post very carefully. Read it again, if you’re interested in this topic.
A corporation is a distinct legal entity, but it is acting as an agent for the shareholders and, therefore, should be allowed to exercise the first amendment rights on behalf of the shareholders. In your old post that you linked to you claim that the executives of the corporation are using corporate money to amplify their own speech. That is backwards, they are using corporate money to amplify the shareholder’s speech because the executives are agents of the corporation/shareholders. So I think your real problem is not with the holding in Citizens United, but with the business judgment standard and the high degree of deference that courts show in shareholder derivative suits. But that’s an entirely different issue than the one you have repeatedly raised about your new “corporate overlords” and such.
It is a business association. It grew out of common law partnership, and utilizes principal/agent law that developed in that context. It does not exist except abstractly, and without the individuals involved–shareholders, directors, officers, employees, it is a nothing
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p>It is a distinct legal “person” or entity for purposes of liability and contract, and as such, made much of the last century and a half of economic history possible.
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p>Nevertheless, much as keyboard cannot type these words without my fingers, it cannot act unless caused to do so by its owners, acting through directors, officers, and employees, none of whom may have their political speech restricted. I see no reason–other than that “progressives” want different results– that the distinctness of the form should some how alienate the inalienable rights of those people. I have long found the argument in support of these bans to be patently contrived.
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p>It has also bothered me, since McCain took up this particular issue 20? years ago, how “progressives” can so straightforwardly embrace something so plainly illiberal as government control of political communication.
via Tim for Governor …
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