On Wed, 27 Jan 2010, Michael Pollak wrote:
> Do you think legislation short of amendment could easily fix this
> problem that money spent to promote political messages has been defined
> as being an essential component of political speech -- and therefore
> entitled to the highest level of free speech protection, and essentially
> unregulatable?
>
> Or would we need an amendment to do that?
I should add: I suspect this might be the legitimate motivation behind focusing on regulating corporate campaign spending rather than that of all rich persons, including natural ones: it's because they *haven't* ever found a legal way around this free speech protection short of an amendment. And that this is why reformers switched to this alternative route, based in (what they thought was the well established) legality of discriminating between natural and corporate persons. Since currently 99% of all campaign financing (which isn't direct contributions to parties, which does have hard limits) is funneled through corporations, theoretically, this would pretty much handle it, if they could plug all the loopholes. But now that whole strategy's scotched.
It's true theoretically that if they ever effectively controlled all corporate campaign expenditures that some super rich people could give directly. But it's not crazy for reformers to say they'd cross that bridge when they came to it. And that they suspected there would be many fewer instances of it because millions in directly traceable money that isn't spent by the candidate him or herself would be easier to delegitimate and harder to organize.
Michael