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Supremes Uphold Campaign Finance Restrictions

By Theresa Fritz Camoriano

By now, you know that the U.S. Supreme Court has upheld the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law.  Some people think this is a wonderful decision, because it supposedly “gets the money out of politics”, which is supposed to clean up the political process.  The folks who support McCain-Feingold find “attack ads” to be unpleasant and offensive, and they look forward to being able to watch their televisions without having to endure such unpleasantness. However, this law does not clean up politics; instead, it further concentrates power in the hands of those who are already powerful, preventing “outsiders” from being able to participate freely and fully in the political debate.  By reducing political competition and putting people in fear of criticizing their government, this law encourages corruption and tyranny.  I just wonder how the people whose sensibilities are offended by “attack ads” will feel when this law ushers in an era of corruption and tyranny, complete with “no knock raids” and innocent people being dragged off in the night by government agents.  Will their sensibilities be offended, or will they be happy as long as they don’t hear the gunshots, see the blood, or feel the pain themselves?

In the United States, we have not seen pogroms, mass murders, and massive confiscation of private property, so we somehow feel that we are immune from them.  But we are not immune.  We are fallible humans, no different from people in other countries where such atrocities have occurred, but we have been protected from tyranny by a constitutional framework and respect for the rule of law.  The people who wrote the 1^st Amendment understood that politics is a rough-and-tumble, dirty business, but they believed that, by respecting private property rights, dividing power among the three branches, severely restricting the power of the national government, and protecting the freedom of Americans to criticize their government, things would tend to work out fairly well, and they established a constitutional framework to institutionalize those protections.  As we tolerate erosions of that constitutional framework, such as this most recent destruction of our individual rights to freedom of speech and of press, we are destroying what has protected us in the past. 

Now, we are not free to criticize our government with impunity.  If we dare to join together with like-minded people to buy advertising space or air time in order to speak out against the actions of our government or promote our views, we may well be subjected to prosecution, fines, and imprisonment for violating the campaign finance laws.  Of course, fear of these repercussions will discourage us from participating in the debate, and it will embolden those who want to further strengthen the hand of the powerful against individual, powerless citizens.  We are now on a very slippery slope.

Earlier in our country’s history, every citizen felt a duty to uphold the Constitution, and our elected officials took very seriously their oath of office, requiring them to uphold the Constitution.  Today, however, our elected officials regularly vote in favor of laws knowing that they violate both the letter and the spirit of the Constitution.  They do what is politically expedient, believing that they are free to pass a law that is unconstitutional and leave it up to the Supreme Court to strike it down.  In the case of McCain-Feingold, many Republicans, including President Bush, thought the law was unconstitutional, but they abdicated their responsibility to uphold the Constitution, voting in favor of the law and signing it.  Of course, as we can see in this case, a majority of the Supreme Court now think of the court not as a body that is supposed to interpret and uphold the law, but rather as a body that is supposed to solve social problems.  So now, it is clear that we cannot rely on any of the three branches of government to respect and uphold the law – not our legislators, not our President, and not our judges.

If we want to be a free and secure people, we must demand a return to respect for the rule of law.  We must insist that our legislators and President uphold the Constitution, as they have sworn to do, and we must insist that they appoint or approve judges who will uphold the Constitution – not those who will “reinterpret” it until it means the very opposite of its original intent.  The responsibility for ensuring a respect for the rule of law ultimately lies with us – the people.

Unfortunately, the one hundred plus years of government control over education have taken their toll on us.  We have been taught to forget our founders’ suspicion of concentrated government power.  What could they possibly have known – that  group of dead white men that founded our country so many years ago?  Some of them even owned slaves!  And besides, the world has changed a lot in over two hundred years!  A law that was written so long ago could not possibly apply to us now!  But the fact is that those dead white men were a remarkable group.  They understood human nature, which has not changed for thousands of years, and they achieved a remarkable feat in establishing a country that unleashed the creativity and ingenuity of the common man and created the most prosperous and most free society the world has ever known. 

Americans have been taught in school that democracy protects us from tyranny.  We know that we have no kings in America, and we don’t believe we could ever have a Hitler, Stalin, or Pol Pot here, ignoring the fact that many of history’s tyrants were elected.  In any case, whatever happens will be alright, as long as we don’t have to endure those horrible “attack ads” on television! 

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