CCP Academic advisor Professor David Primo published an op-ed in Forbes earlier this week entitled “It’s Time To Bring Some Sanity To Campaign Finance Laws”.  In the article, Professor Primo challenges the notion that disclosure adds information relevant for voters to make up their minds about issues:

I put this “informational interest” to the test in a recent experiment with more than 1,000 registered voters in Florida.  Participants were randomly assigned to three groups: one received only the text of a hypothetical ballot issue, while the second and third groups could also access a voter guide, campaign ads and newspaper articles about the ballot issue, but only the third group could access newspaper articles with disclosure information.  It was up to participants to decide which sources, if any, to view before voting.

Campaign-related speech is more than just contribution limits and donor disclosure statutes.  Right now, a case is before the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals on the merits of a state law banning political campaigns from making so-called auto-dialed calls, or “robocalls.”

We’re all familiar with robocalls, those annoying recorded missives from national politicians urging us to cast a vote for Local Candidate X.  Of course, the Head On commercials are annoying too, and nobody is talking about prohibiting those…

As the “Occupy” movement loses steam, the fight to limit corporate rights of political expression has begun taking familiar tacks.  In this case, it’s a local government creating a fuss about corporate speech.

Last week in California, the Los Angeles City Council voted to support a constitutional amendment intended to overturnCitizens United.   The LA Times published an interesting op-ed by Jim Newton (The City Council’s casual hypocrisy, 12/12) exploring the relationship between money, speech, the LA City Council and corporations:

If the company that employs me, the privately held Tribune Co., donated $1 million to Barack Obama, would that be any less an act of speech than if the chairman of this company ordered every one of his editorial pages to support Obama (thankfully, both of those are hypotheticals)? Is it a campaign contribution, an act of speech or both if Random House releases a book denouncing Newt Gingrich a day before the New Hampshire primary? Is it any different if Sony releases a movie making the same point? Money and speech intersect in a variety of complicated ways.

Much has been made of Obama’s speech from Osawatomie, Kansas last week, where the President attempts to outline his prescription for healing the country’s current economic woes. For the most part, media outlets have contented themselves to drawing general parallels between Obama and Teddy Roosevelt, the owner of the very large and very Progressive shoes Obama seems eager to fill. Some however — like Democracy 21 President Fred Wertheimer — see a very specific correlation: campaign finance reform. From HuffPo:

For more than a century, the Roosevelt position prevailed in our country. Corporate money was barred from being used in federal elections. Our national policy was based on a simple proposition: only individuals and groups of individuals were allowed to contribute or spend money to influence federal elections.

 

CCP Legal Director Allen Dickerson wrote a column Wednesday commenting on the FEC’s response last week to the Sen. Mike Lee and American Crossroads advisory opinions:

Lee’s camp argued that IEs don’t give funds directly to candidates’ campaigns so they can’t be corrupting. Why should it matter, the Lee camp’s thinking goes, if the funds went to a leadership PAC? They still couldn’t be used for any of Lee’s election activity, and so they couldn’t corrupt him or anyone else.

The FEC disagreed-in a unanimous vote. And because a federal statute was directly on point, capping contributions not only to federal candidates but also their agents and any affiliated entities, the commission had little choice. That doesn’t mean the underlying law is constitutional-and I expect we’ll see litigation on precisely that point-but at least the FEC recognized that, where there’s controlling law, its duty is to explain that law to the public.