The Supreme
Court is giving the keys to the ballot box to Sheldon Adelson and immensely
wealthy folks like him.
Yesterday
conservative justices on the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that our current campaign finance
law cannot limit the total amount of cash that a single person can give to political
campaigns and PACs. They used a deliberately narrow definition of “corruption”
to justify this dangerous change in the law of the land.
Let’s avoid
simply saying “it’s not fair” or “it’s a free speech issue” when a very wealthy
person can spend millions and millions and millions to change the outcome of an
election, whether it’s an election for local sheriff or for president of the
United States.
In my mind, the
issue is not “fairness” or “free speech.”
The issue is:
allowing a single wealthy person to spend tens or hundreds of millions—to buy
an election—cannot be a reasonable fundamental principle of the electoral
structure of a democracy.
If a single wealthy
person can spend as much money as 100,000 or 1,000,000 voters can spend to
support the election of their favored candidates, then there can be no
reasonable meaning for the bedrock democratic concept of “one man, one vote.”
We need to
demand that our state and national legislators take back control of reasonable
campaign finance regulations.
Sheldon Adelson
and immensely wealthy folks like him should not be able to buy the keys to the
ballot box.
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