[ QUOTE ]
That is not what it says and either:
-You know this and you are being facetious.
-You don't know this and you are relying on what someone told you
Any group (corporation, non-profit, etc) should be able to run ads and contribute to the political process at any time.
Any limit is a clear breach of Free Speech.
-Gryph
[/ QUOTE ]
Warning: *Thread Hijack* - please PM me or start a new thread if you want to debate the following:
Just as an aside -- but the whole campaign finance debate, and subsequently, the deabte over the BCRA/
McConnell vs FEC demonstrates just how much conservatives, and conservative legal scholars, are perfectly A-OK with judicial activism; that is, their own brand of judicial activism.
Keep in mind, of course, the near-constant, and oh-so-righteous indignation that we're constantly subjected to from the right, demanding that we quit pulling all these
interpretations out of our ass and start following the text in the Constitution -- in other words, can't we all just be a little more like our dear friend Justice Scalia?
Scalia from his McConnell commentary, claiming that we ought to provide corporations with First Amendment protections:
<font color="blue">"The last proposition that might explain at least some of today's casual abridgment of free-speech rights is this: that the particular form of association known as a corporation does not enjoy full First Amendment protection.
Of course the text of the First Amendment does not limit its application in this fashion, even though "by the end of the eighteenth century the corporation was a familiar figure in American economic life." C. Cooke, Corporation, Trust and Company 92 (1951).
Nor is there any basis in reason why First Amendment rights should not attach to corporate associations."</font>
Isn't this the kind of [censored] that's anathema to conservatives (and by that I mean, isn't this the kind of [censored] that conservatives claim, when convenient, is anathema to them)? If we replaced 'Scalia' with 'Ginsberg' or 'Stevens', I can just hear the chorus of conservative voices shouting from the rooftops “Ha! There go the liberals, inventing protections again! Ignoring the text of the Constitution, only to supplant it with what they think
ought to be there – which they came to by ‘reason’!?!?!? Ha Ha, Ho Ho – oh those silly liberals, making up rights and protections again!”
Just thought I’d bring this up, yet again – so that when we hear the typical nonsense from the right about how conservatives “follow the letter of the law” and liberals “make stuff up”, we’re reminded of this, and how, in truth, the study of jurisprudence is a study of
good and
bad interpretations, not “following the Constitution” vs. “making [censored] up”...and that of course, conservative do just as much interpreting as liberals do.
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Just to bring this around to etgrphyon’s post, to claim that “money” = “speech” (a claim I’m not necessarily opposed to) – or to make the claim that prohibiting political contributions equals a "clear breach" of the First Amendment, we have to do some ‘interpreting’, some ‘reasoning’, and some ‘looking beyond the text available’...something (as I’ve described above) that conservatives
usually bristle at.
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Lastly (an in regard to the rest of the thread), I don't think it's particularly convenient, necessary, or useful to describe libertarians as either conservative or liberal; but I’ve found (and this is just my personal experience, and this certainly constitutes an unfair jab at some for whom this description does not fit) – but I’ve found that:
“Libertarian” usually = “Closet Republican, who enjoys whining about the excesses of liberals, but when called upon to defend Republican excesses (be they budgetary excesses, or excesses of state authority), enjoys washing their hands of the matter and saying ‘don’t blame me, I’m a libertarian.’ ”
Given how little actual support libertarian parties/candidates receive, but how many ‘self-described’ libertarians there are, I assume many libertarians just vote Republican but are too (insert appropriate adjective here) to admit it.