Rich people have a lot of money.
Rich people spend a lot of money on things that they like or that they think will make them more money.
Sometimes the things that rich people like or think will make them more money are politicians or political issues, and it logically follows that they spend large sums of money on those things. The same is generally true of companies and other interest groups, which have a vested interest in seeing political and legislative changes that they believe will benefit them come to fruition.
Of course, the desire to see changes in government that will be personally beneficial is hardly limited to rich people, companies and interest groups. Every single one of us, even the most politically apathetic, has at least one thing about the government that they’d like to see changed, but the difference lies in how much we can actually do to put those changes into effect.
Sure, anyone can start a petition or write a letter to their congressman, but few of us can drop the $20 million spent by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac over the last 25 years on campaign contributions, let alone the $38 million by the American Federation of Teachers, the $58 million by AT&T Inc or the whopping $120 million by ActBlue (“the online clearinghouse for Democratic action,” according to their website) in the same time span.
This discrepancy in financial power to influence politics has lead Sen. Tom Udall, D-New Mexico, to introduce a constitutional amendment to reform campaign finance. If passed, it would give Congress and the states the power to “regulate and set reasonable limits on the raising and spending of money by candidates and others to influence elections … by prohibiting such entities from spending money to influence elections.”
While I certainly agree that campaign finance and spending is out of control, I don’t believe an amendment this broad is the proper solution. The language of the amendment gives both the State and Federal governments the power to regulate any and all speech that could possibly “influence elections,” including everything from an international advertising campaign to a 7-year-olds’ report on their favorite politician. (They spent money on the paper it was written on and the pencil it was written with, after all.)
While those examples are a bit extreme, any piece of political writing or other form of advocacy by a single-issue organization, journalist or even blogger absolutely is included in this amendment (including this very article).
This amendment, as written, would give government the power to censor just about any speech it wishes.
Of course, government would never abuse its authority to silence or, at the very least, make communication more difficult for those with opposing views.
They would never, say, use the IRS to target Tea Party organizations and then hide the evidence, going so far as destroying hard drives to keep the truth from being found?
They wouldn’t arrest dozens of reporters without any charges, impeding the coverage of a police shooting of an unarmed African American youth that results in some of the largest race riots since the 1960s, would they?
Surely you don’t think that they’d force a man who revealed a secret — and questionably Constitutional at best — government program to monitor all of our private communication into exile?
While all of those scenarios are purely theoretical, they’d certainly be strong counterarguments to sacrificing our rights to freedom of speech and press on the alter of campaign reform, if they were true.