Not one of those examples addresses taking cash, and handing it to politicians.
Why is this so hard to understand?
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Perhaps because it isnât that simple?
Letâs say Tesla donates $250 million to the republican party and you donât like that so you ban it. Fine, Tesla simply gives it to Musk and he then donates it to the Rep party. In the meantime, you have eliminated the ability for any non-profit to gather member resources to influence policy.
But wait, what if you want to carve out an exception for non-profits! Great! Now, all those same corps simply create their own non-profit to accomplish the same thing - but now with the benefit of a tax deduction.
Besides, when this was last done (France), it had some unintended consequences (from two weeks ago):
We show that candidates who lost more corporate donations as a result of the ban indeed tended to de-emphasize their local presence in their manifestos.
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As losing corporate donations pushed these candidates away from local campaigning, it also led them to adopt a more extreme rhetoric (i.e., left-wing candidates shifted further to the left in their discourse, by using words predominantly used by left-wing parties more often, while right-wing candidates shifted further to the right by using more often words such as immigration, deportation, decadence, patriot etc.).
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This funding constraint was particularly binding for candidates from non-mainstream parties, whose funding opportunities were limited, and who responded by shifting their discourse to secure the support and donations from more extreme voters. These candidates may also have felt freer to run a more polarized campaign, closer to their own ideological preferences, when they were forced to rely on personal funds rather than contributions from firms.
You can pass laws that prohibit bribery. We have those already.
What you canât do is simultaneously protect the speech by corporate entities from regulation and say they donât have First Amendment rights to free speech. If they arenât covered by the First Amendment because theyâre not natural persons, then none of their speech is protected. Whether itâs the speech they engage in as part of their business (NBC/Universal produces Jimmy Kimmel) or speech to affect political outcomes (NBC/Universal lobbies to avoid legislation they donât like), all of it is outside the bounds of First Amendment protection.
(Itâs also worth noting that many of the corporations that are intended to be regulated by these provisions are not-for-profit corporations, like Citizens United - they were formed not to make money for their shareholders, but to engage in public advocacy.)
If instead you acknowledge that corporations are protected by the First Amendment, but you want to restrict some of their speech, then you have a different problem. Because speech directed at politics and public policy is the most protected speech under the First Amendment. Being able to say, âI think you should vote for Candidate A instead of Candidate Bâ is completely protected by the 1A. Plus, content-based restrictions are generally anathema under the 1A - so you generally canât tell a corporation like 350.org or Toyota that theyâre allowed to engage in some kinds of speech (advocating for climate change protection or promoting the new Corolla) and not others (advocating for a specific candidate) based on the message of the speech.
Because thatâs a separate thing?
If what youâre talking about is taking cash and handing it to politicians, then thereâs no Constitutional obstacle to that. Limits on actually donating cash to a politician directly are still very much in place.
Citizens United involved restrictions on what corporations could say with their own money. Not about limits on corporations giving money to politicians.
Oh, I support limits on what an individual can give, also. Itâs a âper candidateâ thing. I donât know what the number should be, $10,000, $20,000. Some number thatâs meaningful but does not overly-corrupt the process.
This is about trying to stem the influence of MONEY, not silencing everyone I donât agree with.
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But thatâs the heart of the dilemma. If people/corporations are using their own money to buy their own ads, the only way to stem the influence of money is to silence them (to whatever extent) by forbidding them from using their own money to promote a viewpoint on the election. Any interpretative framework of the 1A that allows government to silence that speech in an election is going to end up allowing the government to silence almost any speech they want to.
Countries like Finland and Israel donât put up with bought elections. Locking out money and or tv time. Strict laws on newspaper stories etc.
We keep eating crap.
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https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/wealth-tax-fever-is-spreading-to-less-wealthy-states-f3f55e00
Wealth-Tax Fever Is Spreading to Less-Wealthy States
Small-market Maine becomes latest state to try to raise revenue by hiking income taxes on its highest-earning residents
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani won his election on a platform to tax the rich. And hikes on top earners are a priority for some Democrats and progressive groups as they head to elections this fall in Rhode Island and Colorado.
Wealthy Mainers include high earners in financial and legal services, manufacturing and timber heirs, and well-heeled elderly residents who retire in the state, local economists and entrepreneurs say. Maine experienced an uptick of new residents during the pandemic, partly because of the rise of remote work. A survey of people who moved to the state from 2019 through 2023 found they had household incomes well above the state median, according to the stateâs Department of Economic & Community Development.
Now the out of power political party is looking at the taxing wealthy to ease the tax burden of the middle class.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/19/business/democrats-tax-cuts-affordability.html?unlocked_article_code=1.cFA.TfxH.J6rqO1RRkVKj&smid=url-share
Are Democrats Becoming a Party of Tax Cuts?
Typically, a bill like the one Senator Chris Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat, introduced last month would not make much of a splash.
It was, after all, a tax proposal that is not going anywhere while President Trump remains in office, the type of idea that is often only greeted by self-congratulatory news releases. But Mr. Van Hollenâs legislation went viral, at least by the perhaps modest standards of Washington tax developments.
The reason for the attention, ire and, admittedly, articles like this one was that Mr. Van Hollen was proposing a broad tax cut. His bill would exempt many working-class Americans from paying any federal income tax, while cutting taxes for individuals making up to $80,500 and married couples earning up to $161,000. Mr. Van Hollen would cover the $1.6 trillion cost of these cuts by raising taxes on people making more than $1 million a year.
And heâs not alone: Other Democrats â including Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey and candidates in races across the country â have put forward their own plans for wide-ranging tax cuts.
Many Democrats are still stung by their loss in 2024, when President Bidenâs economic agenda did little to win over voters. Much of that agenda was focused on rebuilding infrastructure and building new factories, supply-side changes that did not have immediate, broad-based effects.
Mr. Van Hollenâs proposal is an attempt to come up with a more tactile, fast-acting policy program that could speak to votersâ concerns about affordability by returning money to them over the course of a single tax season.
Sens. Cory Booker, D-N.J., and Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., recently rolled out sweeping tax cut plans. Booker seeks to create a federal tax exemption for up to $75,000 in income for married couples. Van Hollen wants to set that figure at $92,000. Both have been floated as potential 2028 presidential candidates.
The trend has sparked a âwonk revoltâ uniting policy experts from the center to the left against the new trend, said Zach Moller, senior director of economic policy at the moderate Democratic group Third Way.
âThereâs only so much revenue you can get out of corporations and billionaires and the 1%,â Moller said. âItâs highly unlikely Democrats are going to get enough revenue from that group to do everything they want to do, whether itâs child care, paid leave, furthering the child tax credit, Medicare expansion.â
We need an industrialization plan, not just tax cuts.
What if we lived in a world of rainbows and unicorns? Why canât we limit the influence of money AND protect speech. For example, we could require public funding of elections, get rid of PACs and Super PACs, and protect speech. These things arenât mutually exclusive. In my mind, corporations and shadow money being donated to political candidates invites a quid pro quo. This is what needs to be addressed.
Nothing should stop corporation XYZ from purchasing ads to promote their viewpoint, or who they support. They could contract with an ad agency, develop a compelling message, and deliver it to the public. Their ad should include information regarding whoâs funding it. Grassroots campaign efforts could be funded by corporations too. Instead of having someone from The America PAC knocking on your door, you may be visited by someone from Teslaâs campaign arm, or Peter Thielâs Anti-Christ Warriors.
This doesnât restrict corporations, but makes their influence more transparent. Informing voters is never a bad thing.
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Ah - but they are mutually exclusive. How do you âget rid ofâ PACs and Super PACâs while protecting speech? Thatâs the rub.
These are just corporations that are created and operated in order to promote political positions - including positions about which candidates they believe voters should choose in an election. Thereâs no simple way to prohibit them from doing that without removing the protections that apply to corporate speakers more generally.
Which causes problems, as weâve discussed on the thread. Many speakers that we want to have protected First Amendment speech are corporations: the NAACP, Random House publishing, NBC/Universal, the Sierra Club. Some of them have the exact same type of âquid pro quoâ relationship with politicians that we deride in PACs. The Sierra Club and Sunrise Movement go out and engage in political speech to try to influence elected officials (and elections) so that they can get the government to do more of what they want, which is to protect the environment.
Itâs easy to pass laws that would take money out of politics. Whatâs really hard to do is to come up with laws that do that which donât require a reading of the First Amendment that also lets the government ban books. Again, thatâs arguably the point where the Solicitor Generalâs office lost the Citizens United case: when they couldnât articulate a limiting principle that would allow the government to prohibit the Hillary Clinton movie but would not allow the government to similarly prohibit a Hillary Clinton book.
He explained it further down. They cannot contribute to a PAC an anonymize their money, but they can advertise or undertake other actions directly, so long as that is clearly disclosed every time.
ââŠand I approved this messageâ, for an example already in use.
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Such would likely become a way to prohibit any third party from ever being successful - much like the debates often set a polling threshold to keep people off the stage. The party in control would forever be able to change the rules on who qualifies for public funding.
Such a restriction probably works a lot better in a Parliamentary government where there are already many parties.
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But how would you apply that to a group like, say, the Sierra Club? Or the NAACP? Could the federal government prohibit wealthy individuals from donating to those groups, because the federal government disapproves of the speech they engage in? Or a movie or television show production company, where (like a PAC) you often have special purpose corporate entities that get formed for the purpose of making a single production?
You would have to cast a wider net. Any money going to any political campaign is a bribe, and therefore illegal.
The proposal in another post was publicly funded campaigns, so one could do that and still not deprive candidates of resource for campaigns.
This isnât about donations. Donations to a campaign can be regulated as tightly as you want. This is about the degree to which the government can (or cannot) indirectly regulate the speech that corporations themselves engage in by prohibiting them from spending any funds on such speech.
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That topic was brought up as well (contributing to PACs, which are -in effect- contributing to campaigns). Itâs been a few years, but I remember seeing a story about how campaigns were getting around rules about working with PACs directly. The story featured McConnell, and his people conveniently produced video of the Senator doing pointless things (like looking up from his desk, grinning) that could then be used by anyone (including PACs). Needless to say, the PACs would then incorporate that in their ads, but McConnell didnât directly work with them, so technically not illegal under that statute they were trying to get around.
I do see your point about NAACP or Sierra Club. But the fact remains that corporations are not natural persons, and therefore not protected (nor even mentioned) in the Constitution. We could probably approach it like churches. Churches -supposedly- are not allowed to advocate for political candidates, or they lose their tax-exempt status. So, perhaps, the NAACP can outline their positions on matters without endorsing a candidate or measure. If they fail that, they lose their exempt status. And then we add that for-profit entities contribute to any political dialogue.
The Constitution also doesnât mention natural persons, or any distinction between natural persons and other types of persons. You open up a huge can of worms if you want to argue that corporations arenât âpersonsâ within the meaning of the Constitution - no right to trial, no right to free speech, no protection against their property being confiscated. You think the Trump administration has a big hammer by using their corporate regulatory power to try to keep the Jimmy Kimmel show or Harvard University in line? Just give them the power to seize all their assets and deny them even the ability to go to court to challenge it, and see what happens.
I mean, sure. If you want to prohibit endorsements by tax exempt organizations across the board (the NAACP, all the unions, Sunrise Movement, Justice Democrats, what have you) that way you can do that. But thatâs going to radically change the free speech environment we have today.
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But it really isnât about what I want, is it. Itâs about what the Constitution says. I would argue that it could really use some updating, but I fear in todayâs environment that will make things worse, not better.
I think the context (to the extent that Iâm familiar with it) clearly shows the Constitution was about actual persons. Even more specifically, white male persons (though some amendments have updated that somewhat). And I think it could be argued successfully that freedom of speech and freedom of the press are mentioned separately because one is actual persons, and the other is a news-reporting entity that might not be a person. Otherwise, why separate them? Just say âfreedom of speechâ, and that implies all persons including the press (made up of people) and the East India Company (also made up of people). But they did separate them. Given that the Constitution was very terse, I donât believe they would have put in extra words for no reason.
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PACs have only been around since the 1940s, Super PACS since Citizens. We had free speech before, weâll continue to have it if we take away the dark money.
By suggesting that limiting political expenditures is limiting speech, Citizens reaffirmed that money is speech. Itâs all about the money.
Let Sierra Club and the NAACP collect as many donations as they like. As a corporation, they should have their political contributions capped, just like individuals. Allow other for-profit corporations to contribute to political campaigns up to a cap.
I agree, that would be a sticky wicket. Then again, I always thought it was weird that corporations can be charged with crimes, when itâs individuals in those corporations who are responsible for committing the crimes. That said, if individuals can be restricted regarding how much money they can contribute to political campaigns, and if corporations have the same rights as people, it follows that corporations can be restricted as well.