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 isnāt that simple?
Letās say Tesla donates $250 million to the republican party and you donāt 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 canāt do is simultaneously protect the speech by corporate entities from regulation and say they donāt have First Amendment rights to free speech. If they arenāt covered by the First Amendment because theyāre not natural persons, then none of their speech is protected. Whether itās 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 donāt like), all of it is outside the bounds of First Amendment protection.
(Itās 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, āI think you should vote for Candidate A instead of Candidate Bā is completely protected by the 1A. Plus, content-based restrictions are generally anathema under the 1A - so you generally canāt tell a corporation like 350.org or Toyota that theyāre 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 thatās a separate thing?
If what youāre talking about is taking cash and handing it to politicians, then thereās 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. Itās a āper candidateā thing. I donāt know what the number should be, $10,000, $20,000. Some number thatās meaningful but does not overly-corrupt the process.
This is about trying to stem the influence of MONEY, not silencing everyone I donāt agree with.
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But thatās 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 donāt 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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