Even today, the Supreme Court can’t be counted on to provide sound legal reasoning.
Supreme Court strikes Arizona’s ‘matching funds’ for publicly financed candidates
The Supreme Court on Monday struck down part of Arizona’s public campaign finance law, the latest in a series of its rulings holding that the right of political speech trumps government efforts to restrain the power of money in elections.
The court rejected Arizona’s system of providing additional funding to publicly funded candidates when they face big-spending opponents or opposition groups. The system has been used in every statewide and legislative election since voters approved it in 1998, after a rash of political scandals in theArizona capitol.
But the court, in a 5 to 4 ruling, said the law impermissibly forces privately funded candidates and independent political organizations to either restrain their spending or risk triggering matching funds to their publicly financed opponents.
“The First Amendment embodies our choice as a nation that, when it comes to such speech, the guiding principle is freedom — the ‘unfettered interchange of ideas’ — not whatever the state may view as fair,” wrote Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.
Monica Youn, who heads the money in politics project at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice, said the court appears to be creating “a new set of rights” that she characterized as “the right to speak without response” and the “right to preserve monetary advantage.”
New Justice Elena Kagan, reading her dissent from the bench for the first time, seemed to emerge as a spokeswoman for the minority, saying that states have an interest in combatting “the stranglehold of special interests on elected officials.”
“The First Amendment’s core purpose is to foster a healthy, vibrant political system full of robust discussion and debate,” Kagan said. “Nothing in Arizona’s anti-corruption statute, the Arizona Citizens Clean Elections Act, violates this constitutional protection.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/.../AG92xenH_story.html
In other words, if I am a privately-financed candidate, bringing deep corporate pockets to the contest, you as a publicly-financed candidate cannot be expected to match my firepower, nor should you. We must go back to the old corrupt system where the most money buys the lawmaker.