Sir Xsarus wrote:
It's not that simple, but certainly very large doners have a huge influence on the people they support. You need the money to run a campaign, so you don't want to do things to alienate big money, and will be more likely to do things that they favour. Money has a clearly corrosive influence in politics.
Ok. But that's not "buying votes". That's more like buying a candidate. Which is a whole different ball o' yarn.
I think we're also conflating three different things (which are actually treated differently in the law as well). There's donating money directly to a candidate's campaign fund, spending your own money directly in support of a candidates campaign, and spending money in support/opposition of "issues" (positions on various things but without mentioning/endorsing/opposing specific candidates. The Citizen's United case was specifically about the last couple cases, which is pretty directly about free speech as it pertains to corporations spending on "soft money" (broadcasting a documentary unfavorable to a candidate specifically). The recent court ruling was about individual (not corporations) donating to multiple campaigns (so case number one). Each is a different issue and kinda has to be addressed on those individual aspects.
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So in answer to your question it doesn't cease to be speech, but there are reasons why we would want to limit the ability of people with more resources to have a larger voice. the ideal is that everyone has the same amount of speech, that a millionaires speech is not more valuable than mine. In order for everyone to be heard, you have to stop people from yelling.
Sure. Which is why we have things like limits on direct campaign donations. Again though, that's more to address the "buying a candidate" issue. Easing the total limit (which effectively limited the number of campaigns you could involve yourself in) doesn't hurt in this regard because each candidate is no more "bought" than any other. It's basically saying that the amount of influence you can have on any candidate is limited to X, but you can exert that amount on any number of individuals you want.
Relative "yelling" as you put it is more about how much someone's personal wealth gives them more "voice" in the political arena. And while I get what you're saying, that's also the area where I think the most concern can lie. Again, where do you decide to draw the line? It gets tricky. You also have to remember that PACs exist entirely because of previously created limits on spending. So are we really preventing wealth from granting "unfair" volume of speech, or are we really just making things worse by changing from a situation where each person's could spend their own money for their own speech to one where they are forced to channel their wealth through a smallish number of "approved" channels, and where the speech that results is actually controlled by an even smaller number of people?
10000 wealthy people each spending their own money on political speech certainly gives each of them more weight than someone who isn't wealthy, but you're going to end out with 10000 different messages and plenty of variation. The same 10000 wealth folks handing their money to 3 or 4 PACs means that their speech and that of anyone else joining them has to comply with that of the PAC itself. It means that instead of 10000 different loud voices, you have a small number of
really loud voices.
I'm not sure that's an improvement.
...It's the same yarn. 