Saturday, February 11, 2012

Super Pac

Super PAC, faster than the 24 hour news cycle, able to leap hostile MSM with a single bound. And just born this year. So this is what "campaign finance reform" has brought us to?
Obama and the dems blame it all on the Supremes and the Citizen's United case two years ago. Obama was so bummed out about Citizen's United that he bad mouthed the Supremes in a State of the Union speech with all nine Supremes sitting in the audience, in uniform. Which pissed them all off. Obama must have been really bummed out that day. It's considered stupid and hazardous to your health to go around antagonizing people at the top of the food chain.
Citizen's United was about a small citizen's group with an axe to grind, they made a hard hitting (not to say partisan) movie pushing their issue. And the Federal Election Commission forbade them from showing it. Claimed it was illegal electioneering. Citizen's United felt it was a plain issue of free speach, and they sued. Took it to the Supreme Court and won. And the Supremes said free speech means anyone, citizens, companies, unions, churches, you name it, can spend as much as they like to support any candidate or any issue they like. First Amendment, free speech.
This blew 50 years of "campaign financing reform" out the window. "Campaign Finance Reform", darling of good government groups and liberals, means rules limiting the amount of money political candidates can raise. All of a sudden, the Supremes say that limits are unconstitutional.
This resulted in today's comical situation. Ordinary PAC's and candidates are still subject to all sorts of rules, like no contributions greater than $2500 (chickenfeed). But Super PACs can do anything they want, just so long as they are "independent" of any candidate. Which leads to the comedy routine where Romney says "By law, I have no control over my Super Pac, and there fore I cannot tell them to stop trashing Newt Gingrich."
Elections would be cleaner and less comical without the Super PACs. Just repeal all the "campaign finance reform" laws and replace them with a single simple law that merely requires candidates to report who gave them how much. We voters can figure it out from there.
All the money would flow to the candidates, who have a certain sense of decency, and would not do things like the Swiftboat campaign that did so much damage to John Kerry. Or all those negative ads on Newt. It would be better if the candidates were responsible for their campaign ads.

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