When Money Talks: The High Price of Free Speech and the Selling of Democracy - Softcover

Cressman, Derek

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1626565767 ISBN 13: 9781626565760

Verlag: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

“When money talks, democracy walks. Read this book to learn how We the People can take back our elections from the billionaires.” —Robert B. Reich, former U.S. Secretary of Labor and author of The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It
 
Special-interest money is destroying our democratic process. And ever since the Citizens United decision threw out campaign spending limits abridgments of free speech, Americans want to know what they can do about it. Derek Cressman gives us the tools, both intellectual and tactical, to fight back.
 
There’s nothing inherently unconstitutional in limiting the amount of speech, Cressman insists. We do it all the time—for example, cities control when and where demonstrations can take place or how long people can speak at council meetings. Moreover, he argues that while you choose to patronize Fox News, MSNBC, the New York Times, or the Wall Street Journal, political advertising is forced upon you. It’s not really free speech at all—it’s paid speech. It’s not at all what the Founders had in mind when they wrote the First Amendment.
 
Cressman examines how courts have foiled attempts to limit campaign spending, details what a constitutional amendment limiting paid speech should say, and reveals an overlooked political tool that concerned citizens can use to help gain the amendment’s passage. Seven times before in our history we have approved constitutional amendments to overturn wrongheaded rulings by the Supreme Court—and there’s no reason we can’t do it again.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Derek Cressman has worked professionally to strengthen campaign finance laws since 1995 as director of U.S. PIRG’s Democracy Program and a national vice president with Common Cause. He ran for California secretary of state in June 2014. www.derekcressman.com


Thom Hartmann is a nationally and internationally syndicated talkshow host whose radio and TV shows are available in over a billion homes nationwide. He is the author of 24 books, most recently the bestselling The Crash of 2016.

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Chapter 1

Enough Is Enough
How and Why We Have Limited the Duration, Volume, and Location of Speech

I rise on behalf of the vast majority of the American people who believe money is not speech, corporations are not people, and government should not be for sale to the highest bidder. We demand that you overturn Citizens United.

—Kai Newkirk, addressing the Supreme Court, which promptly shut him up

The Supreme Court had never seen anything like it. On February 26, 2014, a young man in the audience stood up and had the temerity to speak his mind to all nine justices. The Court bailiffs promptly arrested Kai Newkirk—they silenced his speech so that other people could be heard. And they were right to do so.

The Supreme Court strictly regulates who is allowed to speak before the Court and how they must do it. It’s not enough to be a lawyer. An attorney must be recognized as a special member of the bar of the Supreme Court of the United States. Attorneys must be nominated by another member of the bar and confirmed by the Court itself before they can utter a single word. Regular citizens are forbidden to speak.

Kai Newkirk was breaking all the Court’s rules. He wasn’t a lawyer and he wasn’t representing anyone in the lawsuit before the Court. He was a visitor in the audience, which had been explicitly told it could not speak during the proceedings. Further, somebody videotaped Kai’s speech and put it on the Internet—the first such incident in the history of a secretive chamber that prohibits any video recording of its proceedings.

Although court bailiffs were right to enforce the rules limiting speech in the Supreme Court chambers, Kai was surely right to speak out against the tyranny of a court that refuses to limit the paid speech of billionaires while telling Kai and the rest of us to shut up. In the Citizens United case, and many others, the Supreme Court has mistakenly held that limiting the money people and organizations can spend to purchase speech violates the First Amendment. In fact, our everyday experiences demonstrate that limiting each person’s speech is necessary to ensure a full and free public debate. Let’s consider some examples of how and why this is done.

Why We Limit the Duration of Speech
Courts impose strict page limits on the briefs that lawyers submit prior to hearings. Just ask the multinational oil company BP (formerly British Petroleum). During litigation surrounding its unprecedented oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, the company submitted a brief that appeared to be within the thirty-five-page limit set by the court. However, district court judge Carl Barbier noticed that the company had slightly adjusted the spacing between lines to squeeze in the equivalent of six more pages than what was allowed. Judge Barbier warned that if BP continued such tactics, he would strike all future briefs from the company, saying “The Court should not have to waste its time policing such simple rules. … Counsel are expected to follow the Court’s orders both in letter and in spirit.”20 If courts can limit corporate speech defending itself in litigation, why can’t we limit corporate spending on elections that only indirectly affect corporate interests?

It is not just the city council in Richmond, California, or federal courts that limit how long a person can speak. We limit speech all the time. Turn on C-SPAN and you’ll notice members of Congress pay close attention to just how much time they have to speak on the floor. They’ll often ask the chairperson to allocate more time, or “yield back” the balance of their time to other members to speak. But if they exceed their time limit, the chairperson’s gavel comes down, limiting their speech so that others may be heard. Similarly, during a debate for any office, from president down to state legislator, there are strict rules limiting the amount of time each candidate has for opening remarks and to answer each question.

Nobody seriously believes that these limits on the duration of certain political speech violate the First Amendment, which says that Congress shall not abridge the people’s right to freedom of speech. In fact, these limits protect the First Amendment by ensuring that the people, and our representatives in Congress, can hear from opposing points of view and make informed decisions about self-government.

Why We Limit the Timing of Speech
My first summer job during college was going door-to-door on behalf of a grassroots campaign for an environmental organization. Police sometimes picked up canvassers on our team, telling them that door-to-door solicitation wasn’t allowed in a particular community. It turns out they were wrong. Although courts have upheld bans on door-to-door solicitation for commercial purposes (such as the famed Fuller Brush man of long ago who knocked on doors selling cleaning supplies), the Supreme Court has specifically rejected bans on door-to-door solicitation for political speech.21 Similarly, courts have upheld so-called “do not call” lists for commercial telemarketing even while allowing political campaigns to call voters uninvited. However, courts have upheld limits on the hours that you are allowed to knock on a person’s door or call him on the phone—in many cities this is banned after nine o’clock at night. That limit on speech is justified because it balances the listener’s right to privacy in his own home with your right to speak.

We also limit the timing of speech in public spaces. Just ask the activists of Occupy Wall Street. After holding signs and chanting “we … are … the 99 percent” for hours, the protesters decided to sleep in Zuccotti Park near Wall Street rather than heading home to the comfort of their beds. Other protesters joined them in solidarity in similar demonstrations across the country.

Months into the protests, police fell back on curfews as justification to storm the public parks and eject protesters using tear gas and sometimes violence. Thousands were jailed. In this way, police limited the duration of the protesters’ speech by acting against alleged violations of the timing of that speech (in the form of curfews). This approach perhaps would have been reasonable if there were other people who wanted to use those same public spaces to speak about other issues, or even to simply enjoy some silence. But in this case, it’s not clear that the protesters were preventing anyone else from speaking or disturbing the peace enough to lose their right to free speech, and the crackdowns were widely condemned.

How I Was Arrested for Speaking Too Much
In the summer of 2014, I joined Kai Newkirk and hundreds of others during the final day of a march on the California state capitol. Kai and others in the group 99Rise walked all the way from Los Angeles to Sacramento over thirty-seven days, enduring temperatures as high as 110 degrees in California’s Central Valley.

March organizers had acquired a permit to protest on the steps of the capitol. But we wanted to continue our protest for longer than the permit allowed—long enough so that legislators would hear us when they came to their offices the following morning.

At 10:30 that evening, police informed us that our permit to protest had “expired”—as if there is an expiration date in the First Amendment. When we didn’t leave, we were arrested, handcuffed, and taken to the county jail. The government had decided to limit the duration of our speech. It shut us up.

Had there been four other groups of people wanting to speak on the steps of the California state capitol at 10:30 that evening, then limiting our...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1626565767
• ISBN 13: 9781626565760
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 240
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Berrett-Koehler; https://www.dc.com/tv; ; 1333 Broadway Suite P-100; Oakland; CA; 94612; USA
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