The Supreme Court sided with Republican businessman Shaun McCutcheon in an April 2 ruling, declaring a portion of the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) unconstitutional, and further weakening the set of rules that govern how our country’s elections are financed and conducted.
It’s the latest development in an unsettling trend, which has seen the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts repeatedly equate money with speech. The Court has justified its decisions by reasoning that policies that limit political donations are policies that limit free speech.
McCutcheon v. The Federal Election Commission was the sixth campaign finance case the Supreme Court has heard under Roberts, and the sixth time the court has ruled in favor of deregulation.
The most significant of these cases was Citizens United v. The Federal Election Commission, a 2010 decision that removed limits on the amount of money corporations can spend on candidates or causes, and allowed beneficiaries of the money to receive it without disclosing the source.
Citizens United released a torrential $4.2 billion flood of “dark money”—so-called because the identity of the donor is obscured—into the 2012 election cycle, a record that is predicted to be broken in this year’s midterm elections.
The McCutcheon ruling struck down Section 441 of FECA, which had limited the “aggregate” campaign contributions, or the total amount of money wealthy individuals can spend on all federal candidates, parties and political action committees in a two-year election cycle. Under the court’s ruling, an individual can now spend up to $3.6 million each electoral cycle.
While the rising tide of corporate dark money will still dwarf the amount an individual can contribute each political cycle (a point that the conservative justices stresses in defense of their ruling), it would be a mistake to underestimate the impact of McCutcheon. For one thing, individuals with $3.6 million sitting around will now be able to exercise much more control over who gets elected.
But the really insidious effect is its long-term legal implication. In a piece directly following the ruling, Richard Hansen, a professor of law and political science at University of California, Irvine School of Law, wrote that the McCutcheon decision has subtly set a precedent for further challenges to FECA, in part by defining the word “corruption”—which of course FECA was created to prevent—in the narrowest sense of blatantly paying for specific political favors.
Why all of this matters
Latinos are the largest minority group in the United States, and the Latino demographic is relatively young, which means that its share of the electorate will continue to swell as the Latino youth reach voting age.
In a true democratic society, a greater share of the electorate should translate into greater influence over our nation’s decision making process. But, by equating money with speech the Supreme Court is privileging the voices of a few who can afford to sink millions into elections, over the voices of the many. This means that even as it continues to grow, the Latino population will likely remain marginalized and the issues that matter to Latinos will continue to be overlooked.
Fred Wertheimer, president of the public interest group Democracy 21, put it bluntly:
“With its Citizens United and McCutcheon decisions, the Supreme Court has turned our representative system of government into a sandbox for America’s billionaires and millionaires to play in. The court’s decisions have empowered a new class of American political oligarchs.”
The gutting of campaign finance regulation is itself embedded in a larger shift, one in which the government has morphed from a public institution beholden to its constituents, to something closer to a private entity that provides a service for clients that can afford it.
What you can do
Do not give up hope. If the populace descends into cynicism, then the monied interests will have indeed won. Voting is even more important now, not only in the practical sense of swaying the next election, but also in the symbolic sense—in demonstrating Latino’s strength of numbers.
No where in the constitution does it explicitly protect the right to lavish money on politicians, meaning there is no reason this trend can’t be reversed, but it’s going to be a fight.