Iowa: The Gray Lady Freaks Out
By Bradley A. Smith
Some years ago, back when McCain-Feingold was new, I noted that it had been sold much like a 19th-century patent medicine: “It’s good for what ails ya.” Think campaigns are too long? McCain-Feingold. Too negative? McCain-Feingold. Special interests too powerful? McCain-Feingold. Don’t like the candidates? McCain-Feingold. And so on.
Indeed, McCain-Feingold — with its limitations on spending money to advertise in the days close to an election, its restrictions on funds for party building, and its ridiculous requirement that candidates devote roughly 10 percent of each ad to explaining that “I approve this message” — like the Federal Election Campaign Act (“FECA”) that it amended, failed miserably to accomplish any of these goals. It’s odd that anyone ever thought it would; after all, generally speaking, attempting to limit political speech is not usually considered a healthy thing in a democracy.
Within just a few years, the Supreme Court and lower federal courts were rolling back not merely McCain-Feingold, but portions of FECA. Probably the two most important decisions were Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which held that corporations and unions could spend money independently on political speech; and SpeechNow.org v. Federal Election Commission, a D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals decision, not appealed by the FEC, that held that individuals and others could combine their funds to engage in independent speech. Although campaigns remain, in many ways, more heavily regulated than at any time in U.S. history prior to 1974, the results of the court-ordered deregulation since 2009 have been quite good: The elections of 2010 saw more competitive seats than any election within most Americans’ memory; the campaigns were also the most issue-oriented in a generation; turnout was up, and is expected to be up again this year; Americans are having the most serious debate about the course of the nation’s politics since the debate over civil rights 50 years ago (before FECA was passed, we might note).
