Court Will Rule on Campaign Spending Limits

Court Will Rule on Campaign Spending Limits

With the Big Nomination coming as soon as tomorrow, the court takes on a couple campaign finance cases: Vermont's spending limit (original story trapped behing the New York Times' new pay to play wall) and parts of McCain-Feingold.

Will the court revisit the 1976 Buckley v. Valeo ruling that spending money on campaigns is a form of free speech? McCain-Feingold is First Amendment problematic from the get-go and doesn't solve what it's supposed to solve.

The "campaign finance reform" that the politically uninitiated majority REALLY wants is a spending limit that gets the 30 second ads off TV. That's impossible under Buckley v. Valeo. I don't like spending limits unless they're accompanied by some sort of cheap or better yet free media access. As much as we praise the blogosphere, the average undecided voter still relies on the Big Three evening news and more improtantly the local newscast that follows. 30 seconds isn't my preferred format, but I think anything above five minutes would suffer from massive tune-out.

In either case, free TV time would negate the need for so much money, and could divert spending into more of the grass roots, door to door kind of stuff that we do around here.

Buckley v. Valeo isn't the most burning issue facing the Roberts court, but it's important.

I'm John Deeth and I approved this message.