Supreme Court Overrules Montana

Just recently, the Supreme Court of the United States had ruled that the Citizens United case, which allowed for infinite campaign spending by corporate interests, overrules state laws and they will not revisit said case any time soon. This effectively nullifies a century-old part of the Montana constitution meant to prevent undisclosed campaign finance from corporate interests.

I am rather livid about hearing about this, because it was relating to a law that had existed long before the Citizens United case. Furthermore, it just seemed to be selective state's rights in this regard, because it seems that through current statutes and rulings, social issues such as immigration and anti-discrimination laws are left to the states yet the federal government overrides the State at this? Sometimes I feel that the priorities are screwed...

edited 25th Jun '12 4:45:42 PM by EarlOfSandvich

It's the Court's job to overrule laws (including state laws) that are in conflict with the Constitution. It usually isn't it's job to tell other branches of the federal government what to do. So if you agree that corporations do share 1st amendment free speech rights, then this case is a logical extension of Citizens United. If not, then that's what you should be worried about.

Well I think that people more expected that the Montana law would require the Supreme Court to revisit the Citizens United decision and go, well there IS empirical evidence that it has negative effects on voting patterns. Except instead, the Supreme Court decided that the state law could be trumped.

It's a little ridiculous that it's okay to require people to carry their papers but it's not okay to limit organised political spending by third parties.

I'm not the biggest fan of Citizens United and revisiting it as Breyer suggested would have made me happy. (Also, for the record, I don't know a good way of solving the problem.) But I definitely don't see the connection between these two issues.

It's the Supremacy Clause in action guys.

While I support what Montana wants, I really do, the Supremacy Clause states that state law cannot conflict or override federal law. Ergo if federal law says that corporations can donate to political campaigns, a state cannot infringe on that, because federal law is considered legally supreme.

I mean, I understand what's going on here, after the Supreme Court made the idiotic ruling, they have to follow it and state laws are trumped. Still, I just want the Supreme Court to revisit the ruling.

And as for solutions to the issue of organisation donations: ban it! Unions and corporations take other people's money and then use it for their own political ends. How is that free speech? You're taking free speech away from people by allowing non-government entities to seize their assets for political uses against their will. If that person wanted to support one party or another they can individually donate, or they can join in a group to all agree to individually donate to a particular candidate. It's not the organisation I care about, it's the source of the money.

Breadloaf, I completely agree with you, but legally this shouldn't have even needed the Supreme Court. It's a clear conflict of Federal Law, and thus trumped by default. You would have to either get rid of the Supremacy Clause, which is not happening in our lifetime, or you would have to repeal every law involving corporate/union/etc political donations, which also isn't going to happen.

The Supreme Court was just to make it less of an argument about the subject imo, because even without them Montana is(legally, not morally) wrong in making that law.

Actually Barkey, it was overruled because it violates the 1st amendment's free speech right. So no amount of repealing federal law would do the trick.

Other people's money? Um...maybe unions if you think that union contracts are forcible (some people do). Corporations? That's their money to spend how they want. Who are they taking it from?

Another way to think of it is this: If I said, "Hey, I think the government should repeal all abortion restrictions" and you thought it was a good idea, would you think the two of us had any power to do anything about it on our own? I doubt it. We're just two voters in a massive ocean. Our only recourse is to organize and lobby. That's free speech. We get a group together to exert political (voting) and financial (donations) pressure to try to get our laws put into place. How else does a representative democracy work? Corporations already have the organization part down, so the people who own them lobby. There is significant corruption in the process, but that's true about the entire government, but we don't outlaw it.

Corporate spending is a tax on the workers within it and unless everyone inside agrees, it's taking their money. A corporation can't spend 100 million dollars without taking it out of employee salaries/benefits or out of the hands of shareholders (if you just plain don't care about the employees). That's not their money. No public corporation can spend its money based on the "owners" and private corporations/businesses are taking it from their workers. That's just crap.

Union dues are the same thing. Some policies of the union, they have to grudgingly accept and some they accept fully, but when it goes into the line of political donations that's crossing the line.

Everyone gets to donate up to $1000 (I think that was the previous limit). So if an organisation includes 1000 people, you can donate 1000 * $1000 dollars. That's how it should work.

edited 26th Jun '12 5:04:56 PM by breadloaf

What I'm saying is that it didn't need to go to the Supreme Court to establish that precedent in the first place, because it was clearly not legal to begin with. The Supreme Court is there for cases that involve ambiguity, this issue did not have such a quality.

I agree. I also agree that the hope was for the Supreme Court to word the ruling in such a way that it makes it easier to revisit the Criticizes United ruling.

Ether that, or the people arguing it wanted to make it harder to revisit that ruling... but that is an extremely cynical way of looking at it and I am going to not think about it too hard.

Gotcha.

No, it isn't. The workers agree to work for a certain amount of money. If the corporation has extra after meeting payroll, that extra does not belong to the employees. It belongs to the corporation which can do any number of things with it.

You say that like the shareholders have no say. The shareholders put their power into the hands of the board of directors who decide whether to pour money into dividends to the shareholders, or to invest it somewhere else. Somewhere like lobbying. If the lobbying makes more money for the shareholders over a longer period of time, only idiotic shareholders would want less dividends immediately. Still, if that's what they want, they can vote out directors who push for a lobbying investment, or vote with their checkbook and sell their stock.

Again, why is that? When management decides pay (for non-salaried employees) or negotiate contracts (for salaried employees) they are negotiating on behalf of the shareholders. The shareholders want a maximum gain for the amount of money they are paying an employee. So it makes sense to give raises to retain excellent employees who are working past initial capacities, or cost-of-living pay increases to retain satisfactory employees to avoid retraining costs. It does not make sense to say that pouring lobbying investment money back into the employee's salaries is good for the shareholders unless that would net such a gain in productivity to offset the opportunity cost of the lost lobbying investment.

I don't know enough about how unions work to comment on this.

This is an interesting idea. But wouldn't that allow a person to count more than once (or penalize people who belonged to any organization)? For instance, if a corporation for which I'm an employee donates the maximum amount based on its population, and I also belonged to a group lobbying against abortion, wouldn't that organization also get to count me? Or would it be that if I belonged to such a corporation, I wouldn't be able to donate to my pet political cause myself?

edited 26th Jun '12 5:59:47 PM by Vericrat

The total organisation limit isn't a limit per organisation. The limit is based on the individual. The organisation compels you to use your personal donation limit in cooperation with others in the same organisation to create a united front upon which you create your political engagement. So, an organisation with 1000 people persuades all of its members to use their max donation limit. People may only use half here and half at another organisation. Up to the individual (ie. no coercion possible and you can stay anonymous to your peers, just like a secret ballot)

For a corporation, I think that you divorce way too much of the worker and the organisation for which he works for. Secondly, while the US doesn't have proportional representation, I think that on the individual level people shouldn't have to deal with "winner takes all my money" with respect to political donations. Shareholders can vote, but 51% means 100% of the money is decided by a select few people. I don't think that makes sense.

In terms of workers "agreeing upon a wage", it's more than that. They're agreeing to be part of an organisation and that means a lot. Are individuals allowed to speak however they wish when part of that organisation? No they're expected to be a representative of that company, especially within a publicly traded corporation, they CANNOT speak of the corporation without being considered a part of it. Wages/benefits paid are compensation for the time spent in the labour they provide for the corporation, but you cannot divorce the idea that they are part of the organisation, are a member of it and have an active say in what the total organisation says/does simply because they are paid money. They are treated as part of the organisation in all other ways, let them also be treated as such when it comes to political donations.

edited 26th Jun '12 6:15:30 PM by breadloaf

Um, I'm pretty sure employees can say whatever they want about the company they work for so long as they're not on the clock.

Not at publicly trade ones, for private businesses they can and my argument lies solely on the whole donation limit issue with those.

edited 26th Jun '12 6:33:21 PM by breadloaf

That was exactly what I was thinking, I just really didn't want to say it. Glad I'm not the only cynical bastard.

Could you clarify what you believe the difference between a publicly traded company and a private business is?

Because, by my understanding, they can be the same thing... Kroger, for instance, is a private business as well as publicly traded. And any employee working for Kroger is allowed to decry any part of what the business does(so long as the employee isn't on the clock).

Publicly traded necessarily means it's not a privately owned corporation. Someone can have controlling shares in a publicly traded corporation though, if that's what you mean.

When you work for a publicly traded corporation, all comments you make reflect on the corporation no matter whether you are on the clock or not. [I originally said that's the law but... that's only true in certain circumstances, however corporations can still and have in the past fired people for comments off the clock and there's no labour law saying that they can't, quite the opposite really]. So corporations can fire you for "misrepresentation" if they wanted to do so (for instance, the RIM executives who made fools of themselves on an Air Canada flight by getting drunk were fired over gross misconduct despite not being on the clock because they gave the company a bad image).

That sort of statement implies you are a member of the organisation. Additionally, you don't get to spend corporate money "however you feel like". It's actually illegal to spew corporate banked money in frivolous luxuries. If we're going to say that you can't buy your own private jet with corporate money, why would it be such a big extension to also say, you may not also spend the corporate money on a political party of your own personal choosing?

Corporations usually get around donation decisions like this by having employees decide on where to donate money. Large corporations like Google would ask employees "What NG Os would you like to fund this year?" and do a survey and donate money in that fashion. No legal problems there.

But if the Google CEO took out a billion dollars from the corporate bank account and put it toward an NGO he liked (let's say an NGO called "Import Lots of Foreign Porn!"), that's not his decision to make. Much like he can't go ahead and buy his own private jet with Google money, he can't go donating it away. You can argue along the route of "Shareholders should like a corporation to donate to politicians who make policies in their corporation's favour" but the CEO has to make that argument. You cannot implicitly assume that. There was no such pitch made to shareholders.

edited 26th Jun '12 8:43:23 PM by breadloaf

I'm fairly certain I've read some news articles about people who were fired for complaining about things on social networks.

Just thought I'd throw that out there.

edited 26th Jun '12 8:35:53 PM by Matues

Well I'll give you an example about that. Maple Leaf foods screwed up and got a dozen people killed (and thousands harmed, many permanently) over listerosis poisoning in their food products at a meat plant.

An internal employee off the clock anonymously blamed the corporation for its lax inspections. Corporation found out who it was. Bam fired.

Think labour laws protect him? In fact, labour laws backed up the company's decision to do so.

edited 26th Jun '12 8:45:33 PM by breadloaf

The other thing is that even if they can't fire you for Cleansing Dissent Reason X, they can and will fire you for Incidental Dubious Bullshit Reason Y with the clear off-record understanding that it was actually for X.

edited 26th Jun '12 9:05:18 PM by Pykrete

You can say whatever you want. But they can also fire you for any reason they want (subject to various labor laws). If they think employing you is bad for their company, why wouldn't they want to fire you? You don't have a right to work at their company. Conversely though, they aren't obligated to fire you. It's at their discretion.

Companies are like people. They don't like it when you badmouth them behind their backs. If they catch you doing it, they probably won't want to hang out with you any more. That doesn't make it illegal to badmouth them though, and any punishment you receive is a matter between private individuals.

...subject to various labor laws.

@Raven: Yep. you can say what you want. But the employer can fire you for it, cite a different reason, and unless you can prove it, Oops, Right to work laws.

Well tying it back to the organised donations issue, my point was that you join the organisation and you are compensated with a wage. If we're going to accept corporations into our society we can't be blind and oblivious to the effect and their method of operation. If a corporation spends its money in one place, it has to take it out in another place to make up for the cost. So it makes literally no sense to say "a corporation donating money doesn't affect wages", of course it does. And additionally, you can only work for corporations, which means they have market power over wages. A worker is a single person. Corporations are giant entities. A million different decision makers is very different from the small collection of corporate decision makers and so we can't just go "Oh workers just accept a wage and then thereafter need to have to accept everything else".

It's just wilful ignorance of what's happening for the sake of some ideology about how the constitution must be interpreted, and it's nearly religious the way people are reacting.

No, what you're talking about is idealism. What we're talking about is cynicism. This is quite simply the effect of unchecked capitalism. No one's saying it's good, this is just how it is. You'd have to change a lot more than this one ruling to change society to the way you think it should be.

And the money's coming from the bonuses of the top executives. If they weren't donating this money, do you seriously think they'd raise wages rather than give themselves bonuses? The wages are already as low as it's possible for them to be.

edited 26th Jun '12 10:09:39 PM by Clarste