On Monday the US Supreme Court ruled in favor of large anonymous campaign contributions in a 5-4 conservative majority ruling on Arizona Free Enterprise Club's Freedom Club PAC et al. v Bennett, Secretary of State of Arizona et al. This ruling essentially gives privately funded candidates greater speech over publicly funded candidates.
In 1998 the people of Arizona voted on and passed the Arizona Clean Elections Act providing candidates who opted out of private campaign financing a public grant. This Act would also provide additional grants if the candidate was outspent by a privately funded opponent to help keep a level playing field. This Act was put on the ballot in response to corrupt campaigns that had occurred previously in an attempt to make a cleaner system.
The US Supreme court has now ruled against this law, more specifically the "trigger" mechanism of the law that allows for additional grants to help keep the candidates financially even. The court is arguing that these additional grants infringed on the speech of private donors. I don't think that anybody was surprised by this ruling as the same conservative judges that brought us the Citizen's United ruling arguing that corporations were citizens and could give unlimited contributions to campaigns. We saw the effects of that ruling in this most recent election where not only can corporations, groups, and even other countries donate to political campaigns they can do so secretly through 3rd party groups (Super PAC is a term you'll hear a lot of come 2012).
Obviously the Arizona Clean Elections Act in no way, shape, or form infringes upon the speech of private donors. Nothing in the law restricts how much a privately funded candidate can raise, it just allows for a publicly funded candidate have a similar level of funds. It doesn't even provide for the publicly funded candidate to receive equivalent funding as there are restrictions as to what percentage of the public campaign finance pool can be used during an election cycle. The Act was intended to provide incentive for candidates to forgo private funds, which can be secret and unlimited, in hopes to make elections more transparent and fair.
The people of Arizona lost on Monday, they were victims of a corrupt system and were smart enough to recognize that and passed a law to help clean up elections and ensure their voices were heard instead of being drowned out by corporate dollars. But the conservative members of the Supreme Court overruled the people of Arizona and continued the work they started with Citizen's United to ensure that corporations and other interests were able to play a larger role in our elections and essentially allows them to buy and intimidate candidates and politicians. We know corporations are funding our elections, but maybe they're buying members of the Supreme Court as well, maybe we should ask Justice Thomas.
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