The Times profiles campaign finance lawyer Jim Bopp in this piece today. “If you cannot ban corporate spending on ads, how is it that you are allowed to ban corporate contributions to candidates?” asked Nathaniel Persily, a professor at Columbia Law School. “That is the next shoe to drop.”
Politifact.com takes apart Senator Schumer’s argument last Thursday: “”With a stroke of a pen, the (U.S. Supreme Court) decided to overrule the 100-year-old ban on corporate expenditures.” We asked Schumer’s staff about the 100-year-old comment, and they pointed us toward a 1907 law called the Tillman Act. They cited the dissenting opinion issued this week, […]
Ezra Klein discusses Citizens United in this post. At the base of this is a simple fact: The amount of money in political campaigns is peanuts compared with (1) the amount of money disbursed by the federal government and (2) the amount of money controlled by large industries.