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Chuck Ross

The U.S. Supreme Court Heard a Case on Wednesday, Sept. 9th, That Could Affect Millions and Millions of Dollars Spent on Networks and Local TV Stations. And It’s Very Possible the Decision Will go the Way That Will Allow This Spending to Happen

Sep 10, 2009

The case in question involves corporate and union funding of political ads. Here’s the long and short of it: right now, for all intents and purposes, corporations and unions cannot fund these ads. But that could change, and if it does, it could mean a windfall for TV stations and networks during political campaigns.

How much of a windfall? Well, according to the report below, "if Exxon Mobil had spent just one percent of its 2008 profits on political advertising in that year’s election, it would have outspent both Obama and McCain combined."

Now, that’s real money, as they say. And press reports of the oral arguments from Wednesday’s Supreme Court session indicates that the conservative majority on the court may very well overturn the current rules preventing the corporate and union funding of these ads.

To really understand this, here’s the transcript from a report that ran on Tuesday, Sept. 8th on a program entitled "Marketplace" from American Public Radio:

Show host Kai Ryssdal: The Supreme Court is going to hold a rare instant replay tomorrow. Instant at least in judicial time. The justices are going to re-hear a case from last spring, called Citizens United vs. The Federal Election Commission. As you can gather from the name of one of the parties to that case, and from the fact that we’re covering it on this program, it’s a case about money in politics. About whether companies can buy ads to support or to attack candidates in federal elections. Marketplace’s Steve Henn reports.
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STEVE HENN: The case the Supreme Court hears tomorrow could remake American elections. But when it began, it looked like a minor fight about a pay-per-view documentary called "Hillary: The Movie."

DICK MORRIS: Hillary is really the closest thing we have in America to a European Socialist.
Voice Over: If you thought you knew everything about Hillary Clinton, wait until you see the movie.

HENN: David Bossie is president of Citizens United, the nonprofit group that made the movie.

DAVID BOSSIE: We are a political group. We make political films. We make films that are timely.

HENN: And Citizens United accepts individual and corporate money to do it. Groups that accept individual contributions can air ads about candidates right up to election day. But corporate money changes that. And that’s why Bossie always runs into trouble with the Federal Election Commission, or FEC.

BOSSIE: We made this movie knowing we were headed to the Supreme Court.

HENN: Bossie planned to run his film during Hillary Clinton’s campaign. But officials at the FEC thought it was really a 90-minute attack ad. And because Bossie took a little corporate money to make the film, the FEC told him he couldn’t run it on pay-per-view or air ads for it on television without facing consequences.

BOSSIE: I would open myself up to five years in prison. That’s the penalty. It’s not like, oh, they slap you with a little fine. We are talking about criminalizing speech. Not just criminalizing it, but with a massive jail sentence.

HENN: So Bossie sued. Michael Toner is a former chair of the FEC. In this case, he filed a brief supporting Citizen’s United.

MICHAEL TONER: Congress didn’t intend to focus on pay-per-view programming and advertising of this nature.

HENN: Originally, that’s what this case was about: Can the FEC legally ban a pay-per-view film? But instead of deciding that issue, this spring the Supreme Court surprised everyone by asking for a new hearing addressing a different issue: Do corporations have a first amendment right to political speech? Michael Toner…

TONER: It’s a very unusual situation to have the court ordering rehearing in a case, and it usually only occurs when a number of justices are seriously contemplating overturning established precedent.

HENN: Toner believes campaign finance laws have been on a collision coarse with the first amendment for years. And this isn’t the first time the FEC has interfered with a documentary film.

CLIP FROM FAHRENHEIT 9/11: You had some airplanes authorized at the highest level of our government to pick up Osama bin Laden’s family members and transport them out of this country.

HENN: Back in the summer of 2004, the FEC began investigating Loinsgate and Michael Moore, asking questions about the promotion of Fahrenheit 9/11, which skewered President George W. Bush. Here’s David Bossie.

BOSSIE: And they actually took their ads off the air, as opposed to fighting it. I found that to be kind of incredible actually. That the biggest distributors, the biggest movie companies in the country, would be afraid of the Federal Election Commission.

HENN: The FEC’s power has alarmed the ACLU, and the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, and major unions. They are all backing Bossie in this case.
But campaign finance reform advocates like Trevor Potter say there are half a dozen ways Bossie could have made his movie legally and aired it on TV without breaking campaign finance rules.
Potter is a former chairman of the FEC. Now he runs the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center, which promotes enforcement of campaign finance laws.

TREVOR POTTER: There isn’t a problem. This is an artificial crisis created by people who have another agenda.

HENN: Potter thinks Citizen’s United real agenda has always been to challenge the ban on corporate money in elections and overturn a law that’s been on the books for 62 years. If they win…

POTTER: In essence, you would be giving corporate America the capacity for dominance of our electoral and our decision-making process.

HENN: Fred Wertheimer lobbies for strict campaign finance laws at Democracy 21. He points out that if Exxon Mobil had spent just 1 percent of its 2008 profits on political advertising in that year’s election, it would have outspent both Obama and McCain combined.
In Washington, I’m Steve Henn for Marketplace.

To read one of the many accounts of yesterday’s arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court, click here. It’s the report from the Los Angeles Times.#

3 Comments

  1. The biggest mistake the Supreme Court ever made was granting corporations the same status as human beings. Someone needs to challenge that ruling to have it overturned. Corporations exist for one purpose, to make money. Corporations have no soul, they have “mission statements” and if you don’t believe in a soul, fine, they also don’t have a birth or death, they call those a charter and takeover or liquidation. Human beings are the ones born with inalienable rights. Since we have given these rights to corporations, they have come to completely dominate every aspect of American life. During the last 15 years they are the ones who right the laws and give them to the biggest recipients of their money and tell them to pass it or lose their money teat. Now they will be able to tell us how to vote and think because it’s what is best for the corporation, not what is best for society, any society.

  2. If the supreme court does allow the corporations to fund political adds, this country will be short lived. There is no way that this could not destroy the very fabric of our nation. And the conservative idiots on the supreme court are too stupid to know this.
    God help us all.

  3. If the Supreme Court overturns their previous ruling, it will open up American politics to being dominated by the military industrial complex that President Eisenhower warmed Americans against. It will all but complete the hijacking of the American domocratic process by big business and spell the end for American Democracy as we know it.

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