The Next Attacks on Campaign Finance Reform and Voting Rights

After Citizens United and McCutcheon, you could be forgiven if you thought the ruling class was through with their attacks against reasonable constraints on campaign financing.  After the widespread implementation of voter suppression laws in Republican-held states over the past few years, you could also be forgiven if you thought they would sit back and allow the laws to do the dirty work of denying people the right to vote.  In both cases, of course, you would be wrong.

Huffington Post reported on May 8 on the next attack against campaign finance limits.  Encouraged by the wording in the McCutcheon ruling that defined corruption as direct, quid pro quo bribery,  "Republican Party officials are set to join what may be the next big court challenge in the ongoing push to unravel campaign finance laws...The target of this new challenge is the ban on political parties soliciting and receiving unlimited contributions, known as "soft money," that was enacted in the 2002 McCain-Feingold law. The lawsuit aims to overturn that ban and more.  It will ask the courts to allow political parties, at both the national and state levels, to create affiliated super PACs that can raise and spend unlimited sums on any electoral effort. This would include express electoral activity -- that is, efforts aimed at supporting or defeating specific candidates."

Money wins elections and, because of its importance and presence, it sometimes sways the votes of elected representatives.  The 2014 elections are turning out to be the most expensive mid-terms in our history. The obvious and perhaps only answer to the election money problem, a Constitutional Amendment giving Congress the right to regulate campaign financing, is far in the future.

As for preventing votes and lowering turnout, Adalia Woodbury blogs in PoliticusUSA, watch out for Republican tricks in the 2014 elections for "there is no tactic too extreme or too low for the Republican Party to try if they can get away with it. These extend beyond the already unacceptable restrictions on voter and registration ID, shorter voting hours, eliminated weekend voting, reduced or eliminated early voting, reduced or eliminated absentee voting, and eliminated same day registration."  Erroneous voter roll purges have been conducted prior to past electuions.  Woodbury cites Florida and Kansas as examples and indicative of things to come.  "Some states have given election gestapo groups like True the Vote and the Voter Integrity Project additional powers on Election Day.  In North Carolina, Art Pope’s election gestapo, the Voter Integrity Project, now has the power to challenge any voter in any district. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, gave the Koch Brother funded True the Vote and other 'poll observers' the new power of standing as close as 3 feet from voters  while they are registering to vote and as they are processed by election officials."

After voter intimidation, what else can the Republican right come up with?  Well, they can always make it more difficult for you to get to a polling place and to vote.  "Local officials are using a variety of tactics guaranteed to create even longer lines.  In one Florida county, half the voting locations  were eliminated. It comes as no surprise that occurred in a district comprised mainly of minority voters.  If the same number of people are voting, but there are dramatically fewer locations at which to vote, wait times will increase substantially.  It also means people will have to travel further to vote, discouraging more voters.  As if that wasn’t enough, some poll places in Dade Country, Florida won’t allow  voters to use restrooms."

Sure, there will be a few court challenges against voter suppression laws in the coming months. Democrats and the ACLU will have their own observers at some polling places to try to prevent the most egregious abuses and intimidation.  But the damage has been done.  Who knows how many voters will be discouraged from voting because of the ID laws - even when overturned - and the obstacles thrown in their way?

Today, there was this lead-in for a USA Today article: "The United States of America — the land of opportunity — has the fourth most uneven income distribution in the developed world."  Only Chile, Mexico and Turkey have a wider gap.  We have elections that are overwhelmingly determined by which candidate spends the most money.  We have Congressional districts so gerrymandered that they make a mockery of the "one man, one vote" basis for a democracy. We have a Supreme Court whose majority is more concerned with defining money as speech and corporations as persons than with protecting voting rights.

So what to make of all this? Frankly,our nation appears to be in a headlong dive towards oligarchy.

 “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

- George Orwell, Animal Farm