One of Ronald Reagan’s judges, a guy who has held senior status on the Eastern District of Virginia court for thirteen years, just ripped up the last shred of campaign finance law in this country.
A federal judge in Virginia has declared unconstitutional a century-old law banning political contributions from corporations, a ruling that, if upheld, could have major implications for the rules governing campaign fund-raising and spending…
…the ruling drew from and extended the reasoning in the Supreme Court’s landmark decision last year in the Citizens United case. The justices ruled in that case that the government may not ban political spending by corporations in candidate elections, but did not address the current bans on direct contributions by corporations to candidates.
In his decision, Judge Cacheris said that if corporations and people have an equivalent right to free speech under Citizens United, they also have an equivalent right to contribute to candidates, albeit within the same limits currently established by federal law.
“That logic is inescapable here,” Judge Cacheris wrote.
If upheld, corporations could give money directly to candidates for office, but they would still be bound by the individual caps that we all must abide by as individual citizens. Yet, it would make it impossible to police campaign giving.
“If this case stood, it would mean the end of campaign contribution limits for everyone, because it would be so easy to get around the law through a straw or sham corporation,” said Richard L. Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, who is helping to defend a lawsuit challenging municipal campaign laws in San Diego.
Indeed, I would expect the number of corporations to explode, with tens of thousands of them being created each election cycle for the simple purpose of expanding the power of rich assholes to give more money to campaigns than regular folks are allowed to do. Individual candidates would face a compliance nightmare just trying to vet their donors.
This is what happens when Republicans seize control of our judiciary. They try to destroy us. Maybe they do destroy us.