The New York Times and many other news outlets have just reported that Elon Musk spent over $250 million supporting Donald Trump's campaign for president. The combined campaigns raised nearly $4.7 billion dollars. The amount of money is obscene.
This is a natural and inevitable outgrowth of the 2010 Citizen's United decision by the Supreme Court, which found that corporations and other organizations were citizens and so entitled under the free speech amendment to support political candidates, and that the amount of money they spent in support of a candidate, as long as such spending was not coordinated with the campaign, could not be limited.
This decision has been criticized on various levels, mostly as a blow to democracy because of the increased influence on campaigns by corporations and wealthy donors. And that is true. But from a legal standpoint, what's wrong with that? This question has not, to my knowledge, been addressed.
What wrong is that it makes the Supreme Court rule of "one man, one vote" meaningless, an illusion. What is this rule? It holds that in drawing congressional districts, all citizens in a state should have roughly equal representation.
Why is that of crucial importance? Because ours is a representative democracy and in the House of Representatives, as opposed to the Senate, each person's vote should have an equal value. Each person should have an equal voice as to the direction of our country.
But what if each person's voice is not in an important sense his own? What if huge amounts of money are spent to influence his vote, if he is bombarded with advertising to make him vote for one candidate or the other? The outcome of the election is still based on those votes, but how people vote is greatly influenced by the advertising and emotions that are put in play.
And this is not the marketplace of ideas envisioned by the 1st Amendment. This is biased marketing that appeals to the emotions, not the mind. Even if "alternative facts" were not part of that advertising, it still would be an appeal to emotion rather than rational thought.
A democracy based on emotion rather than rational thought is a democracy in form only. A democracy depends on reasoned debate, both by the elected representatives and by the public. Because reasoned debate is a search for the truth. Whereas emotional debate doesn't get past the emotions; it is not about the search for truth. And a democracy based on emotion is likely to attract a demagogue as leader and be in danger of slipping into an autocratic state. Witness the ascendence of Donald Trump.
There is only one way to reverse the impact of Citizen's United. Adopting Federal financing of elections wouldn't work because the Court's holding would prohibit legislation that sought to limit donations that were not coordinated with a campaign. The only possibility left would be a constitutional amendment that would reverse the Supreme Court's decision. And that is a process that is unlikely to succeed, certainly in our current polarized state.
So until the Court once again has a liberal majority, or at least a neutral conservative majority, which could be persuaded to overrule Citizen's United, we are stuck with elections that are a contest of mega-donors and often appeal to the darkest forces within us.
