A blow against Citizens United

...transparency, i'm all for it,...er..wait, does that mean?, nah. . .

 

Dude really you have problem with the amount of there contribution being known if they want a goverment contract come on man be real its about time something gets done about this shady dealing that are being done in washington this order can show what both sides are doing.

 

Good move. I really don't understand what the arguments were against the Disclose Act except as a way to obscure and obfuscate donors from the electorate.

 

Sounds good to me. Don't care for the obviously-biased article linked. So, in fairness, I went and found an article slanted in the opposite direction: http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/citizens-united-and-rule-by-decree/. Their arguments are weak-sauce, though.

 

its cool, this is going go hard at defense contractors.

 

punctuationandformattingplzkthxby

Was there ever a day that Cato opposed companies (that they support) graciously suckling the government's teet? Seems like an important caveat to the writer's verbal diarrhea.

 

It's just a disclosure requirement. Doesn't change Citizens materially. Sort of embraces it and brings the disclosure rules in line with those for individuals and officers. Citizens decision remains as offensive as ever.

the cato article was written on 4/20.

 

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42776788/ns/politics-the_new_york_times

Contractors 'not going to tolerate' political spending disclosure
Obama 'thinks that the American taxpayer should know where his or her money is going'

WASHINGTON — So much for détente.

After a brief truce of sorts between the White House and business leaders, the top lobbyist at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce took aim at President Obama on Tuesday over an as-yet unannounced plan to force government contractors to disclose their political giving.

The lobbyist, R. Bruce Josten, said in an interview that the powerful business bloc “is not going to tolerate” what it saw as a “backdoor attempt” by the White House to silence private-sector opponents by disclosing their political spending.

“We will fight it through all available means,” Mr. Josten said. In a reference to the White House’s battle to depose Libya’s leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, he said, “To quote what they say every day on Libya, all options are on the table.”

While no final decision has been announced, the White House has acknowledged that Mr. Obama is considering issuing an executive order requiring all would-be federal contractors to disclose direct and indirect political spending of more than $5,000.

The order could, for instance, force a military contractor or an energy company seeking federal work to report money it gave to the Chamber of Commerce or another advocacy group to help finance political ads and expenditures.

After tens of millions of dollars in anonymous political spending flooded the 2010 elections following a landmark Supreme Court decision in the Citizens United case, Democrats tried to pass a bill known as the Disclose Act to require greater reporting of political spending, only to see it blocked by Senate Republicans. Democrats are now turning to other means, including the possible White House order and a lawsuit filed last week against the Federal Election Commission, to achieve similar ends.

When asked about the possible order this week, the White House spokesman, Jay Carney, said, “What the president is committed to is transparency, and he certainly thinks that the American taxpayer should know where his or her money is going.”

'Regulatory over-reach?'
The sparring over the issue disrupts several months of relative calm between the White House and business leaders.

The two sides clashed last year over Congressional action on health care and business regulations, with the chamber spending $42 million on the 2010 midterm elections to push its opposition to administration policies.

But in February, Mr. Obama crossed Lafayette Park for a speech at the chamber at which he promised to be “more neighborly” with business leaders. Elizabeth Warren, the administration official in charge of setting up a consumer protection bureau, delivered a similar message of partnership in another speech before the group last month, and chamber executives also pledged to work cooperatively with the White House.

Mr. Josten, in an interview at his spacious office in view of the White House, said the chamber was concerned about a variety of Obama administration policies that it considered potentially damaging to businesses in a time of economic uncertainty.

Those concerns include the efforts to carry out last year’s health care plan, a vast expansion of business regulations under the Dodd-Frank measure passed by Congress and the slow pace of new trade agreements with foreign nations.

American businesses “are losing market share” globally to countries like Canada that have enacted new trade pacts, Mr. Josten said. “The rest of the world — while we’re sitting around doing nothing — is racing ahead.”

But much of the renewed tension can be traced to the prospect of the White House order on political disclosures — first disclosed last week in a blog posting by Hans von Spakovsky, a conservative lawyer who worked on election law in President George W. Bush’s administration.

The Business Roundtable, another powerful business association made up of leading chief executives, also urged the White House on Tuesday not to move ahead with the draft order. It called the proposal “yet another example of regulatory over-reach” and said it would increase paperwork and drive up costs for businesses.

On Tuesday, 27 Republican senators also sent Mr. Obama a letter accusing him of playing politics through the proposal.

Mr. Josten said that the order as now drafted would also stifle free speech rights for businesses that worked with the government by subjecting them to harassment and protests if their political spending were disclosed.

As one example, he pointed to the Target Corporation, which was the object of boycotts and protests at its stores last year after reports said that the company gave $150,000 to a Minnesota business group that supported a Republican candidate opposed to gay marriage. “This is meant to have a chilling effect,” he said of the disclosure plan.

This story, "Lobbyist Fires Warning Shot Over Donation Disclosure Plan," originally appeared in The New York Times.

 

It's hard to believe anything serious coming from the Chamber of Commerce anymore.

 

The arguments against this so far are serious weak sauce.

A lobbyist is telling the president they aren't going to take this? An attempt to "silence" the private-sector? A stifling of free speech rights?

The people are so entrenched in getting their way that they can't even project coherent arguments.

 

Yeah but looks like they're trotting out this guy to help them:

Yeah, I've got to tell you, nothing will help support a vastly unpopular item like unlimited secret corporate campaign contributions from mnc's than bringing out a former official from the universally reviled Bush Administration who sounds like a character out of Dr. Strangelove.

 

He can't change it unless we add a constitutional amendment right?

My understanding is that the Supreme Court ruled in favor of those crooks (Corporations United) due to the 1st Amendment "protecting" corporations. How can you change that with a law, any similar law would just be struck down. Right?

 

Further evidence Yoo sucks...

 

Here is the Op-Ed that Yoo and David Marston express their opinion.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704132204576284630941397792.html

[rquoter]Political Privacy Should Be a Civil Right
In NAACP v. Alabama the Supreme Court upheld the right to free and discreet association.

By DAVID MARSTON AND JOHN YOO

Suppose that during the civil rights movement segregationist governors ordered all state contractors to disclose their political donations in an attempt to expose civil rights supporters to harassment and retaliation. The Supreme Court would have had none of it.

In NAACP v. Alabama (1958), the court barred Alabama from forcing the NAACP to disclose its members. Those justices would have struck down a similar effort to force the release of the NAACP's financial supporters. They would have rightly viewed it as an infringement of the constitutional right to free association and free speech.

Today President Obama is ignoring the lessons of the civil rights era he claims to revere. According to a draft executive order leaked last week, Mr. Obama plans to require any company seeking a federal contract to disclose its executives' political contributions over $5,000—not just to candidates, but to any group that might make "independent expenditure" or "electioneering communication" advertisements.

If a small businesswoman wants to sell paper clips to the Defense Department, Mr. Obama would force her to reveal contributions to groups such as Planned Parenthood or the National Rifle Association. These donations are obviously irrelevant to whether she made the most reliable bid at the lowest price. The only purpose of the executive order is to dangle the specter of retaliation (by losing her contracts) and harassment (from political opponents).

It would be comforting if this order had been some aberration produced from somewhere deep in the bowels of the federal bureaucracy. Unfortunately, it was not. This order represents the latest salvo in the Obama administration's war on the First Amendment rights of its political opponents.

The conflict goes back to January 2010, with the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. The court held as unconstitutional the McCain-Feingold Act's limits on the political spending of corporations, unions and other groups. Mr. Obama struck back, claiming that the decision "strikes at our democracy itself." He trotted out the usual suspects—"big oil, Wall Street banks, health-insurance companies and other powerful interests"—as the winners. He promised that the White House would "talk with bipartisan congressional leaders to develop a forceful response to this decision."

There was no bipartisanship, but there was certainly a forceful response. Democrats proposed the Disclose Act, which would have muzzled political speech by prohibiting federal contractors from making contributions to federal candidates or parties. Though the act failed to overcome a filibuster last year in the Senate, its supporters remain undeterred.

Having failed to undo Citizens United by legislation, Mr. Obama apparently believes that he can veto the Supreme Court by naked presidential fiat. But before the administration barrels through with this attempt to suppress corporate political activity, it would do well to revisit NAACP v. Alabama.

The court declared that the privacy of group membership and political activity were critical to the "effective advocacy of both public and private points of view, particularly controversial ones." Privacy can be critical for free speech. "Inviolability of privacy in group association may in many circumstances be indispensable to preservation of freedom of association, particularly where a group espouses dissident beliefs," Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote for a unanimous court.

The court went on to recite a litany of potential retaliation—"economic reprisal, loss of employment, threat of physical coercion, and other manifestations of public hostility"—that could deter people from publicly supporting the NAACP. It did not matter, the justices observed, that the harassment would likely come from "private community pressures." What mattered is that such pressure would be prompted by "the initial exertion of state power."

Our era of instant mass communication exponentially multiplies this threat. Supporters of California's Proposition 8, which bars gay marriage, have faced relentless harassment after a federal court refused to bar the disclosure of their identities in 2009. Opponents promptly created a website that used the Prop 8 list to create a map of donors' homes. Widespread intimidation followed: Some Prop 8 supporters were fired from their jobs, and several of their businesses were boycotted.

Mr. Obama's executive order threatens to replicate the Prop 8 experience on a nationwide scale. In fact, it requires the release of contractors' political contributions in a publicly available electronic database to be posted online as soon as possible. It shouldn't matter here that disclosure would be the price for doing business with the government. In B oy Scouts of America v. Dale (2000), the Supreme Court made it clear that a group did not have to give up its right to associate in exchange for some government benefit.

Civil libertarians and liberals have so far been mum in the face of Mr. Obama's executive order. They're likely justifying their silence on the basis that businesses—not unions—will suffer. But if the president succeeds in reducing the free-speech rights of business today, it will be far easier to limit the same rights of other Americans tomorrow.

Imagine the outcry we'll hear from self-described First Amendment supporters when every professor applying for a government research grant has to disclose his political donations.

Mr. Marston is a lawyer and former U.S. attorney in Philadelphia. Mr. Yoo, a law professor at the University of California Berkeley and a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, served in the George W. Bush Justice Department. [/rquoter]

I will say its an interesting argument in regard to the NAACP case but it seems to me to have one big flaw in regard that Obama's Exec. order wouldn't force the groups getting the funding to disclose their funders but the for the contractors wanting to do business with the government to disclose who they are funding. That doesn't seem like it is violating their rights as they can choose not to do business with the government.

While it seems ironic for Yoo to have argued for almost unlimited wartime executive power to criticize this I don't think his criticism conflicts as this isn't a wartime power. What I find more ironic is for legal conservatives like Yoo to be arguing for a right to privacy.