Public Financing Laws Next on the First Amendment Chopping Block
Those who love free speech have always been wary of publicly funded election campaigns, and recent versions of such laws often contain provisions that trigger more government financed speech to counter privately funded speech. That's a scary concept, isn't it? Criticize the government, and the government hands a fat check to the person you are criticizing.
As George F. Will notes in his excellent column today on the gun rights and millionaire's amendment cases, "This ruling invites challenges to various state laws, such as Arizona's and Maine's, that penalize private funding of political speech. Those laws increase public funds for candidates taking such funds when their opponents spend certain amounts of their own money or receive voluntary private contributions that cumulatively exceed certain ceilings. Such laws, like McCain-Feingold, rest on the fiction that political money can be regulated without regulating political speech."
The way people try to get around this is to buy ads at the last minute, before the government has time to cut the check or for the candidate to buy the time. But frankly, that doesn't work very well.
Hopefully somebody in Arizona or Maine will accept the invitation.
