Newsgroup: it.politica
Titolo: "Corporations are people and money is speech" (!)

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/25/crooked-dead
 
 
American Chronicles AUGUST 25, 2014 ISSUE
 
The Crooked and the Dead
Does the Constitution protect corruption?
 
BY JILL LEPORE
 
The fall and winter before last, Daniel J. Halloran III, a Republican 
city councilman from Queens, met with two men: an undercover F.B.I. 
agent who was posing as a businessman called Raj and a real-estate 
developer named Moses Stern, who was coöperating with the F.B.I. in 
exchange for a reduced prison term. (Stern is facing a 
four-hundred-and-fifty-five-year sentence for bank fraud, among other 
charges.) During meetings that were secretly recorded, Raj and Stern 
gave Halloran almost forty thousand dollars in cash, including 
hundred-dollar bills crammed into unmarked envelopes, and sixty-five 
hundred dollars in checks made out to his congressional campaign: in 
2012, Halloran ran for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. The 
checks were written from other people’s accounts, Raj allegedly told 
Halloran, because he didn’t want his name to appear in any 
campaign-finance report. “I can take green,” Halloran said, after he 
lost the congressional race and was no longer eligible for campaign 
matching funds. “That’s politics, that’s politics,” he told Stern at a 
restaurant in Manhattan on a night when he accepted a wad of cash, 
adding, philosophically, “You can’t do anything without the fucking money.”
 
Much of the money, in this case, was payment to Halloran for brokering a 
deal with two Republican Party officials, Vincent Tabone and Joseph 
Savino, buying their support for Malcolm Smith, a Democratic New York 
State senator who wanted to run for mayor of New York as a Republican. 
(Smith’s party switch required the approval of three of the city’s five 
Republican Party borough chairmen.) Stern warned Smith that getting onto 
the ballot would cost “a pretty penny.”
 
 
“It’s worth it,” Smith said.
 
On February 14, 2013, in a car parked outside Sparks Steak House, on 
East Forty-sixth Street, Savino accepted fifteen thousand dollars from 
Raj. (Tabone, a harder bargainer, got twenty-five thousand.)
 
“Tell me you love me,” Halloran texted Savino, after the handoff.
 
“U are my fucking valentine,” Savino texted back.
 
In April, 2013, the office of Preet Bharara, the United States Attorney 
for the Southern District of New York, indicted Halloran, Smith, Tabone, 
and Savino on federal corruption charges. After the news broke, the 
state’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, urged the Legislature to pass a package 
of anticorruption reforms, including a Campaign Finance Reform Act. The 
Legislature failed to pass a single measure. That summer, Cuomo 
announced the formation of a twenty-five-member panel, the Moreland 
Commission to Investigate Public Corruption, “to probe systemic 
corruption and the appearance of such corruption in state government, 
political campaigns, and elections.” He said, “Anything they want to 
look at, they can look at: me, the lieutenant governor, the attorney 
general, the comptroller, any senator, any assemblyman.” The commission 
was given eighteen months to conduct its investigation, but in March, 
2014, apparently as part of a budget deal with the Legislature—a deal 
that did not include any meaningful campaign-finance-reform 
provisions—Cuomo shut it down. In April, Bharara, concerned about 
possible malfeasance, seized the commission’s files.
 
This spring, while the U.S. Attorney’s office launched an inquiry into 
the possible corruption of the corruption commission, the Times began 
its own investigation. Reporters discovered that, after the commission 
issued a subpoena to a political-consulting firm called Buying Time 
(“How and where campaigns spend their money on media is more important 
than ever,” the firm’s Web site reads), Cuomo’s top aide called one of 
the commission’s co-chairs, told him that Cuomo was one of Buying Time’s 
clients, and said, of the subpoena, “Pull it back.” The subpoena was 
withdrawn. (It was later reissued.) The Times report appeared in July. 
In a thirteen-page response, the Governor’s office insisted that by law 
the commission had never been independent: “A commission appointed by 
and staffed by the executive cannot investigate the executive.”
 
Cuomo is up for reëlection in November, but first he has to win a 
Democratic primary, on September 9th, against an improbable challenger: 
Zephyr Teachout, a constitutional-law professor at Fordham University. 
The week before the Times published its report, nearly ninety per cent 
of New York voters either didn’t know her name or had no opinion about 
her. Teachout has never held an elected office; she has little 
experience and less support. She’s not so much campaigning for office as 
campaigning for reform. Shortly before the primary, her first book will 
be released. It’s called “Corruption in America.”
 
Running for office, a vital civic act, costs money. How much it costs 
and who pays for it are legitimate matters of public concern and 
legislative action. Four years after the Supreme Court’s ruling in 
Citizens United dismantled a regime of campaign-finance legislation that 
had been in place for more than a century, the prospects for reform are 
bleak. There is quite possibly more money in American politics today 
than at any point in the country’s history. But there is also less 
agreement than ever about what can or should be done about it. In fact, 
there is very little agreement about whether fighting corruption is a 
compelling state interest, or even about what corruption is.
 
The New York story is important because, historically, New York is 
corruption’s proving ground. In December, 2013, three months before 
Cuomo shut down the Moreland Commission, it issued a preliminary, 
ninety-eight-page report describing “an epidemic of public corruption.” 
For instance: “One out of every eleven legislators to leave office since 
1999 has done so under the cloud of ethical or criminal violations.” But 
those are only the people who got caught violating the scant, weak, and 
poorly enforced anticorruption laws that govern their conduct. “The real 
scandal,” according to the report, “is what remains legal.”
 
What remains legal includes the following: between 2009 and 2012, donors 
gave two hundred and thirty-two million dollars to legislators in 
Albany, and lobbyists gave six hundred and ninety-three million—a total 
of nearly one billion dollars in direct political spending. Eighty per 
cent of individual contributions came from big donors. (New York has 
hardly any small donors. Of New Yorkers who voted in the last 
gubernatorial election, fewer than one per cent made campaign 
donations.) Big donors give big money to both Democrats and Republicans; 
they give it to whoever holds power. In 2012, when Republicans held a 
majority in the Senate, they took in thirteen million dollars, while 
Senate Democrats took in only seven million dollars. In 2010, when 
Democrats held the Senate majority, the pattern was reversed. Big donors 
aren’t advancing an ideology or a party, the commission concluded: 
they’re paying for access. They give money to politicians who wield 
power over decisions affecting their specific economic interests, 
regardless of those politicians’ party affiliations or ideological 
positions. One example: between 2011 and 2012, the chairs of the health 
committees in both the Republican Senate and the Democratic Assembly 
each received more than half of his campaign funds from the health 
industry. The people and the organizations writing these checks know 
exactly what they’re buying. In one instance cited in the report, a 
trade association asked its members to donate ten thousand dollars each, 
because “Our future ability to adopt favorable legislation, stop 
terrible legislation or modify legislation to limit the pain to our 
industry is directly tied to our continued positive relationship with 
all the leaders in Albany.” A further source of corruption, according to 
the report, is “shadowy outside spending.” After Citizens United, a 
Virginia-based 501(c)(4) called Common Sense Principles spent nearly 
$3.5 million attacking Democratic candidates from New York. The 
commission was unable to identify who runs this organization, or where 
it gets its money.
 
 
The Moreland Commission, in its preliminary report, urged an overhaul of 
the state’s campaign-finance laws—closing loopholes regarding 
limited-liability companies, mandating disclosure of outside spending, 
instituting public financing for state campaigns, and creating an 
independent election-law-enforcement agency—and suggested that it would 
include, in its final report, a vast amount of evidence that it held 
back from the preliminary report because of the ongoing nature of the 
investigation. Before that investigation was halted, the commissioners, 
including nine district attorneys, had been working with a 
data-analytics firm to study political contributions, floor motions, 
votes, and policy outcomes: they were following the money, politician by 
politician, penny by penny. Unless the U.S. Attorney’s office continues 
the study, the findings of that analysis will never be made public.
 
It may not matter. What the Moreland Commission to Investigate Public 
Corruption considers to be corruption is not what the United States 
Supreme Court considers to be corruption. And much of what the 
commission urged, by way of legislative reform, is, in the eyes of the 
Court, unconstitutional.
 
Cuomo announced that he had shut down the commission on March 29th. On 
April 2nd, the Supreme Court issued its ruling in McCutcheon v. Federal 
Election Commission. The case clarified and extended the logic of 
Citizens United, in which the Court had ruled that certain contributions 
made by corporations cannot be regulated, because corporations are 
people and money is speech, and therefore money spent by corporations is 
protected under the First Amendment. In McCutcheon, Chief Justice John 
Roberts wrote the opinion for the five-to-four majority. “The right to 
participate in democracy through political contributions is protected by 
the First Amendment, but that right is not absolute,” he began. Congress 
may not “regulate contributions simply to reduce the amount of money in 
politics, or to restrict the political participation of some in order to 
enhance the relative influence of others.” But there is “one legitimate 
governmental interest for restricting campaign finances,” he explained: 
“preventing corruption or the appearance of corruption.” That said, the 
Court’s understanding of corruption is very narrow, Roberts explained, 
echoing a view expressed by Justice Anthony Kennedy in McConnell v. 
F.E.C., in 2003: “Congress may target only a specific type of 
corruption—‘quid pro quo’ corruption.”
 
Quid pro quo is when an elected official does something like accepting 
fifteen thousand dollars in cash in exchange for supporting another 
politician’s bid to run for mayor of New York. The only kind of 
corruption that federal law is allowed to prohibit is out-and-out 
bribery. The kind of political prostitution that the Moreland Commission 
was in the middle of attempting to document—elected officials 
representing the interests not of their constituents but of their 
largest contributors—does not constitute, in the view of the Supreme 
Court, either corruption or the appearance of corruption. In the words 
of Daniel Halloran, “That’s politics.” Is the distinction tenable?
 
“It’s not a quid-pro-quo thing,” Vincent Tabone insisted, when asked 
what he wanted in exchange for his support of Malcolm Smith. “It’s a 
matter of good faith.”
 
“You give us some ideas on how he can demonstrate that good faith,” Raj 
suggested.
 
Three weeks later, Tabone accepted twenty-five thousand dollars, cash.
 
 
“You have to let them make their own mistakes.”
 
Last year, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee advised 
freshman members of Congress to spend four hours on the phone each day 
raising money. That sounds dreadful. But what would be the right number 
of hours? There’s only so much that can be done about money in politics, 
of course. The trouble, at the moment, is that almost nothing can be 
done. In 2009, John McCain, after hearing oral arguments in Citizens 
United, made an impassioned speech on the floor of the Senate: 
“Throughout our history, America has faced periods of political 
corruption, and in every instance Congress has risen above its own 
self-interest and enacted the necessary reforms to address the scandals 
and corruption that have plagued our democratic institutions.” That’s a 
wonderfully rosy account of American history, but, at this point, 
Congress is handcuffed. The Court’s rulings in Citizens United and 
McCutcheon are so broad and far-reaching that, notwithstanding public 
support for campaign-finance reform—four out of five Americans support 
it—nearly any campaign-finance laws passed in the states or by Congress 
stand a good chance of being struck down.
 
One approach that has been pursued by those interested in reform since 
2010 is to amend the Constitution. In a recent book, “Six Amendments,” 
the retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, who dissented in 
Citizens United, urges an amendment separating the regulation of 
campaign finance from the protections offered by the First Amendment. In 
September, the Senate is scheduled to vote on an amendment that, in the 
interests of “democratic self-government and political equality, and to 
protect the integrity of government and the electoral process,” grants 
to Congress and the states the power to “regulate and set reasonable 
limits on the raising and spending of money by candidates and others to 
influence elections.” It can’t possibly pass; a constitutional amendment 
requires a two-thirds majority in both houses. But, if the issue gets 
enough play in the press, it could bring voters to the polls in 
November, and reformers to office.
 
 
To that end, the political consultant Mark McKinnon and the Harvard Law 
School professor Lawrence Lessig are using the deregulation of the 
campaign- finance system to raise what they hope will be an overwhelming 
amount of bipartisan money from small and big donors to get both 
Democratic and Republican reformers elected to Congress, so that they 
can support efforts regulating the very spending that got them elected. 
Lessig and McKinnon have launched a Super PAC called Mayday, one of 
whose objectives is to make Super PACs illegal. Lessig says, “Embrace 
the irony.” Tragedy, more like.
 
Zephyr Teachout’s argument in “Corruption in America” follows an 
argument that Lessig made in his book “Republic, Lost” (2011). Lessig 
countered the Court’s cramped understanding of corruption with a 
sprawling one, defining corruption as “the economy of influence.” By 
that, he meant the overpowering—by outspending—of the will of the many 
by the will of the few, a corruption he describes as “the banal evil of 
second-rate minds who can’t make it in the private sector and who 
therefore turn to the massive wealth directed by our government as the 
means to securing wealth for themselves.” Teachout believes that 
Lessig’s definition of corruption is the framers’ definition of 
corruption. If Lessig’s gambit is to outspend the spenders, Teachout’s 
is to out-original the originalists. The first half of her book is a 
long essay on the role of corruption in eighteenth-century political 
thought—Hobbes and Montesquieu, Pufendorf and Locke. Indisputably, in 
the eighteenth century corruption meant a great deal more than bribery. 
“By corruption, the early generations meant excessive private interests 
influencing the exercise of public power,” Teachout writes. Of the 
hundreds of times that the subject of corruption was raised during the 
Constitutional Convention and the ratification debates, as Lessig 
pointed out in an amicus brief in McCutcheon, only a handful of 
times—about one per cent of the time—did it mean anything as narrow as 
quid pro quo.
 
This isn’t uninteresting, but it’s not especially helpful, either. 
Teachout, while writing from the left, makes the same rhetorical moves 
as the Tea Party. She loves Benjamin Franklin and James Madison, and she 
is certain that they are on her side. Her chief complaint is that 
Americans have abandoned the Founding Fathers. Another complaint is that 
“the Court has become populated by academics and appellate court 
justices,” rather than by people who have experience with “real 
problems.” Admittedly, there are only so many cards in the populist 
deck. But gushing about the Founding Fathers and demeaning intellectuals 
is a weak hand.
 
Only in passing does Teachout note that an element of corruption, in 
republican political theory, is “dependence.” The Declaration of 
Independence declared independence from a corrupting dependence on the 
king and his council. Another and deeper meaning of dependence had to do 
with structural economic dependence on other people: the dependence of 
women on their husbands, of servants on their masters, of workers on 
their bosses, and of tenants on their landlords. In the early American 
republic, people who were economically dependent on other people were 
not allowed to vote, because their votes were considered inherently 
corrupt: they lacked the independence that made civic virtue possible. 
Property requirements for voting were struck down, in the nineteenth 
century, only by the force of the argument that the cost of 
disenfranchising the dependent outweighed the risk of corruption. So, 
while it’s certainly true that the attempt to stamp out “corruption” was 
very much a part of the founding of the United States, it’s not an idea 
that can simply be lifted out of the eighteenth century to overturn 
Citizens United, any more than “liberty” can be lifted out of the 
eighteenth century by the Tea Party to overturn the Court’s decision on 
the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act.
 
There may be good reasons to define corruption broadly. But fighting 
corruption through democratic action requires embracing a set of ideas 
about democracy that the framers did not.
 
The entrance into the electorate of men who owned little or no property 
democratized American politics. The fear that they would sell their 
votes—a fear that was not unfounded—was chiefly addressed, in the 
eighteen-eighties, by the adoption of the secret ballot. In the 
eighteen-nineties, reformers who had fought against machine politics 
turned their attention to a new source of corruption: big business. In 
1894, Elihu Root proposed an amendment to New York’s constitution, 
banning “great aggregations of wealth”—corporations—“from using their 
corporate funds, directly or indirectly to send members of the 
legislature to these halls, in order to vote for their protection and 
the advancement of their interests as against those of the public.” The 
amendment failed, but Root kept the issue on the agenda when he helped 
Theodore Roosevelt campaign for mayor of New York, in 1886, and for 
governor, in 1898. In 1905, when Roosevelt was President (Root served as 
his Secretary of State), he told Congress, “All contributions by 
corporations to any political committee or for any political purpose 
should be forbidden by law.”
 
The first federal law to ban corporate political donations, the Tillman 
Act, was passed in 1907, the same year that New York passed the Moreland 
Act, granting to the governor the power to appoint commissions to 
investigate corruption. Both pieces of legislation were the result of 
hearings conducted in 1905 by the Armstrong Committee, which was 
appointed by the New York State Legislature to investigate the insurance 
industry. Charles Evans Hughes, serving as the committee’s chief 
counsel, stumbled upon evidence that insurance companies had, for years, 
paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Republican National 
Committee, often listing these disbursements in their account books as 
“legal expenses.” Hughes entered into evidence a check for $48,702.50 
that New York Life had paid, through J. P. Morgan & Co., to the 
Republican National Committee in 1904 (about a million dollars, in 
today’s money). As the historian Robert E. Mutch points out in his 
thoughtful and well-researched study “Buying the Vote,” this proof of 
what had before only been rumored occasioned an outcry. “So long as 
great corporations are permitted to send their checks for $50,000 to 
campaign committee Treasurers we shall have, or be in great danger of 
having, a Government of the corporations, not a Government of the 
people,” the editors of the New York Times, a Democratic newspaper, 
wrote. The city’s leading Republican paper, the Tribune, went further:
 
 
In the United States the government is intended to be a government of 
men. A corporation is not a citizen with a right to vote or take a hand 
otherwise in politics. It is an artificial creation, brought into 
existence by favor of the State solely to perform the functions allowed 
by its charter. Interference by it with the State and attempts by it to 
exercise rights of citizenship are fundamentally a perversion of its 
power. Its stockholders, no matter how wise or how rich, should be 
forced to exercise their political influence as individuals on an 
equality with other men. That is the basic principle of democracy.
 
Hughes asked the New York State senator and Republican Party boss T. C. 
Platt whether these payments involved any quid pro quo: Had any of these 
insurance companies ever asked Platt to “intervene in their favor”? 
Platt said no. Hughes then asked if the consideration given was, 
perhaps, broader:
 
HUGHES: To see that the legislature, for example, did not enact 
legislation which they thought hostile to their policyholders?
 
PLATT: That is what it would amount to . . . .
 
HUGHES: Is not that the way it really comes about, Senator, that the use 
of these contributions in the election of candidates to office puts the 
candidates under more or less of a moral obligation not to attack the 
interests supporting?
 
PLATT: That is what would naturally be involved.
 
In the manner of all the best dialogue, this exchange changed everything.
 
Hughes’s effectiveness on behalf of the Armstrong Committee carried him 
into the New York governor’s office in 1906. One of the first things he 
did after his inauguration, in January, 1907, was to ask the assemblyman 
Sherman Moreland, who had been a law student of his at Cornell, to 
introduce legislation giving the governor investigative authority. 
Meanwhile, in Washington, Congress debated the Tillman Act, which banned 
corporate contributions to political campaigns (while providing no 
mechanism for enforcement). Because of the breadth of its support, the 
Tillman Act was the subject of almost no formal discussion. The Senate 
elections committee, forwarding it to the floor, said only, “The evils 
of the use of money in connection with political elections are so 
generally recognized that the committee deem it unnecessary to make any 
argument in favor of the general purpose of this measure.” Mutch 
suggests that the absence of official discussion has led the Supreme 
Court to underestimate both congressional and popular support for the 
Tillman Act.
 
 
“I got spurs that jangle jingle jangle—I want spurs that jingle jangle 
jingle.”
 
Restricting political contributions is one approach; requiring them to 
be made public is another. In 1908, William Taft pledged to make public 
his entire donor list. Disclosure was a political necessity even before 
the passage, in 1910, of the Publicity Act. In 1925, the amended Tillman 
and Publicity Acts became the Federal Corrupt Practices Act, which 
together regulated campaign finance in the United States until, in the 
Watergate era, the system began to unravel.
 
In 1972, the Committee to Re-elect the President failed to comply with 
disclosure requirements in the 1971 Federal Election Campaign Act, the 
first significant revision of the 1925 Federal Corrupt Practices Act. 
(Under the Federal Corrupt Practices Act, individual contribution caps 
had been set at five thousand dollars; some of Nixon’s donors had given 
more than two million dollars.) The Watergate scandal exposed Nixon’s 
campaign finances, leading, in 1974, to a revision of the 1971 act, 
strengthening and expanding its regulations and providing for their 
enforcement through the establishment of the F.E.C. The act passed only 
after a filibuster in the Senate; Ford considered a veto but, in the 
end, signed. And then, in the nineteen-seventies, campaign finance, like 
abortion and gun control, moved from Congress to the courts.
 
 
In 1976, the Supreme Court issued a ruling in Buckley v. Valeo, which 
challenged the constitutionality of the 1974 Federal Election Campaign 
Act; the decision marked the beginning of the era of constitutional 
interpretation that resulted, this year, in McCutcheon v. F.E.C. “A line 
of cases this misguided about matters of such fundamental importance to 
American politics is a frightful thing,” Robert Post, the dean of Yale 
Law School, writes in his new book, “Citizens Divided.”
 
The Buckley of Buckley v. Valeo was James Buckley, who is now a U.S. 
appeals-court judge but who was then a U.S. senator from New York, 
elected as a member of the Conservative Party, and the brother of 
William F. Buckley. The petitioners, which included Buckley, the 
N.Y.C.L.U., and Eugene McCarthy, made a libertarian argument, that the 
1974 Federal Election Campaign Act violated the First Amendment because 
giving money to campaigns and the spending of money on behalf of 
campaigns are forms of political expression. This argument rested on a 
new interpretation of the First Amendment, a cornerstone of the rising 
conservative movement. The D.C. Court of Appeals ruled against Buckley, 
six-to-two, writing, “It would be strange indeed if, by extrapolation 
outward from the basic rights of individuals, the wealthy few could 
claim a constitutional guarantee to a stronger political voice than the 
unwealthy many because they are able to give and spend more money.”
 
This argument, however, found favor on the Supreme Court, aided by an 
amicus brief submitted on behalf of the Ford Administration and written 
by Solicitor General Robert Bork. (The filing of this brief, opposing a 
brief submitted by the Justice Department, was unprecedented.) “Money is 
a proxy for speech,” Bork wrote. “Money is speech,” Justice Potter 
Stewart echoed, during oral arguments, “and speech is money.”
 
The petitioners’ argument, if accepted, challenged every part of the law 
except disclosure, as Mutch explains. The defendants argued that the 
rationale for each part of the law was the same, and had been the same, 
since 1907: curbing “the undue influence of a wealthy few” owing to “the 
corrupting influence of large contributions,” in the interest of 
political equality and public trust. The Court split the difference, 
ruling that limits on campaign spending are unconstitutional, because 
they violate the First Amendment, and that limits on campaign 
contributions are legitimate only if they target one kind of corruption: 
quid pro quo. Everything sorted into one pile or the other: First 
Amendment speech or quid-pro-quo corruption. Restrictions on 
“independent expenditures”—money spent on behalf of a candidate but not 
given to his campaign—were struck down (as violating the First 
Amendment). Disclosure requirements were upheld (as anticorruption 
measures).
 
In Buckley, the Court dismissed political equality as a justification 
for regulating money in politics, even though political equality had, 
all along, been the point of campaign-finance legislation; it also 
replaced Congress’s definition of corruption with James Buckley’s 
definition of corruption. In Citizens United, Teachout argues, the Court 
did something even stranger: it redefined undue influence, which for a 
very long time had been seen as a form of corruption, and destructive of 
democracy, as “responsiveness,” and foundational to democracy. “The fact 
that speakers may have influence over or access to elected officials 
does not mean these officials are corrupt,” Justice Kennedy wrote, 
citing his opinion in McConnell v. F.E.C.: “Democracy is premised on 
responsiveness.”
 
Kennedy has a point. Still, the narrower the Court’s definition of 
corruption, the less Congress can do about money in politics. Teachout 
wants to restore the older definition, which is why she’s written 
“Corruption in America,” and why she’s running for governor of New York. 
“I am trying to bring corruption back,” she writes. “As an idea, as 
something we fight about.” It might not be the right fight to pick.
 
“Conceptualizing campaign finance reform in terms of the state’s 
interests in preventing corruption leads down a constitutional blind 
alley,” Robert Post warns, in “Citizens Divided.” Historically, he 
points out, three compelling state interests have been cited to support 
the regulation of money in politics: promoting equality, removing 
distortion, and eliminating corruption. In Buckley, the Court rejected 
the equality argument; Post thinks this decision was correct. In Austin 
v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, in 1990, the Court supported the 
distortion argument. Post thinks this decision was incorrect. He agrees 
with Teachout and Lessig that the Court’s definition of corruption from 
Buckley to McCutcheon is weak and confused and wrong, but he doesn’t 
think the way out is redefining it as “undue influence.”
 
Lessig says that Post has given up on the possibility of clarifying what 
corruption is, which is a fair charge. But Post isn’t alone. Bringing 
corruption back is an odd strategy when anticorruption campaigns, like 
purity crusades, have often done more harm than good. In “Captured by 
Evil: The Idea of Corruption in Law,” the Cornell law professor Laura 
Underkuffler argues that corruption is a moral and religious idea, more 
medieval than modern, whose place in the law is troubled. Piety makes 
poor policy. One reason that campaign-finance jurisprudence is such a 
mess is that attempting to eliminate corruption is like trying to stamp 
out sin. To say as much isn’t to take a libertarian position, or even a 
cynical one. It’s not only possible to argue for better laws without 
damning either government or politics to hell; it’s necessary. 
Unregulated money in politics erodes the public’s trust in government. 
There will never be no money, but, for the public to have faith in 
government, the law has to be something a great deal stronger than: 
anything goes.
 
Aside from amending the Constitution, what can work? For Post, the only 
state interest in campaign-finance regulation that is both compatible 
with the First Amendment and rises above the threshold to interfere with 
it, because its claims are prior, is electoral integrity: “Electoral 
integrity is a compelling government interest because without it 
Americans have no reason to exercise the communicative rights guaranteed 
by the First Amendment.”
 
 
Post sees the debate over campaign-finance reform as a debate between 
those concerned about discursive democracy and those concerned about 
representative government. One is more interested in free speech, the 
other in free elections. For much of the twentieth century, he argues, a 
bridge between these two positions was a shared faith in public opinion 
and the press. The line of cases from Buckley to McCutcheon has favored 
free speech over free elections, and Post considers this a 
vulnerability—this is the fight he wants to pick—because speech can’t be 
free unless elections have integrity. As a legal strategy, that might be 
sound. But, practically, it’s worrying, because the set of ideas about 
public opinion and the practice of journalism which guided American 
democracy a century ago was never a very sturdy bridge, and, at this 
point, the bridge is out.
 
Post hasn’t repaired that bridge, or even neared it. But he has hacked 
his way through a thorny partisan thicket to a constitutional clearing. 
The problem is, once you get to Post’s clearing, what you need, to do 
anything, is evidence about the integrity of elections. He hasn’t got 
any. “I am not now engaged in the serious historical and empirical 
inquiry that would be necessary to address this issue,” he admits. 
You’re on your own until that research is done. In the meantime, it 
would be helpful if investigative bodies like the Moreland Commission 
were allowed to finish their work.
 
Daniel Halloran pleaded not guilty to federal corruption charges. His 
lawyers ventured an insanity defense. (Halloran had a benign brain tumor 
removed two years ago.) The judge denied that motion. Joseph Savino 
pleaded guilty, and is coöperating with the prosecution. The trial of 
Halloran, Vincent Tabone, and Malcolm Smith began in June. During 
opening statements, Smith’s attorney, Gerald Shargel, accused the F.B.I. 
of entrapment. Tabone’s attorney is pursuing a similar defense, charging 
the government with an attempt to “create corruption.” Both defenses 
question Moses Stern’s credibility. A few weeks into the proceedings, it 
was revealed that the prosecution had failed to turn over to the defense 
more than seventy hours of recordings—about a third of them 
conversations in Yiddish, most between Stern and a rabbi from Queens. 
Lawyers for Tabone and Smith sought and were granted a mistrial.
 
Halloran’s trial proceeded. His lawyers argued that the money Halloran 
received was a combination of campaign donations and personal loans. On 
the stand, Halloran said he’d consulted the New York City Campaign 
Finance Board’s Web site to make sure everything he was doing was legal, 
by comparing his political-consulting expenses with those publicly 
disclosed by Michael Bloomberg. In July, the jury found Halloran guilty 
on five counts. He faces up to fifty-five years in prison, and his 
lawyers are pursuing an appeal.
 
During the F.B.I.’s undercover operation, Malcolm Smith said that, if 
his plan to run for mayor of New York as a Republican didn’t work out, 
he hoped to regain his position as the Democratic leader in the Senate. 
At the White Plains Ritz-Carlton, Raj, the undercover F.B.I. agent, 
warned him that this would require bribing his fellow Democratic senators.
 
Raj: “Sometimes it takes cash, sometimes it takes checks, sometimes it 
takes a job.”
 
Smith: “Right, right, right.”
 
Smith and Tabone will be retried in January, after the Yiddish tapes 
have been translated. Meanwhile, Smith is running for reëlection. His 
name will be on the ballot in November.
 
Zephyr Teachout would like to debate Andrew Cuomo. She thinks that there 
ought to be three debates: one on education, one on immigration, and one 
on fracking. “But,” she admits, “all three would end up in a debate 
about corruption.” No debates are scheduled.
-- 
Namib
.....
Trost ist ein absurdes Wort:
Wer nicht verzweifeln kann, der muß nicht leben
(J.W. v. Goethe)

 (J.W. v. Goethe)
 
 
 
Ce ne frega un cazzo.
 
Salvini

 
 
Ce? 
A te, minus, non frega un cazzo!
Ti devi interessare dell'appartamento da un milioncino di euro a Milano,
dei castelli di Praga, dei fuoristrada, del business delle api 
e delle altre migliaia di puttanate che da anni inanelli su questo ng.
Sei un poveraccio, un po' babbeo e tanto complessato. 
Con derive eroiche infantili da ROTFL.
 
brif


Ma sai cos'è la cosa bella?
Che a parte il modo di dirlo, fatto apposta per risvegliare la deficienza dormiente di ogni pezzente rosso.. E' TUTTO VERO!!!!!:-))
Indipercui immagina quanto mi sto divertendo, coglioncello pseudomafiosetto!!!!
Pacatamente
Salvini

Il giorno domenica 24 agosto 2014 13:22:17 UTC+2, brif ha scritto:

Ah a proposito nel 1769 alcuni miei antenati vennero addirittura nominati PRINCIPI... ma non volevo fare lo sborone, per natura sono umile.
Pensa che per un certo periodo avevano in appalto pure i servizi postali della Stiria....CAPRONE PLEBEO!!!
 
Salvini

 ha scritto:

Beh, se non sai l'inglese non devi rodere cosi', come una nutria
idrofoba!
 
-- 
GiOvAnNi