Posted on 06/25/2007 8:46:09 AM PDT by neverdem
Associated Press
The Supreme Court loosened restrictions Monday on corporate- and union-funded television ads that air close to elections, weakening a key provision of a landmark campaign finance law.
The court, split 5-4, upheld an appeals court ruling that an anti-abortion group should have been allowed to air ads during the final two months before the 2004 elections.
The case involved advertisements that Wisconsin Right to Life was prevented from broadcasting. The ads asked voters to contact the state's two senators, Democrats Russ Feingold and Herb Kohl, and urge them not to filibuster President Bush's judicial nominees.
Feingold, a co-author of the campaign finance law, was up for re-election in 2004.
The provision in question was aimed at preventing the airing of issue ads that cast candidates in positive or negative lights while stopping short of explicitly calling for their election or defeat. Sponsors of such ads have contended they are exempt from certain limits on contributions in federal elections.
Chief Justice John Roberts, joined by his conservative allies, wrote a majority opinion upholding the appeals court ruling.
The majority itself was divided in how far justices were willing to go in allowing issue ads.
Three justices, Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, would have overruled the court's 2003 decision upholding the constitutionality of the provision.
Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito said only that the Wisconsin group's ads are not the equivalent of explicit campaign ads and are not covered by the court's 2003 decision.
IMHO, this knocks out the 30 days before a primary and 60 days before the general election restriction on issue ads.
Do they think that if they saturate us early, we won’t be so excited about bad proposals?
This is interesting. In fact, it appears it does NOT do away with the restrictions at all. It merely says that the ads in question were not campaign ads. In fact, if you read the article, apparantly it's not even clear that Alito and Roberts would overturn CFR on speech grounds.
I disagree. I think the decision is more limited than that. It is good news for free speech, in that it does loosen the restrictions but it upholds the general principle. Groups will just need to be more clever in the way they present the ads. I don’t think we’ll return to the 2000 ads where Bush is dragging James Byrd by the back of his pickup truck but we will probably see anti-candidate ads thinly disguised as issue ads.
Am I reading this right? The story is rather skimpy, but this has the most text that I can find.
It appears that the bad news is that Roberts and Alito didn’t go along with Scalia, Thomas and Kennedy, because it seems that the three of them were ready to scrap McCain-Feingold altogether.
Email your pro-amnesty senators NOW!
Tell them “guess what, The Supreme Court has just ruled that we WILL be allowed to remind the electorate immediately before the next election about the treachery you are currently engaged in”.
Yea, I wonder why Roberts and Alito were unwilling to overturn the 30 and 60 day speech limits. Instead, all they said was this ad wasnt a campaign ad. The other conservatives were ready to overturn. Wonder what went wrong with Roberts/Alito.
Exactly. All they did was say this ad wasn’t a campaign ad. And they apparantly balked on overturning it on speech grounds.
Great news.
Reading takes time, too. The news ain't that great.
And raises a possible “red flag” on Roberts and Alito.
I think there is a doctrine in the Supreme Court where of a constitutional issue can be avoided, they will do so utilizing other grounds to reach the same result. That Roberts and Alito deferred to this protocol is not surprising...
If that is the case, then they are indeed Justices that judge each case on it’s merits and are strictly behaving as interpretors of the law.
Repeal the 17th amendment and eliminate 33 of the most expensive elections that occur every two years. Without the elections, there are no campaigns, and no need for campaign financing.
There are no issue ads, no hard vs. soft money, no complicated 501(c)(3) regulations to navigate through.
Simple concept, huh?
Repeal the 17th amendment -- It's the "Fairness Doctrine for Congress!"
-PJ
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