Soros is a US Citizen I believe.Is it not illegal for candidates to take money from non US citizens? - Fai Mao
IIRC you are correct. The glaring issue is that Democrats were unanimous, or close to it, behind McCain-Feingold and any and all unconstitutional restrictions (“reform”) on the exercise of free political press. And “the press” was behind it too - at least, the associated press cabal.Theoretically the Federal Election Commission will now come down on Soros and like a ton of bricks Hillary for conspiring to evade “Campaign Finance Reform.” (All right, no snickering in class!)
The scare quotes around “the press” are justified by the fact that, under 1A, everyone has freedom of the press. Jim Robinson exercises freedom of the press by hosting FR on his server; you could do the same (using your own (e.g. licensed) software and server (and your own unique name). Posters to FR don’t exercise freedom of the press by posting here; JimRob can take down any post he doesn’t want on FR without explaining it to any legal authority. The way he exercises that authority is what gives FR its distinct character. And attracts, or does not attract, particular people.
Anyway, we are currently outraged over “the media” bashing Trump and ignoring the issues. Any individual newspaper has a perfect right to do that; the scandal is that all newspapers, and nearly all broadcast journalism, does exactly the same thing. And would do, for any Republican. The intent of the First Amendment is that there will be open competition among promoters of opinion. Not objectivity (implying homogeneity) among them.
Time was, when the former was the norm, now the latter is. It took me a lot longer than I like to admit to myself to figure out a rationale for the difference. What made the difference was the telegraph. The telegraph, and the Associated Press. The telegraph made the kind of newspaper we take for granted - with news from all over the world - possible. But expensive. The AP conserves scarce, expensive bandwidth in the distribution of the news nationwide. The AP and its membership of newspapers (etc) constitute a monopoly; SCOTUS so ruled in 1945. But the AP did not violate the Antitrust act when it was created, because that happened in the 1840s, and Sherman only dates back to 1890.
Even when SCOTUS ruled against the AP (in 1945) it did not break the AP up; its mission was deemed critical and it was “too big to fail.” That was then, it is now seven decades later. Above I styled telegraphy bandwidth “scarce and expensive.” In the Internet age, it is dirt cheap. An honest SCOTUS - which if Hillary wins I will never see again in my lifetime - would declare the AP a blatant violation of Sherman. An honest SCOTUS would declare “Campaign Finance Reform” - and all its works, including the FEC - an abomination and a blatant violation of 1A. An honest SCOTUS would declare the FCC - federal regulation of communication - to be likewise anachronistic. We should be able to “broadcast” via cell phone; the government should have no authority to shut down a Rush Limbaugh by threatening members of his network with loss of license.
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The real problem is that we allow those who become citizens to keep any others that they may have.