Imagine you\u2019re unhappy with the performance in office of some incumbent politician. You throw your hat in the ring and proceed to spend months raising the hundreds of thousands of dollars necessary to wage a viable electoral challenge. Or, maybe you\u2019ve spent decades of hard work amassing the private, after-tax savings necessary to fund such an effort on your own.<\/p>\n
In response, your state government takes hundreds of thousands of dollars extracted from taxpayers against their will — including, ironically enough, taxes you yourself have paid — and hands that money to the politician you\u2019re attempting to defeat, explaining it\u2019s \u201cnot fair\u201d that you\u2019re raising and spending more money than your poor, pathetic opponent, who only starts out with all the name recognition and other advantages of elected office.<\/p>\n
It sounds like far-out fiction, but it\u2019s actually been happening in the state of Arizona, home of \u201ccampaign reform\u201d champion Sen. John McCain-Feingold. Arizona election \u201creformers\u201d wanted to limit the amount of money spent on campaigns, see — handing an automatic advantage to well-known incumbents. To pull this off, they\u2019ve been bribing those who agree to limit their expenditures by handing them tax money for their campaigns.<\/p>\n
But the politicians won\u2019t play by those rules if a challenger refuses the government handouts, instead going out and raising a larger campaign chest, privately. The solution? If a challenger who\u2019s not accepting public funds raises \u201ctoo much\u201d money, Arizona \u201cmakes up the difference\u201d by handing more taxpayer funds to the incumbent!<\/p>\n
Fortunately, in another step back toward free speech and common sense, the Supreme Court on June 8 stopped Arizona from distributing campaign subsidies to publicly funded candidates facing big-spending opponents.<\/p>\n
The court granted a stay request from opponents of the decade-old law that subsidizes state candidates who agree to spend only public money — other people\u2019s tax payments — on their campaigns. (Do we need to point out that most third party candidates, already struggling to get their views heard, \u201cdon\u2019t qualify\u201d for all this government largess?)<\/p>\n
The high court will now decide whether to review the lower court decisions.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe subsidies are an attempt to blunt the influence of campaign contributors,\u201d The Washington Post explains. \u201cIn order to keep the publicly financed candidates from being roundly outspent, new subsidies are doled out according to the fund-raising and spending of their privately financed opponents. But those candidates, some of whom are self-financed, say the law forces them to limit their spending to avoid triggering more public money for their opponents.\u201d<\/p>\n
A federal judge in Arizona, quite sensibly, said that made the law unconstitutional. But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit — the nation\u2019s most collectivist — disagreed, setting up the issue for the high court. Opponents of the law asked the high court to stop the next round of public payments, which were scheduled for June 22, while deciding whether to hear the case.<\/p>\n
A brief submitted by an intervener in the case, Clean Elections Institute, said disallowing the subsidies would \u201clikely distort the outcome of the 2010 elections in Arizona.\u201d<\/p>\n
As an example, it pointed to the governor\u2019s race. Republican Gov. Jan Brewer, a publicly funded candidate, is eligible to receive more than $2.1 million under the current plan. \u201cIf matching funds were enjoined, that amount will drop by 66 percent to $707,447.\u201d Her privately financed GOP opponent Buz Mills, the brief said, already has spent nearly $2.3 million.<\/p>\n
In fact, it\u2019s the dole-out-the-taxpayer-funds scheme that \u201cdistorts\u201d the outcome of Arizona elections. While voters are of course free to vote for a low-spending candidate, and spending the most millions doesn\u2019t always guarantee election (thank goodness), campaign contributions are one way law-abiding Americans can help promote the governing philosophy they favor. When did it become government\u2019s business to try and reverse such private judgments — using the taxpayers\u2019 own money to back candidates they may abhor?<\/p>\n
This is not about the merits of Gov. Brewer or her opponent — Arizona voters will decide that question. But the high court, which has been properly suspicious of many of these \u201ccampaign finance reform\u201d schemes of late, should indeed review the Arizona law, and — I hope — throw it out.<\/p>\n
Incumbents have plenty of electoral advantages already, without letting them dip into public funds to finance their efforts to hang onto power … and without punishing challengers who raise \u201ctoo much money\u201d by allowing government officials to reach in and put their thumbs on the scale. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Imagine you\u2019re unhappy with the performance in office of some incumbent politician. You throw your hat in the ring and proceed to spend months raising the hundreds of thousands of dollars necessary to wage a viable electoral challenge. Or, maybe you\u2019ve spent decades of hard work amassing the private, after-tax savings necessary to fund such […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[30,39,5,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-537","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2008-election","category-2010-election","category-elections","category-free-speech"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pWqFl-8F","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/537","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=537"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/537\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":538,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/537\/revisions\/538"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=537"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=537"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=537"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}