His proposal misses the point that money is speech. His favored solution is limiting campaigns to 100$ per person. Then he of course would need to limit celebrity endorsements to the 100$ limit, or the amount of volunteer time to 100$ worth, or in any way supporting a candidate to the value of 100$ per person. Otherwise you're enabling those who have more time available and greater reach due to celebrity to have a greater reach than those who are busy working to produce things for the world, and have money to spend but not the time or voice that others have. It is merely favoring one group over another. Which is just plain wrong.
He wants to limit donations to citizens (thus excluding corporations). You can make all the analogies you like about time, celebrity and money, but none of that is as distorting as corporate-funded lobbying.
Corporate money completely subverts the basic principle of "one person, one vote." By pouring vast sums of money into lobbying, corporations have influence all out of proportion to that principle.
Are you against a group of people forming an organization around an issue and then spending money they raise? How about 10 guys who pool their money to take out an tv ad for candidate they like? Is that ok?
I disagree. The idea that money is speech is absurd. Money is different from speech for the same reason working on a web startup is different from working as a physician: a difference in scaling. The differences in wealth are so absurdly large, and spending money, compared to speaking, costs essentially no time. The end result is that allowing people to spend money to have others speak for them leads to much larger differences in influence. It is not "merely favoring one group over another".
Tell that to the Supreme Court. Which has said that, because of free speech, corporations are allowed to spend as much money as they wish directly advertising for political causes.
Yeah, and they're wrong. That's why one of the main features of the campaign is a Constitutional amendment. People tend to forget that the Supreme Court isn't the Supreme Law of the Land -- they only interpret it.
They may be wrong, but with the way common law works, a lot of judges are obliged to judge in accord with their reasoning.
As for the phrase "only interpret it", the way the law is interpreted bears so little relation to what is written that there is no "only" about it. For the most obviously extreme example, consider how radically the interpretation of the phrase To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes changed in the 1930s.
If you're unfamiliar with that history, the short version is that Congress went from being able to regulate direct trade crossing state boundaries to being able to regulate anything that relates to commerce, even indirectly. For instance the Civil Rights Act is legal because of the Commerce Clause. I like the outcome, but do not agree with the reasoning used to get there.
The Supreme Court is fundamentally just a bunch of people wearing robes. Just because they think money is the same as speech does not mean it really is, or rather, that it should be treated as such. Also, they are humans, and can be bought or threatened behind the scenes.
