The First Amendment, Upside Down
The Supreme Court decision striking down public matching funds in Arizona’s campaign finance system is a serious setback for American democracy. The opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. in Monday’s 5-to-4 decision shows again the conservative majority’s contempt for campaign finance laws that aim to provide some balance to the unlimited amounts of money flooding the political system.
In the Citizens United case, the court ruled that the government may not ban corporations, unions and other moneyed institutions from spending in political campaigns. The Arizona decision is a companion to that destructive landmark ruling. It takes away a vital, innovative way of ensuring that candidates who do not have unlimited bank accounts can get enough public dollars to compete effectively.
Arizona’s campaign finance law provided a set amount of money in initial public support for candidates who opted into its financing system, depending on the type of election. If a candidate faced a rival who opted out, the state would match the spending of the privately financed candidate and independent groups supporting him, up to triple the initial amount. Once that limit is reached, the publicly financed candidate receives no other public funds and is barred from using private contributions, no matter how much more the privately financed candidate spends.
Chief Justice Roberts found that this mechanism “imposes a substantial burden” on the free speech rights of candidates and independent groups because it penalized them when their spending triggered additional money for a candidate who opted into the public program. The court turns the First Amendment on its head. It denies the actual effect of the Arizona law, which is not to limit spending but to increase it with public funds. The state program expands political speech by giving all candidates, not just the wealthy, a chance to run — while allowing privately financed candidates to spend as much as they want.
Justice Elena Kagan, writing in dissent, dissects the court’s willful misunderstanding of the result. Rather than a restriction on speech, she says, the trigger mechanism is a subsidy with the opposite effect: “It subsidizes and produces more political speech.” Those challenging the law, she wrote, demanded — and have now won — the right to “quash others’ speech” so they could have “the field to themselves.” She explained that the matching funds program — unlike a lump sum grant to candidates — sensibly adjusted the amount disbursed so that it was neither too little money to attract candidates nor too large a drain on public coffers.
Arizona’s system was a response to a history of terrible corruption in the state’s politics. Rather than seeing the law as a way to control corruption, the court struck it down as a limit on the right of wealthy candidates and independent groups to speak louder than others.
The ruling left in place other public financing systems without such trigger provisions, including public financing for presidential elections. It shows, however, how little the court cares about the interest of citizens in Arizona or elsewhere in keeping their electoral politics clean.
Lots of Talk, Too Little Action
The price of agricultural commodities has surged by more than a third over the past year — cereal prices by 70 percent — surpassing even the levels that sparked widespread food riots in 2008. According to the World Bank, the rise in prices pushed 44 million more people into hunger in the second half of 2010.
It is disappointing that the agriculture ministers from the 20 large industrial economies who gathered last week in Paris failed to end two policies that are a big part of the problem: bans on agricultural exports by certain producers and government supports for food-based biofuel production.
A report for the Group of 20 meeting by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Bank and others noted that eliminating or curtailing these policies would help mitigate the spikes in prices that have deepened hunger in the poorest countries in the world.
The United States, Brazil and several other biofuel makers opposed an agreement to cut support for biofuels. This country is the world’s biggest ethanol producer. The 13.5 billion gallons made here last year used about 40 percent of the nation’s corn crop. Government supports include a nearly $6 billion annual subsidy for ethanol makers.
The ministers agreed only to further study the relation between biofuel production and food prices. That is just an excuse for continuing to protect these industries. The cost should be clear to all by this point. The report to the Group of 20 noted that biofuels consumed 20 percent of the global sugar cane crop between 2007 and 2009, when food prices soared, as well as 4 percent of the beet crop and 9 percent of the world’s production of coarse grains like corn.
The ministers also failed to forbid the use of export barriers to hold down food prices at home. Argentina, Russia and more than two dozen others have adopted bans since prices began to surge, sending global prices even higher and discouraging investment in food producing regions. The ministers did agree that countries could not restrict sales to the World Food Program so it can continue to address crises. It is not enough.
The agricultural summit meeting, the first of its kind, did make some progress. The participants agreed to set up a system to monitor world food stocks and production to prevent misinformation that can contribute to price fluctuations. They also agreed on a pilot program for an emergency food reserve system to respond to shortages in vulnerable countries.
More aggressive action is needed. High energy prices and irregular weather patterns are likely to keep food prices volatile, even as demand increases from fast-growing developing countries. The first step to ensuring a steady food supply is to eliminate the most egregious distortions in agriculture policy.
A Gravel Road Too Far
It would be nice to be able to praise the Tanzanian government and President Jakaya Kikwete for dropping plans to build a road across the northern section of Serengeti National Park. The road, about 32 miles long, would have cut across one of the planet’s major migratory corridors — used by great herds of wildebeest and other animals — and one of the last of its kind on the planet.
Unfortunately, the letter announcing Tanzania’s change in plans is too ambiguous to celebrate, and it leaves the ultimate fate of Serengeti unresolved.
Tanzania now proposes to build roads right up to the edge of Serengeti. The letter, from the minister for natural resources and tourism to Unesco’s World Heritage Center, then announces that the controversial route across the park “will remain gravel road” and be managed by the Tanzanian national parks system. But such a gravel road does not now exist, since much of this section of the park is maintained as wilderness.
By conceding its hopes for an asphalt road across Serengeti, Tanzania gets a gravel road by sleight of hand. In fact, it was a plan for a gravel road across the park that caused worldwide protest last year.
Serengeti lies directly on a route from Uganda to a Tanzanian port called Tanga, on the Indian Ocean. The pressure to develop this route is intense, thanks largely to mining and other extractive industries in Uganda. Tanzania has a right, of course, to pursue its economic future. A major part of its economic present is revenue from tourism, mostly related to Serengeti. It is time for the Tanzanian government to do the right thing, economically and environmentally, and declare its unequivocal commitment to protect Serengeti’s integrity.
New Jersey’s Governor, Champion of Inequality
New York’s approval of same-sex marriage was a testament to Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s political courage. In the New Jersey governor’s office, it is good sense that is in short supply on this issue.
It appears as though there are sufficient votes in the State Legislature to pass a marriage-equality bill in New Jersey — a positive change from last year when the freedom to marry was defeated in the Democratic-led State Senate. The obstacle is Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican.
“I’m not a fan of same-sex marriage,” Governor Christie said on the NBC News program “Meet the Press” on Sunday — a rather strange way of putting it. “I believe marriage should be between one man and one woman.” He vowed to veto any bill resembling the historic civil rights law that was approved in New York with help from his Democratic peer, Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Mr. Christie said the state would “continue to pursue civil unions,” a separate and inferior category of recognition that still results in inequality.
A new court fight looms. On Wednesday, a civil rights group, Lambda Legal, plans to file a lawsuit in New Jersey Superior Court with the goal of showing that civil unions fail to meet the mandate of equal legal rights and financial benefits for same-sex couples set by the State Supreme Court in a 2006 ruling. The group’s hope, which we share, is that the case leads to a ruling by New Jersey’s top court ending the exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage.
It should not take a court’s edict for lawmakers to do what is right. Governor Christie’s veto threat is no excuse for legislators to sit on their hands. The president of the State Senate, Stephen Sweeney, recently said that he had made the “biggest mistake” of his career when he withheld his support for same-sex marriage last year for timid political reasons, and at a time when a Democrat, Jon Corzine, was in the governor’s chair. He can make amends by building a veto-proof majority for the marriage bill.
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