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Advocacy Blog
Monday, July 02, 2007
Continued WRTL Commentary; Lumping Nonprofit Groups Together With Corporations
A National Journal ($$) column explains how the prohibition on corporations paying for broadcasts that mention federal candidates 60 days before a general election or 30 days before a primary in the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (BCRA) sought to prevent business corporations from getting involved in election campaigns, but in turn censored nonprofit groups' criticism of the work of elected officials. "Because nearly all nonprofit advocacy groups are incorporated, the effect was to extend to such groups a ban ostensibly aimed at companies like General Electric and Dow Chemical. Indeed, it was the nonprofit citizens groups, not Big Business, that had bought many or most of the attack ads that legislators so resent."
However, the Court missed an opportunity to apply a "principled, pragmatic, nonideological solution," supported in the amicus brief filed on behalf of a group of charities, including OMB Watch.
The ideal solution would have been for the Supreme Court to uphold the ad ban as applied to business corporations and to carve out an exception for nonprofit advocacy groups. How many justices proposed doing that? Not one. Instead, in FEC v. Wisconsin Right to Life Inc., the five conservatives in the majority and the four liberal dissenters alike focused on all-or-nothing arguments treating all corporations as fungible.
One reason for taking this "all-or-nothing" approach is because the Court sees no difference between the speech rights of a business corporation and individuals and citizen groups. A blog from the Campaign Legal Center addresses this; "The lack of interest in the nonprofit tax exempt status of WRTL is consistent with a jurisprudence of political speech without reference to speakers." Chief Justice Roberts is not concerned about the context or who is speaking (a 501(c)(3) or not), but concerned about the content of the political speech itself.
Posted by Amanda Adams
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