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this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2024
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I could be wrong, but isn't a blatant quid pro quo basically the only way to wind up on the wrong side of the Citizens United decision? Didn't the Supreme Court rule that, unless a candidate was engaged in open bribery, campaign contributions constitute free speech? I could be misremembering/misinterpretating, and he'll never face any consequences for it anyway, but it would be very funny if there was a Supreme Court ruling that said, "As long as you're not dumb enough to admit it's a bribe it's not illegal," and he still fucked that up.
The Supreme Court ruling splits a very fine hair. If you give a government official money and say "make sure my housing development goes through", that's a bribe and it's illegal. If you show them money and say "I'll give you this if my housing development goes through", that's a gratuity and is perfectly fine.
Why, yes, this is a stupid as it sounds.
Wrong Supreme Court decision. They said Citizens United.
The core of the CU decision is that engaging in political speech is not a campaign contribution. Even if you spend money to engage in that speech. Even if you pay some 3rd party organization to engage in that speech on your behalf, unless that 3rd party organization is operating in collusion with the actual campaign.
Or to put it another way, if you run off a bunch of flyers supporting Kamala Harris and pass them out, that's not a campaign contribution despite ink and paper (and your labor) not being free. If Staples agrees to print those flyers free of charge for you, Staples is not making a campaign contribution. Unless the campaign itself is involved with the process. Now, just scale that up to massive corps and political nonprofits.
People try to describe it as "deciding money is speech and corporations are people", but both of those are long held by law - corporations have had 1A rights for a long, long time and likewise arguments that restricting things used to engage in protected expression is in fact restricting protected expression have held for a long, long time (for example you can't just place a $10,000,000/week tax on printing presses to silence newspapers).
But in practice what happens is people/companies make donations directly to a candidate then all of their priorities get fulfilled by the candidate even though the people that voted for the candidate don't support the issue.
Except when we're talking about someone like musk donating millions to a candidate, he's not donating directly to the candidate, he's donating to some third party who's advertising for the benefit of the candidate but isn't technically coordinating with the actual campaign as an end run around campaign finance limits.
That's the whole point of a PAC - hypothetically they exist to forward some issue but often that's just code for a specific set of candidates for various offices.
For example, Americans Against Murdering Babies is probably going to support GOP candidates across the board, likely emphasizing abortion. Whereas Americans For Medical Privacy is likely doing exactly the reverse.
a) yes
b) maybe he'll be held accountable for this within the course of the next 20 years
He'll be posthumously sentenced at this point
Hope and pray that the courts see it your way!