[EL] Informational benefit outweighed by cost?

Fri May 11 14:59:55 PDT 2012

I am a little confused:  One cannot regulate the size of campaign
contributions to elected officials because it's insufficiently likely
that government officials will give favorable treatment to large donors,
but one also cannot require disclosure of the names of campaign
contributors because it's sufficiently likely that government officials
will give unfavorable treatment to their opponents' large donors?

Fredric D. Woocher

Strumwasser & Woocher LLP

10940 Wilshire Blvd., Ste. 2000

Los Angeles, CA 90024

fwoocher at strumwooch.com

(310) 576-1233

From: law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu
[mailto:law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu] On Behalf Of
Steve Hoersting
Sent: Friday, May 11, 2012 2:30 PM
To: Mark Schmitt
Cc: law-election at department-lists.uci.edu
Subject: Re: [EL] Informational benefit outweighed by cost?

Was VanderSloot intimidated?  I don't know.  Possibly not, see this
excerpt.

	Mr. VanderSloot acknowledges that "when I first learned that
President Obama's campaign had singled me out on his 'enemies list,' I
knew it was like taping a target on my back." But the more he's thought
it through, "the public beatings and false accusations that followed are
no deterrent. These tactics will not work in America." He's [that is,
VanderSloot's] even "contemplating a second donation." 

But if he is not intimidated, he would be a rare breed.  The point I
keep raising is that we no longer are seeing only citizen-on-citizen
retribution a la Doe v. Reed.  Rather, we may be seeing
government-on-citizen retribution.  After all, the man who coined the
phrase, "The deterrent effect of campaign disclosure should not be
underestimated" is a sitting Senator, not a researcher at Media Matters.

This is interesting stuff to discuss on the list, and I continue to
think that if, as it appears, we have officials entering the
intimidation fray it marks a difference in kind (from the discussion in,
say, Doe v. Reed).  No need to remind me that the intimidator in
McIntyre was, technically, a government official.  The malefactor in
McIntyre was small potatoes.  Here is what I mean:

VanderSloot is CEO of company making dietary products.  I wonder if
businessmen less brave than he have calculated how much relief they will
be able to obtain from courts or Congress if their medical products are
disallowed by the IPAB soon-to-be-selected by the next administration,
whoever that administration may be.  The relief available in Court or
Congress is nil, not least because the discretion the agency has is vast
that nearly any decision is "defensible."

Given New Deal jurisprudence, the time for concerned businessmen to
protect their economic interests is in the political process now, not in
courts later.

What I want people to consider is that as we approach a state of affairs
where regulatory agencies increasingly are given powers so vast that
they effectively possess the means of retaliation, and where officials
seeking re-election are displaying the motive to retaliate against
businessmen, the informational interest permitting compelled disclosure
of independent and non-corrupting political speech is not the slam dunk
it used to be -- not if the Socialist Workers exemption to compelled
disclosure continues to prove a hollow remedy.

Good weekend, Mark,

Steve

On Fri, May 11, 2012 at 4:29 PM, Mark Schmitt <schmitt.mark at gmail.com>
wrote:

Wait, Vandersloot was intimidated?? You do realize that the guy has a
long history of attacking and intimidating any and all critics,
including Forbes, which first put up an article about "Four Romney
donors he doesn't want you to know about," by a Republican operative,
and then pulled the article after Vandersloot's legal threats. He placed
a full page newspaper ad, signed in his own name, attacking a reporter
as "a homosexual." He put anti-gay billboards all over the state of
Idaho. He's a totally public figure, not, as Strassel pretends, just a
quiet citizen who wanted to make a contribution. 

I don't think divorce records should be made public, and they're usually
not (and there's also no indication in Strassel's article that the clerk
actually complied with the request for the records). But certainly if
corporations are going to be major players in electoral politics, that
activity should be open to public scrutiny, and the only way for that
information to be useful is if we can also know the corporation's
regulatory interests and legal issues. For example, Don Blankenship
didn't give $3 million to replace a W. Virginia Supreme Court justice
just to express his political views. It would have been useful for
voters to know about the expenditure, and also about the
legal/regulatory issues that motivated Blankenship and Massey Coal.

Mark Schmitt
Senior Fellow, The Roosevelt Institute <http://www.newdeal20.org> 
202/246-2350 <tel:202%2F246-2350> 
gchat or Skype: schmitt.mark
@mschmitt9 <https://twitter.com/#%21/mschmitt9> 

On 5/11/2012 2:45 PM, Steve Hoersting wrote:

	Kim Strassel has another piece in today's WSJ intimating that
the compelled disclosure of independent, non-corrupting speech poses too
high a cost on speech rights for too little benefit in voter information
-- especially absent a meaningful exemption available not just to
Vandersloot, for whom it is too late, but to other would-be funders
noticing this treatment, and eager to seek an exemption as John Doe or
Jane Doe.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230407030457739641256003820
8.html

	-- 
	Stephen M. Hoersting

	_______________________________________________
	Law-election mailing list
	Law-election at department-lists.uci.edu
	http://department-lists.uci.edu/mailman/listinfo/law-election

_______________________________________________
Law-election mailing list
Law-election at department-lists.uci.edu
http://department-lists.uci.edu/mailman/listinfo/law-election

-- 
Stephen M. Hoersting

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://webshare.law.ucla.edu/Listservs/law-election/attachments/20120511/252afa42/attachment.html>