On 4/8/11, Steve Klein <stephen.klein.esq@gmail.com> wrote:
Leaving aside the rather beaten-to-death divergence of principle over
whether money, in fact, buys votes (never yours, just your silly neighbors',
of course), I'm curious if listers have considered the implications of
translating this equality-of-financial-condition under the First Amendment
to other amendments?
Yes, I believe I've pointed out myself that extra wealth should not
mean more due process rights (like more time to speak in oral argument
in court than one's less wealthy opponent, or more time for the
wealthy to speak in the public comment section of a city council
meeting).
The crux of the underlying debate goes to whether equality as a
principle extends anywhere beyond the narrowest frame of actual
counting of votes, given the strong legal principle of one person/one
vote in elections.
I point out that elections are not only uniquely important but clearly
in a class of their own, because voters act not in their capacity as
citizens or subjects of the law, but as sovereigns. For this reason
(and related corollaries to it) the equality principle acts with its
strongest force in the context of elections.
But, as pointed out in this post (through examples inapposite to
elections), we do not have an equality of wealth principle analogous
to one person/one vote, and thus people can and do have more money,
more houses or more guns than other folks do, because we don't have a
one person/one house or a one person/one gun principle, and in
exercising those rights or privileges no one is acting in their
capacity as a co-equal sovereign voter. If we indeed have a democracy
based on equality, it's like a partnership with 130 million or so
equal partners participating in an election, how is it that some of
those equal partners get a grossly unequal and superior amount of time
to speak to the whole group?
Citizens United is widely rejected by large supermajorities of both
conservatives and liberals, and is remarkable for its assertion of a
right of speech that transcends what any rational group of equals
would freely agree to.
Paul Lehto, J.D.