Anonymous political speech. Foreign money in U.S. elections. The proliferation of super PACs. How grave a threat do any of things pose to American democracy? Not much, according to a panel of conservative attorneys, who gathered Thursday at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C.
The high-profile legal minds on the CPAC panel largely agreed that the changes to the campaign finance landscape are grounds for celebration.
Thanks to the Citizens United decision, we’ve seen “more voices, more competition, and more accountability,” said panelist Benjamin Barr, a senior fellow at the Goldwater Institute, a conservative think tank.
“Without SpeechNow.org, the Republican nomination would have been sewed up weeks ago,” added Brad Smith, the former chairman of the Federal Election Commission who co-founded the Center for Competitive Politics, a nonprofit that promotes First Amendment political rights. “And in 2010, we would have had fewer competitive races.”
In the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission case in 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed corporations and unions to spend unlimited amounts of money from their treasuries on ads and other activities to influence the election or defeat of federal candidates so long as they are not coordinating with the candidates’ campaigns.
A few months later, in SpeechNow.org v. Federal Election Commission, used the Supreme Court’s reasoning and decided that limits on individual contributions to groups that make independent expenditures are unconstitutional.