Sometimes, Money Is Speech

On Monday, Kevin Drum of Mother Jones discussed an Arizona campaign finance law that’s facing scrutiny before the Supreme Court.  The law ensures that candidates with publicly funded campaigns have funds sufficient to match those with privately funded campaigns, but opponents say this is a restriction on free speech, the argument being:

The only ways a self-financed candidate could prevent the state from helping to put out the message of the subsidized candidate — a “windfall” — would be to reduce the volume of his or her own speech, or at least to rearrange the timing of the speech, with negative effect. Either of those restraints, the petitions argued, would impose the campaigning burden that the Supreme Court had found unconstitutional in the Davis case.

The argument against this is that money ≠ speech, and candidates with lots of money don’t have the right to their speech drowning out everyone else’s.  The solution?  Make sure there’s some sort of funding parity among all the candidates for an office so they have a roughly equal chance of being heard by voters.

This is exactly the right solution, but I think the reasoning is a bit confused.  Proponents of campaign finance parity love to make the point that money is not speech.  Though that may be true in a trivial sense, for the purposes of political campaigns, they basically are the same.  Money is how speech is mediated: it costs money to run TV and radio ads, to put up campaign flyers, to canvass, etc.  If you don’t have the money to do these things (or to do them as well as your opponents), then people won’t hear your speech, and for all intents and purposes you haven’t said anything.  Campaign funding parity is essential to safeguarding the right to free speech of all the candidates.

That may seem to be a sort of minor point—I haven’t come to any substantively different conclusions than other proponents of campaign finance regulation—but I think it’s important to remember that political rights (including, but not limited to, the right to free speech) are not just abstractions.  They’re often mediated through material factors like money, and in certain cases, like elections, it becomes very important to pay attention to how those material factors are used.  In those cases, whether or not we regulate those factors determines whether we enjoy healthy, robust civil liberties.

(Photo by Newtown grafitti under a Creative Commons license)