In today’s Star-Ledger (NJ), Project Vote board member Frank Askin, Distinguished Professor of Law and Founding Director of the Constitutional Litigation Clinic at Rutgers School of Law-Newark, editorializes on the recent Supreme Court decision striking down the Arizona public financing law as a violation of the free speech provisions of the U.S. Constitution. The Arizona statute, which the Court struck down Monday by a decision of 5-4, would have provided a base grant of public funds to state legislative candidates who agreed not to accept or spend any other funds.
Prof. Askin writes:
So let’s get this straight. Providing the wherewithal for additional speech (a right of reply?) by a candidate, who is being drowned out by an opponent who refused public money, violates the free speech of the free-spending candidate. Or as [dissenting opinion author Elena] Kagan poetically put it: “Except in a world gone topsy-turvy, additional campaign speech and electoral competition is not a First Amendment injury”…
And by the way, the majority in this case consisted of the same five justices who, just a year ago in Citizens United, wrote that “the governing rule” of the First Amendment is “more speech, not less.”
The only explanation must be that the principle of “more speech” only applies for the conservative majority when they are talking about the unlimited speech of the corporate community and the independently wealthy, which the court there said had an unlimited right to deploy their wealth to help elect candidates of their choice.
Read Askin’s entire editorial on this important case here.