[by Gloria Bilchik]     “What if you could get a text or email alert every time a wealthy donor cut a fresh check to your member of Congress?” asks the Sunlight Foundation.  That kind of instant disclosure would go a long way toward exposing who’s wielding [or should I say, “buying”] influence in political campaigns. It seems like a pie-in-the-sky idea, but it’s not. In fact, there’s a bill in Congress right now that could help make that scenario a reality.

It’s called the Real Time Transparency Act. [Remarkably, it has a name that actually describes what it would do–unlike so many Orwellian-named bills whose titles suggest the direct opposite of their intent.] It’s sponsored in the Senate by Angus King [I-ME] and in the House by Beto O’Rourke [D-TX].The bill requires 48-hour disclosure of so-called hard money campaign contributions of $1,000 or more to candidates, committees and parties.

This bill is especially important in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decisions in Citizens United and McCutcheon. In Citizens United, the court declared that money equals speech, leading it to rule that corporations cannot be barred from donating to campaigns. In McCutcheon v. FEC, the court destroyed the last vestiges of campaign-finance sanity, ruling that there should  not be an overall cap on the amount individuals can donate to political parties, candidates and PACs.

At the same time, in his opinion in McCutcheon, Chief Justice John Roberts  asserted that “with modern technology, disclosure now offers a particularly effective means of arming the voting public with information.”  The Sunlight Foundation notes that, while Roberts’ comment is a nod toward the importance of disclosure, but it doesn’t take into account that..

…laws don’t exist to ensure effective, complete and timely disclosure. Right now, we have a system in which the public must wait as long as three months before some contributions are made public; in the case of U.S. Senate candidates, even longer because candidates for Senate still file their campaign reports on paper, delaying disclosure by weeks after reports are due.

Sometimes that delay means voters go to the polls without knowing who contributed to a campaign.

The Real Time Transparency Act isn’t the ultimate solution to campaign-finance reform, of course. There are other actions that must be taken to overturn these two democracy-killing Supreme Court decisions: It’s going to take an amendment to the U.S. Constitution to do that–and that could take quite a while. In the meantime, this bill is a helpful step in the right direction.

I’m less than optimistic about this bill’s chances, for the obvious reasons that the very politicians who would be voting on it are the people who don’t want you to know who their fat-cat donors are. To get this deal done, Congress would probably have to set an effective date far in the future–and my cynical side thinks that our current crop of representatives would be inclined to set such a date for 10 years after everyone currently serving in Congress is dead.

In the meantime, we can at least try to encourage our representatives to do the right thing, right? The Sunlight Foundation offers these suggestions for helping to build momentum:

Sign our petition calling on Congress to pass the bill.

Write a letter to the editor of your local newspaper, or write a post for your blog. [Or link to this post!]

Share one of our political cartoons on Facebook, Twitter, and Google +

The post Congress should pass the Real Time Transparency Act appeared first on Occasional Planet.

So often we hear about our inherent rights to what is guaranteed in the Constitution. If it’s regarding free speech, we are entitled to say anything because the First Amendment protects us. If it’s about owning a gun, any of us can do so because the Second Amendment guarantees it.

Our founders provided very little guidance in these situations in which one right collides with another. This certainly came to play in the recent McCutcheon v FEC Supreme Court case regarding financial contributions to political campaigns. In a 5-4 decision, SCOTUS ruled that individuals could essentially contribute as much as they wanted to in as many campaigns as they wanted to. The decision was clearly a victory for those who believe that those rights guaranteed by the First Amendment are essentially inviolate. The right to free speech extends beyond the spoken or written word to money, which is now considered another means of expression.

Justice Stephen Breyer, speaking for the minority (which also included Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor) wrote, “The right to participate in democracy through political contributions is protected by the First Amendment, but that right is not absolute. Congress may regulate campaign contributions to protect against corruption or the appearance of corruption. See, e.g., Buckley v. Valeo.”

The minority argued that the Federal Elections Commission is mandated to “prevent quid pro quo corruption,” and its appearance—was a “sufficiently important governmental inter­est” to place limits to campaign contributions. This means that the right to express oneself through money in a political campaign is not absolute. There comes a point at which society as a whole has the right to take steps to try to keep its electoral process as clean and honest as possible.

We should keep in mind that placing limits on campaign contributions is far from the first time that the Court has ruled that the right to free speech is not absolute. In numerous decisions, the Court has ruled that an individual cannot slander another individual. In other words one cannot knowingly and willfully say something that is false with the intent of harming someone else. And it’s well known that “you can’t yell fire in a crowded theater.” That dictum emanates from Supreme Court rulings that one cannot say something that causes a threat to public safety.

What the Court has not said is that our electoral process (outlined in Article. I., Section 1. and Article. II., Section. 1. of the U.S. Constitution) has as much of a right to be honest as people have the right to free speech. The dilemma of protecting both the right to free speech and the right of citizens to have honest elections clearly come in conflict with one another. In recent years, the Court has ruled that the right to free expression through campaign contributions is of greater value than the right of people to know that their elections are free of undue outside influences.

In practical terms, because Republicans are generally the party of “big money,” they benefit more than Democrats from few restrictions on campaign contributions. However, Democrats have worked to take advantage of the loopholes in previous restrictions on campaign contributions, and Barack Obama was the first presidential candidate to refuse to take public monies for his campaign, so that he could raise an essentially unlimited amount of money from private sources.

In light of the McCutcheon v FEC ruling, we are left with two ways of cleaning up our elections. The first would be a constitutional amendment protecting our right to honest elections by curtailing private contributions and taking additional steps to eliminate electoral fraud. The second would be for candidates to voluntarily refuse contributions and for the public to consider that to be such a positive step that it will back such candidates.

The hurdles that must be cleared for a constitutional amendment that protects our right to free elections to be passed are monumental. It’s highly doubtful that any such amendment will be forthcoming in the near future. So, we must ask candidates and the public to accept the notion that excessive money in politics is a bad thing, and for the public to hold candidates who raise (or their proxies raise) excessive amounts of money to be a stain on their reputations and qualifications to hold public office. That too seems to be asking for too much, but we should at least try.

The post Free speech and free spending vs. fair elections: A Constitutional dilemma appeared first on Occasional Planet.