How to balance freedom, fairness in political marketplace

Stewart and Colbert use humour to illustrate the absurdity of laws governing the funding of politicians — and their attack ads

For once, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have met their match. If you’ve not been following, Stewart has taken over control of Colbert’s “Super PAC” — a private, supposedly independent fundraising organization, or “political action committee” as they’re called in the U. S. — while Colbert runs for “President of South Carolina.”

The two comedians make an elaborate show of not communicating with each other, in obedience to U. S. law, even as they are very obviously communicating with each other.

But nothing they could do could top the act by Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich. Each protests loudly at the millions of dollars the other’s Super PAC has spent on advertising attacking him. Each professes not to have seen his own Super PAC’S ads, then defends their contents as true, then piously asserts that if they contain any allegations that are false they should, of course, be corrected — all the while insisting he has had no communication with the organization responsible.

It’s the U. S. campaign finance laws, in other words, that have become the biggest joke.

Whatever restrictions the candidates and parties are under as to how they raise and spend funds, the Super PACS can raise funds in any amount from virtually any source and spend it in any way they see fit, to exactly the same purpose.

At the other extreme, there is Canada. If independent advocacy groups are, absurdly, under no restriction in the U. S., in Canada they are absurdly restricted. While political parties were limited to spending roughly $ 21 million each in the last federal election campaign, so- called “third- party” groups were confined to just over $ 180,000.

The appearance last week of a single ad, available so far only on Youtube, criticizing the Liberal interim leader, Bob Rae, was enough to prompt demands for draconian curbs on such expressions of political opinion, even between elections.

At which point things become not so much absurd as chilling. It’s fair to say the ad’s sponsor, the National Citizens Coalition ( president emeritus: Stephen Harper), is more or less shilling for the governing Conservatives. But what if they weren’t? What if they were just a group of people who wanted to make their views known?

The concern is not entirely illegitimate. We don’t have to look to the States for examples of unregulated third- party spending run amok: in Ontario, where electoral laws are nothing like as strict, the Working Families Coalition — a front for unions, and by implication the governing Liberals — spent millions of dollars before and during the last election attacking the provincial Conservatives.

Are those the only options, then? No. There’s a third way.

The purely libertarian view, as set out by the U. S. Supreme Court in the decision that opened the Super PAC floodgate, is that “money is speech”: to prevent people from spending money to express a view amounts to preventing them from expressing it. Up to a point, that’s a reasonable position.

Even our Supreme Court agrees. What was previously a total ban on third- party advertising here was rolled back to the present near- ban.

Even the U. S. Supreme Court would probably accept the legitimacy of limiting contributions to political parties, insofar as these could otherwise come to resemble bribes. So the slightly- less- libertarian position would permit limits on spending for private political advocacy, the more nearly it resembled a direct contribution to a party: ads that explicitly supported or opposed a candidate or party, for example, rather than a cause or view.

What might such a regime look like? Start from first principles. It is widely agreed that every citizen should have equal ability to influence the outcome of an election at the ballot box: one person, one vote. It follows they should have roughly equal ability to do so in the course of the campaign. In terms of the present argument, they should each be able to spend roughly the same amount on it. That suggests a system based on individual contributions — no union, corporate or government money — and individual contribution limits, much as we have now.

But how each chooses to participate should be up to the individual. Whether he chooses to contribute to a political party or to an advocacy group or to spend his money directly, it should be no business of the state. Rather than have one system of contribution limits for parties and another for advocacy groups or individuals, they should all come under the same umbrella: a global, annual ceiling, say $ 10,000, on the amount an individual could spend on political advocacy — through whatever vehicle.

Because it did not discriminate between types of political participation, such a system would be self- equilibrating: the more you gave to one group, the less you’d have left to give to another. Indeed, since all spending on political advocacy — again, here defined as explicitly supporting or opposing a candidate or party — would have to be financed in this way, there would be no need for limits on campaign spending.

Because ( back to first principles) it’s not equality between parties we want to protect, but equality between individuals.

Pure libertarians won’t like it. But this strikes me as a better way to balance freedom and fairness in the political marketplace than either country has managed to date.