Prof. Smith Goes to Washington

Federal Election Commission member Bradley A. Smith takes on campaign finance laws.

Michael W. Lynch from the July 2001 issue

(Page 5 of 5)

To drive a little closer to home: Let’s say Republicans don’t like the way The New York Times has been attacking them. “We won’t limit their speech,” the good legislators declare, “but we will say you can’t spend more than $1,000 a day or $25,000 a year to publish.” Of course that would limit the paper’s speech.

I think in a basic sense, everybody recognizes that spending money is intimately a part of the speech process and that if you limit expenditure, you limit speech. That is what the Supreme Court recognized in Buckley. The only question, then, is whether there’s a compelling enough government interest to allow you to regulate speech in this circumstance. When you think about it seriously, there’s no one who questions that if you limit spending you limit speech and that the First Amendment is involved.

REASON: What’s the ideal system of campaign finance regulation?

Smith: The ideal system is the system we had that elected Abraham Lincoln and Grover Cleveland, which is no regulation. Or the system that elected both Roosevelts, Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy, which is a system that had virtually no regulation. The First Amendment is there precisely to keep government out of the business of deciding who is engaged in “real” issue advocacy and who is engaged in “sham” issue advocacy, and to keep government from deciding who has too much influence and who has too little influence. That’s exactly why we have a First Amendment, so bureaucrats like myself are not making those decisions.