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Upon reading Mr. Daniels’ article Thursday, I noticed some peculiar things with regard to the Supreme Court cases he purported to quote. Roth v. United States is a 1957 obscenity case having nothing to do with finance reform and the only portion of the quote he attributes to it that appears in the opinion is a line not referencing finance reform but, instead, the court’s reason for the distinction between unprotected obscenity and protected speech. Daniels’ second quote doesn’t come directly from any Federal Election Commission case, but a portion of it does appear in the 1976 per curium dealing with the validity of the 1974 amendment to the FEC act Buckly v. Valeo. Even within that context the quote is used as a qualifier to a point that is ultimately upheld. Daniels seems more concerned with stacking the deck than with truth. If he intends to use case law he may wish to look into recent cases. In the 2000 campaign reform case Nixon v. Shrink Missouri Gov. PAC, Justice Stevens writes, “Money is property; it is not speech.... the right to use one’s own money to fund ‘speech by proxy’ certainly merits significant constitutional protection. These property rights, however, are not entitled to the same protection as the right to say what one pleases.” Justice Breyer and Ginsburg concur, “a decision to contribute money to a campaign is a matter of first amendment concern — not because money is speech (it is not) but because it enables speech... [but] such restrictions aim to democratize the influence that money itself may bring[s] to the electoral process... they seek to broaden the base of a candidate’s meaningful financial support, encouraging the public participation and open discussion that the First Amendment itself presupposes.” —Tim
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