The next Citizens United case?
If you think Citizens United has unleashed a torrent of cash and real corruption into our electoral system —and it has — brace yourself for something worse.
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a campaign finance case that could be even bigger than Citizens United, which was decided in 2010.
The new case, McCutcheon vs. FEC, challenges the aggregate spending rules that limit any one campaign contributor to $123,000 in total spending to political candidates and election committees during any two-year federal election cycle.
Shaun McCutcheon is an Alabama businessman who likes to spread his money around to Republican candidates and campaign committees — more than $400,000 in the last election cycle. He says the aggregate limits in the law infringe his free speech, and the Republican National Committee, which is bringing the case with him, concurs.
The aggregate limit long has been a check on the flow of cold hard cash into the electoral system. As a three-judge panel of federal District Court in Washington, D.C., observed last year, without the aggregate limit, the per-candidate contribution limits in federal law — including $2,500 per election to any given candidate, $30,800 per year to each political party — would allow an individual to spread up to $3.5 million around. That’s a lot of bunce. The $123,000 ceiling effectively limits that donor to backing no more than 18 individual candidates in any cycle, the D.C. court noted.
Over the decades, the Supreme Court has upheld the aggregate limit as a necessary check on “corruption” of the electoral process. In a key 1976 decision, the court defined corruption broadly and ruled that it was a sufficiently important purpose to justify the marginal restraint on free speech imposed by the limit.
The D.C. judges also noted that the aggregate limit also works as a check on attempts to evade the individual contribution limits. Without it, they wrote, an individual might write, say, a single half-million-dollar check to a party campaign committee that would be required to divvy it up so no one candidate receives more than his or her legal share. But following the money is hard, so there would be no way to know whether the funds weren’t being illicitly combined.
“The candidate who knows the coordinated expenditure funding derives from that single large check at the joint fundraising event,” the judges wrote, “will know precisely where to lay the wreath of gratitude.”
But as election law expert Rick Hasen of UC Irvine observed last week, the Supreme Court has been consistently narrowing the definition of “corruption” in campaign finance. Citizens United, which overturned campaign limits on corporations and unions, defined corruption strictly as outright bribery, Hasen wrote, scrapping a broader definition that encompassed “buying access to politicians or ingratiating oneself with them.” (As the adage goes, the shocking thing sometimes isn’t what’s illegal, but what’s legal.)
It may be a close call. Hasen counts at least three votes on the court for overturning aggregate limits, not counting Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, who don’t strike many people as exemplars of judicial restraint when the rights of the wealthy and influential are at issue.
The political establishment has already weighed in — Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has filed a friend of the court brief urging the court to apply a strict standard that would almost certainly result in the rule’s being overturned. His lawyer has been given time for oral argument next week.
McConnell, who identifies himself in his brief as a “respected senior statesman,” says he’s concerned only about free speech. It probably wasn’t lost on the justices that his party has also benefited to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars from the spigot that Citizens United opened — not that the Democrats haven’t collected a pretty penny too.
The consequences of loosening the aggregate limit could be dire, re-creating “the system of legalized bribery that existed prior to the Watergate campaign finance scandals,” warns Fred Wertheimer of the progressive group Democracy 21.
Is there anything that could derail the McCutcheon express? Not much. Government shutdown or not, the court’s schedule will hold through next week. After Tuesday, the fate of campaign finance rules will again be in the justices’ hands.
LAUSD’s excellent iPad adventure
... Well, maybe not so excellent.
In the latest installments of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s $1-billion marketing venture with Apple Inc. — excuse me, I meant its visionary effort to equip every pupil with 21st century educational technology — the district has found that scores of its $678 tablets have gone missing. Students have been able to hack their way easily past security software designed to keep them off prohibited websites.
As my colleagues Howard Blume and Stephen Ceasar have documented, students at three schools have been told to surrender their iPads, though they say they haven’t been told why. At other schools, they’re forbidden to take them home. The district appears to be in total confusion about the tablets’ necessity for the new state standardized tests to be administered starting next year. LAUSD Supt. John Deasy said last week during a call-in show on the district’s television station that the tablets would be necessary; the test designers say that’s not so — the test could be taken on older school computers. If students take the tests on iPads, the devices will need separate keyboards, which the district hasn’t purchased.
The iPad rollout, they say, is in “chaos.” LAUSD Supt. John Deasy, who pushed this program (and appeared in an Apple promotional video as the program was being formulated), declares it “an astonishing success.”
The biggest problem with the iPad plan isn’t the hands-on misuse of the tablets by students, however. It’s that no one can explain what educational problem the iPad is supposed to fix.
As we’ve pointed out before, school administrators are often fascinated by advanced technology because they’re technological rubes. Teachers, who have to deploy these things in class, are often less impressed, for good reason.
One person we have to blame for this misplaced devotion to technology is U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who pushes tech as an imperative in U.S. schools, wringing his hands about being outpaced by places such as South Korea. “We have to move from being a laggard to a leader” is his sound bite.
His own agency disagrees. In 2009, the Education Department studied how math and reading software influenced student achievement. The study found that the difference in test scores between the software-using classes and the control group was “not statistically different from zero.” (I’d link to the study, but it’s offline — government shutdown, you know.)
The factor that always gets forgotten in the misty glow of educational tech is how to pay for it and keep it upgraded. It’s also forgotten who really benefits from the expenditures — the manufacturers. Is it any surprise that the most relentless promoter of tablets as learning tools is, um, Apple?
Educational technocrats like Duncan and Deasy invariably take their eye off the ball. What’s needed for educational progress is good teachers, and more of them, with adequate supplies and comfortable school environments.
And not just any technology, but the right technology. As former Los Angeles Deputy Mayor Austin Beutner observed last week in a Times Op-Ed, some 250,000 L.A. schoolchildren need eyeglasses. Without them, they can’t read a blackboard.
Do you really think it’ll be better for them if they’re squinting at an iPad instead? Teachers attest that equipping a nearsighted child with glasses makes an instantaneous improvement. Give that child an iPad, and you’ve accomplished almost nothing.
Michael Hiltzik’s column appears Sundays and Wednesdays. Read his new blog, “The Economy Hub,” at latimes.com/business/hiltzik, reach him at mhiltzik@latimes.com, check out facebook.com/hiltzik and follow @hiltzikm on Twitter.
