County Supes Take on First Amendment
Here's a thought experiment. Let's just say you wrote a book about the history of inequality in Santa Clara County. It's a scholarly, well-argued book. And at the end--the very end, the last words of the book--you say, "As a result, I think you should vote for Elizabeth Warren."
The Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors thinks the government has the right to ban any corporate publisher -- which would practically cover all real publishers -- from printing and distributing the book and has taken a position to amend the First Amendment to give the government that power.
No kidding: earlier this month the Supes voted their support to overturn the Citizens United decision, which reaffirmed people's First Amendment right to gather together in groups to enact political speech.
According to San Jose Spotlight, the Supes, unanimously and "in partnership with Santa Clara County Move to Amend... support an amendment to the U.S. Constitution establishing that “money is not speech, campaign contributions and expenditures may be reasonably limited, and only natural persons have constitutional rights.”
According to constitutional scholars, the proposed amendment could represent a chilling expansion of the federal government's ability to limit all kinds of speech.
According to Eugene Vokohl, Law professor at UCLA:
"If 'the rights protected by the United States Constitution are the rights of natural persons only, not of corporations or other artificial entities,' (that's the Move To Amend's language) then the Trump Administration (or any federal, state, or local government) could censor the New York Times, seize property owned by the Catholic Church, dissolve the ACLU or the NRA or the Sierra Club, and more. After all, newspapers, churches, and advocacy groups are all organized as “corporations or other artificial entities.”
Jim Manley, attorney at the Pacific Legal Foundation, agrees: "People have a bee in their bonnets about Citizens United. The issue here is not about corporate personhood, as some opponents of Citizens United claim. It's about whether a group of people, like a union or a group of businesses, can pool their funds and speak. And that's just speaking, it's not even giving money to candidates.
"This is all bluster," Manley concludes. "The county supervisors don't have the authority to enact an amendment and this doesn't move the amendment process forward."
On a related note, progressives in Santa Clara County are lining up behind another effort to limit campaign contributions by groups of people, the ironically titled Fair Elections Initiative. But guess what? The local effort, while limiting contributions from developers and other business groups provides an exemption for--get ready--unions.
In his recent State-of-Downtown remarks, Scott Kniess, head of the San Jose Downtown Association said,
“Labor wants to dupe San Jose voters into thinking this is about special interest money in local elections,” Knies said. “If the labor unions truly wanted campaign finance reform they would have included all special interests instead of excluding themselves.”
“Make no mistake: this devious measure would give organized labor a headlock on all future San Jose elections” he added.