SALON: Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire casino owner, is now the poster boy for what’s terribly wrong with our campaign-finance system. Adelson, you may recall, had, before the South Carolina Republican primary, donated $5 million to the pro-Gingrich Super Pac “Winning Our Future” – giving Newt a pile of money for negative advertising against Mitt Romney in South Carolina. Adelson has done it again. He and his wife Marian have cut another $5 million check for Gingrich to go negative on Romney in Florida. The money won’t go as far as it did in South Carolina – TV ads cost a lot more in Florida – but it’s enough to give the Grinch a solid footing. And, who knows? The Adelsons are billionaires. They might decide to put in another $5 million or perhaps $20 million into Gingrich’s Super Pac. The point is, there’s no limit. Do you know who Sheldon and Marian Adelson are? Do you know what Gingrich has promised them, or what they think they’ll get out of a Grinch presidency? I don’t. Never before in the history of American politics has a single couple given more money to a single candidate and had a bigger impact – all courtesy of the Supreme Court and its grotesque decisions that speech is money and corporations are people under the First Amendment. MORE
RELATED: Two years ago, Justice Scalia cast one of the five votes necessary to unleash unlimited corporate money on American democracy in the Supreme Court’s egregious Citizens United decision. Yet, at a panel in South Carolina this weekend, Scalia tried to lay the blame for the absurd campaign finance system he created at everyone’s feet but his own:
Super PACs have raised more than $30 million just three races into the 2012 presidential race, according to the website opensecrets.org, run by The Center for Responsive Politics. TV advertising alone in South Carolina, which is voting Saturday, is estimated at $12 million, or nearly $27 per voter when calculated using the 2008 Republican primary turnout numbers. […]
Scalia said the blame for this type of system shouldn’t fall on the Supreme Court, which he said decides merely whether the system is legal under the U.S. Constitution. Instead, he said the ones who have to change things are the politicians who created the system and the voters who often reward the candidates who spend the most money. “If the system seems crazy to you, don’t blame it on the court,” Scalia said, during a discussion in front of South Carolina lawyers that lasted for more than an hour. MORE
RELATED: Last year, in perhaps the “most consequential Supreme Court decision in decades,” the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) invalidated a sixty-three year-old ban on corporate and union money directly funding individual candidates in federal elections. The SCOTUS decision sent shockwaves throughout our democracy, with many fearing that it would lead to an overwhelming amount of corporate money flooding out the voices of ordinary people. Now, the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics has put out a comprehensive analysis to assess the flood of campaign money in last year’s election. One of the most shocking results of the analysis finds that the decision appeared to have a sharply partisan and ideological result. The group found that spending by Super PACs and all outside spending strongly tilted towards conservatives, and that spending by undisclosed donors actually was eight times higher for conservatives than liberals, with conservatives spending $119.6 million to liberals’ $15.7 million. MORE
