"Money is speech" is a reddit-ism. The argument is closer to "limiting spending can be tantamount to limiting speech."
Should the president of the US (regardless of party) be able to restrict your ability to spend money on a web server because it hosts a forum about humanrights/guns/birthcontrol/etc? Or to run a news channel/blog that focuses on a particular perspective?
If not, little prevents the most endowed campaigns from changing their form factor from ads to propoganda platforms. And buying out news platforms becomes more enticing.
Whatever line you think is reasonable to draw here, would you trust a bad president with it? And would it actually solve the problem?
> Whatever line you think is reasonable to draw here, would you trust a bad president with it?
I don't think this is a good argument, because it's oddly specific. You can't trust a bad President to properly enforce any law. That much should be clear right now. A bad President is a general danger to the country and to the world. Among other powers, the President is the commander-in-chief!
Of course Congress has the power to impeach and remove a bad President, so you don't get a bad President without also having a bad Congress. In other words, we'd have much bigger problems than campaign finance. And I would claim that we get a bad President and a bad Congress precisely because we have no campaign finance limitations anymore.
The President is an example (and actual) enforcement mechanism for the State. Not the argument.
We want to ban independent political expenditure past a certain dollar threshold. Great. How do we do that without torching legitimate civic and commercial participation, and without accidentally entrenching rich participants even more? I'm unconvinced you can do that, and unconvinced that ads are a worthy enough evil to be worth the try, particularly if it requires amending over the First Amendment. ("If" is an operative word.)
I agree in spirit, but if not courts, and government, who is the one who gets to decide on it? Since it's a democratic country, if people disagreed or had a strong opinion about it, then would've voted accordingly.
Entrenched power is leveraged to further entrench power. No way such a bill would have gotten through Congress, even before Citizens United. But is that democracy?
When was it put up to a vote? I don't recall many national elections where I was asked my opinion about issues, only to choose between two options. And most of the time between one option really.
Free speech is when I scream so loud, no one else can even be heard. Its your fault anyway. Maybe if you cared you should have spent your life learning how to scream louder.
"Underground tunnels are immune to surface weather conditions (subways are a good example), so it wouldn’t matter to Hyperloop if a hurricane was raging on the surface. You wouldn’t even notice."
Musk, Twitter, 2022
This is, on its face, an utterly idiotic and untrue statement. Look at the subways in NYC anytime it rains
Isn't conversation on this forum supposed to be more informed and curious? Why are you posting idle speculation?