First Amendment Political Speech, the Second Amendment and the Best Gun Laws Money Can Buy

The National Rifle Association (NRA) has been a well-known fixture on the political landscape for a long time.  The more recent news is that the NRA spends even more money on off-the-books political advocacy (about $17.6 million) than it does on political contributions (about $1 million) and lobbying (about $3 million).   

http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/summary.php?id=D000000082

The First Amendment right of individuals to political speech is important, but the Supreme Court in Citizens United refused to uphold laws defining outer limits on mechanisms such as corporate treasuries that are used to pay for political speech.  The NRA's political expenditures can be paid for not only by gun owners but by corporations that make and sell guns.  The Court has also begun defining the individual right to bear arms under the Second Amendment.  It remains to be seen whether there will be outer limits here as well.  Does the Constitution view a hunting rifle as the same thing as an AK-47?  And, as with the Court's vision of unrestrained political speech, what happens to the people who are outgunned? 

Comments

[David Cameron Carr]

Interesting stuff Richard but it seems unconnected to legal ethics. Am I missing something?

[Richard Painter]

I have made several posts here on campaign finance, a topic that is directly relevant to government ethics. This is yet one more example of conflicts of interest that campaign money has caused in our political system.

If the hosts of Legal Ethics Forum wish to confine discussion here to conflicts of interest for lawyers and other ethics problems for lawyers, I will post commentary on the ethics of government officials elsewhere.

[John Steele]

We're glad to have Richard's posts. If they don't interest our core readers, I suppose they can skip those posts.

Richard, if there ever was an illustrative example of the importance of associations of like-minded individuals to be able to engage in free speech of the core, political kind, the NRA may be it. It -- like NARAL, NAACP, etc. -- is passionately involved in a heated political debate that affects all Americans and is being debated in local, state, and federal legislatures.

As is commonly observed, any voting bloc that cares passionately about an issue can have an out-sized impact on electoral politics when the rest of the public has a more diffuse interest in the issue. Voting groups much smaller than the gun owners (about 30-40% of US households) are quite successful in our political system. I don't think it helps us understand the politics is we subscribe to a theory that the NRA has some "special sauce" or "magic dust" (not terms you used, to be fair!) that enables them to cheat the political system. Rather, they succeed in the political system the old-fashioned way: they speak, debate, spend, and vote about this issue passionately.

Whether or not I agree with the NRA, I would hate to see any laws that restricted its ability to passionately argue its viewpoints in the public market. I say the same thing about NARAL and the NAACP and the NLG too.

[Richard Painter]

Although I am skeptical about the Court’s reasoning behind Citizens United (corporate personhood?), the political system was already saturated with money before that case was decided (I describe the state of affairs as of late 2008 in the last chapter of my 2009 book Getting the Government America Deserves). Citizens United opened the floodgates and accelerated an inflow of cash that was already building up under the provisions struck down by the Court.

The problem is that the millions of Americans who do not agree with these cash-laden organizations (including the millions of gun owners who do not agree with the NRA) have a much diminished voice in policy matters that affect them and their families (including their children who don’t even have the right to vote). Rather than regulate expenditures by the NRA and similar groups, I have suggested here that taxpayers should be allowed to use a portion of their tax dollars (perhaps $200) to help choose who runs their government.

http://www.legalethicsforum.com/blog/2012/10/a-tax-cut-for-democracy.html

We need this or something else to even the playing field. The public is growing tired of being outgunned by the big money in politics.