There are some arguments that are so absurd on their face that the simple act of rebutting them rationally makes you feel a little dumber than you were when you started.
"If humans evolved from monkeys, then there wouldn't be any more monkeys."
"Government spending doesn't create jobs."
"Barack Obama's parents planted his birth announcement."
These are all preposterous statements. They are the kinds of assertions made by people who grew up on a diet of paint chips, mint paste, and quarry chub. When we hear them, we know we're in the company of someone truly special--someone capable of living with one foot in this Newtonian reality and the other foot in an alternate dimension entirely. We know not to trust such people with our children, or heavy machinery, or governments.
Wait, no, strike that last one. Apparently we do entrust our government to such people, as evidenced by the fact that 5 of 9 Supreme Court justices asserted earlier this year that in fact money is speech, and as such, campaign contributions are protected under the First Amendment.
Lo and behold, it turns out that when your name is embossed on a bench in the highest court in the land, your harebrained idea is suddenly less harebrained, and sentient people who may have normally shit themselves laughing at it are suddenly subscribed, as if by incantation.
I do not claim to understand the physiological mechanism that causes the blood to stop flowing to the cranium of otherwise rational people like this. Perhaps the crippling fear of being thought of as insufficiently "down" with the Bill of Rights compels them to wave through whatever-the-fuck, like a kennel owner who is all too glad to let you board a Bengal tiger, because cat.
"That's not a 400-pound telemarketer in a WHO FARTED? tee-shirt and a shoulder-slung AK-47 in that Chipotle; that's a well-regulated militia."
Whatever the malfunction, the notion of money as speech is uniformly accepted on the right of our political spectrum, and all too frequently proffered in leftward circles as well. Even here at DailyKos. Today. And so, from time to time, we find ourselves in the unenviable position of having to rebut the constitutional equivalent of Jesus on a dinosaur.
I don't have the energy, or the chops. But you know who does? John Aravosis.
He wrote the following the day of the McCutcheon ruling:
The argument that “money is free speech” reminds me of when the religious right tells gay people that they don’t need marriage equality because they can already get married in every state of the union.
But that’s not true, you think, gays can only get married in a (growing) handful of states – right?
The answer is simple, the religious right says: Just marry someone of the opposite sex!
The same “wishes were horses” argument applies to McCutcheon. “Every American” has the right to influence the political process with never-ending gobs of money. Provided that you ignore the fact that most Americans don’t have never-ending gobs of money, so they won’t ever be able to “speak” in politics at all.
Lest Aravosis be unjustly accused of arguing from
reductio ad absurdum, he brings it home:
Part of the reason we protect freedom of speech in this country is because we all have the ability to speak. The whole “fight bad speech with good speech” argument presumes that we can all speak in the first place.
And while that’s true of vocal speech, and physical speech (marching in a protest), it’s not true of economic speech.
Not everyone can afford to give money to a political candidate. And most couldn’t afford to give the old, now extinct, $123,000 limit in one election cycle – or a lifetime.
There is quite literally no way that you can fight economic speech with more speech if you don’t have the economic ability to speak in the first place. And most people don’t.
Genuine speech, in other words, has value worth protecting because we are nearly all born with a voice. But when money is given standing as speech, then suddenly corporations and wealthy individuals have infinitely more "speech" than the rest of us, and little if anything about that is worth protecting in the first place--unless you have the intent and the means to rig the game.
Seems intuitive, doesn't it? Like preaching to the choir, even.
Only maybe not so much.