The Supreme Court recently reversed a long-standing tradition that corporations couldn’t directly fund political advertising. I believe the core argument for the reversal is that the restrictions impinged on the corporation’s right to free speech, as though a corporation is a person.

Alarmists are warning that corporations will flood the airwaves  with political commercials in the days before an election to promote their bought and paid-for candidate, or to denounce the candidate they couldn’t buy. That may be, but what is the price of Free Speech, enshrined in our holy founding documents? 10 billion dollars? 100 billion dollars? We shall soon find out.

I would like to suggest a political finance reform.

Only registered voters are allowed to donate to political campaigns or to fund political advertising. I would allow unrestricted amounts to be donated, with the caveat that all donations must be made publicly available within 24 hours with a means to uniquely identify the donor. Using the name and address and precinct where  they are registered should be sufficient. And publicly available means something like an election board website, generally available to the general public and not hidden away in some hard-to-access site that only policy wogs are likely to know about.  I want to know who is trying to buy my representative; you can tell a lot about a candidate by who is paying to support them.

This includes contributions to PACs. As a collective they are allowed to accept contributions from registered voters and to use those contributions for a common goal. They also have to disclose the source of their contributions – same list. And any other political entity, like: Party, Committee to elect or re-elect, etc.

PS. For any corporations that I hold shares in- I do not approve of the use of corporate funds for political advertising.