You cannot stipulate that funding speech is speech (it isn't that the act of donation is itself the expression) and then say that funding a dollar's worth of speech is the same as funding a million dollars worth of speech.

That's like saying you are "free" to write a book, but the government limits each author to two pages as the maximum length of a book.

You must go after the root of the argument or not at all.

....but at least it makes somewhat more sense than claiming allowing unlimited amounts of donation is protected speech.

I'm dubious about both.

send the top 10,000 most influential Americans a copy of Richard Dawkins' book THE BLIND WATCHMAKER (I would do that!). That would be a promotion of your point of view that is not open to non-rich people.

Is there a line to be drawn in that case? Most would say no.

And we hold that political expression is the most protected. (for good reason) So spending all that money to disseminate 10,000 copies of a book saying Obamacare should be abolished is surely as protected as in the case of a book about evolution.

And there is no difference between buying TV time (off public airwaves) and mailing people books.

And so on.

It is a maddeningly tricky area.

Myself, I distinguish political rights and expressive rights... but the Constitution doesn't. To me, political rights are, by their nature, more intrinsically democratic than expressive rights. (The ultimate political expression is voting, which we accept to be strictly limited.)

the problem is that the supreme court didn't do any analysis of the amount and simply discarded all limits, period.

if congress has the power to limit contributions to a single dollar, that would obviously stifle political speech. it would clearly be unconstitutional to that.

but it does not then follow that any limit is unconstitutional. in fact, given that television airtime is a limited quantity, the ability of a few people to spend outrageous sums not only buys up the best time spots but also drives of the cost for others. the effect of that is to crowd out other speech. at that point, congress has a legitimate interest in limiting contributions from some in order to protect the free speech rights of others

i think that is the kind of analysis that is necessary to resolve this matter (well, until we get a publicly-funded campaign system) but this supreme court has no interest in that kind of thinking.

and any analysis is limited to twisting and turning anything they can find in the law to arrive at that agenda driven decision.