After the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v Federal Election Commission, which gave corporations unlimited rights to spend money to influence elections, I am leaning in favor of a constitutional amendment to permit the regulation of campaign finances. The need will be even more pressing if the Court overturns Arizona’s system of public funding for candidates, as appears likely.
But it will not be easy to get the amendment right (even imagining that it can pass). Although spending should not be equated with free speech, regulating campaign spending does raise genuine First Amendment issues. Unchecked by courts, Congress could deliberately set the spending limit so low that incumbents would be safe. Or worse, it could ban some groups from spending while setting no limits on others. That is why the Supreme Court should have approved reasonable campaign finance laws (applying First Amendment scrutiny) and allowed us to leave the Constitution alone.
If we must amend the Constitution, I’m not sure I favor the leading proposal, which says: “Congress shall have power to set limits on the amount of contributions that may be accepted by, and the amount of expenditures that may be made by, in support of, or in opposition to, a candidate for nomination for election to, or for election to, Federal office.” (It also grants similar powers to state legislatures and gives Congress the right to enforce the limits.)
Would this text allow Congress to set a spending limit of $1 and prohibit any advertising? (Given incumbents’ ability to send free mailings and obtain free news coverage, they have incentives to set low limits.) Would this text permit Congress to ban newspapers from running articles “in support of” candidates? Perhaps a court would balance the new amendment with the First Amendment, but I am not sure that the plain text cited above would allow such balancing.
I lack the expertise and experience to write a better amendment, but I think it would have to invoke such principles as fairness to challengers and reasonable access to communications media, so that courts could strike down inappropriate limits. Ultimately, I am less enthusiastic about limits than about public funding for campaigns–which is fully constitutional until the Supreme Court says otherwise.
The Poetry Foundation provides the text of Bishop’s masterpiece “At the Fishhouses” (1948) along with a recording of the author reading it (not necessarily as well as it could be read).
She introduces the color silver early and returns to it often. In fact:
But nothing in the poem is actually silver. That is just an appearance, a misleading feature of the surface of things. For instance, “the silver of the benches … is of an apparent translucence …” The wheelbarrows look beautifully silver because of the “small iridescent flies crawling on them.”
The opposite of false silver is the profound and true depth of the sea. “Cold dark deep and absolutely clear” is the comma-free phrase that Bishop strikingly repeats. The temptation in the poem is to plunge through silvery appearances to the real “element bearable to no mortal,” the ocean water that would kill by freezing or drowning. It is a temptation that Bishop suggests early and then repeatedly defers or avoids. Immediately after first invoking the “cold dark deep,” she digresses:
Singing Baptist hymns to a seal is amusing. Even if you don’t happen to find it funny (as I do), I think you will agree that it has the form of a joke, meant to deflect the question of how to relate to the “clear gray icy water” that would ache your bones and burn your hand if you entered it. Buried in the joke is the serious idea of “total immersion.” Plunging into the ocean at Nova Scotia would be like facing the ultimate truth that we try to defer. Of that water, Bishop writes,
If silvery surfaces and deadly depths are two crucial ideas in the poem, a third is the human observer. The poem begins with apparently objective and scientifically precise description. But then the narrator comes in:
The narrator, like all mortal beings, inhabits a world of change. All the things she observes have developed and will cease, like the wheelbarrows that have come to be “plastered / with creamy iridescent coats of mail” or the cod that will disappear from overfishing. The last line of the poem says explicitly that “our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.” You cannot truly experience the freezing depths without dying in them: a metaphor for the unbearableness of truth. The poem is about flinching.
Bishop’s mentor Marianne Moore had written “A Graveyard” about a similar view of the ocean. In that poem, an unnamed man stands in the way of the sea, annoyingly blocking the view. But Moore tries to forgive him because it is natural to want to immerse oneself:
In Bishop’s poem, the ocean seems to come from a living source, even a human one:
I would normally resist a biographical interpretation, but Bishop inserts herself in the poem (“he was a friend of my grandfather”) and reminds us that human knowledge is temporal and personal. So it is relevant that Elizabeth Bishop had to move to her grandparents’ home in Nova Scotia at age five, after her father had died and her mother was institutionalized with mental illness. In this poem, the frigid, salty water flows from breasts that should feed a daughter warm, sweet, sustaining milk. The metaphor (stated in a line of iambic pentameter) is agonizingly lonely. But Bishop’s seal friend, her grandfather’s dwindling connections, her love of surfaces–“beautiful herring scales”–, her subtle homage to Marianne Moore, and the writing of the poem itself show how we can digress and postpone what we know that we know.
This chart from Alan I. Abramowitz, The Disappearing Center (Yale, 2010) deserves attention:
Turnout has risen for people who strongly identify with parties and has fallen for those who do not. Or … people who vote have become more attached to parties, while people who don’t vote have moved into the Independent column. Or some of both. As a result, an Independent is likely to be a non-voter and a voter is likely to be a partisan. This was far from true in the 1950s. I am not sure whether the trend is good or bad, but it is an important explanation of politics today.
(All the turnout rates shown above are exaggerated because of social desirability bias, but the relationships among partisanship, year, and likelihood of voting should be valid).
The Minority Leader with Tufts Trustee Alan Solomont at Tufts. She is pointing out that the hands on the cover of my book The Future of Democracy are of many colors.