Arlen Specter Quotes

Money is speech. It's incongruous to say a multimillionaire can spend as much on his own campaign as he wants, but you can only give $2,300. His free speech rights are different from yours, thus violating the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution. It's absurd.

As a consequence, the Court ruled that the limits on campaign spending violated the First Amendment, but it accepted the $1,000 limit on individual contributions on the ground that the need to avoid the appearance of corruption justified this limited constraint on speech.

In 'Citizens United v. FEC', the Supreme Court ruled that sections of the federal campaign finance law known as McCain-Feingold imposed unconstitutional restrictions on the First Amendment rights of corporations.

People have their constitutional right to contribute to a campaign and if they have discretionary money that they want to contribute to a candidate, whether a Republican or a Democrat, they should be able to do so.

I have introduced a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United and make it clear that the Congress and state legislatures do have the ability and the power to regulate and get corporate funding out of political campaigns.

Anyone who has been around Washington politics long enough can't avoid this truism: Election-year money is like a rushing river that invariably finds cracks in any dam the reformers erect.

History will record that the Citizens United decision is one of the worst in the history of our country.

In my view, a corporation is not a person. A corporation does not have First Amendment rights to spend as much money as it wants, without disclosure, on a political campaign.

If candidates spend money on ads and other political speech and their opponents are rewarded with government handouts to attack them, that chills speech and is unconstitutional. Non-participating candidates certainly don't volunteer to allow their opponents to receive taxpayer subsidies to bash them.

The usual test under the Federal Election Campaign Act for whether something counts as a campaign expenditure is whether the obligation would have existed but for the campaign. If so, it is not a campaign expenditure.

Now that the Court has declared money to be speech, I say we replace the current Court with some Ben Franklins, Thomas Jeffersons, George Washingtons, a couple of Susan B. Anthony's, Roosevelts, Hamiltons, a Sacajawea or two, and an Abe Lincoln to cover Scalia in full.

It's important not to limit the amount of their own money that candidates can spend, but to give other people access to enough money to run competitive races.

You never talk about what you want when giving money. I don't pay attention to what other people think... There shouldn't be restrictions of any kind on political contributions.

I certainly want campaign finance reform. I just wish this would do it in a way that would stand up to a constitutional challenge.

The 1st Amendment protects the right to speak, not the right to spend.

We need a complete ban on soft money, which is sort of an enveloping problem, and a ceiling on the amount of money that can be spent on a given race.

A few people have big free speech and the rest of us have little free speech. Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission was decided wrongly.

The most misguided, naïve, uninformed, egregious decision of the United States Supreme Court … in the 21st century. To somehow view money as not having a corrupting effect on an election flies in the face of reality. I just think that just one of the five had run for county sheriff. I guarantee you … there will be scandals. There is too much money washing around political campaigns today, and it will take scandals and maybe the Supreme Court will go back and revisit this issue

The Federal campaign contribution limit of $2,500 is way too low. You can’t even buy a Democrat for $2,500.

The Supreme Court has equated money with free speech.

Most important of all the structural reforms, we need to follow through on the recent Congressional effort to discipline the use of money in politics, by setting reasonable limits on campaign spending, limiting and publicizing individual and organizational gifts and channeling much more of the money (including … all general election spending) through the respective party committees rather than through individual candidates’ treasuries.

Spending limits have proven a monumental failure at limiting campaign spending in presidential elections, merely diverting the money underground.

This Court now concludes that independent [political] expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.

We agree that Citizens United is a very bad decision. We don't believe outspending your opponent is the way to go, since we don't believe we will ever be outspending our opponents!

In Montana, no one, including out-of-state corporate executives, has been excluded from spending money - or 'speaking' - in our elections. Any individual can contribute. All we require is that they use their own money, not corporate money that belongs to shareholders, and that they disclose who they are.