Leftist Hypocrites on Campaign Donations

-By Warner Todd Huston

One of the left’s biggest rallying cries against what they claim are the evils of the right was its opposition to the Citizens United Supreme Court decision that essentially opened up our political process to unlimited donations to political causes. The left claimed allowing more money into politics was evil and says the case must be over turned. But now leftists in New Jersey are hypocritically using the case for their own ends.

A Washington DC-based left-wing super PAC has sued New Jersey’s campaign finance watchdog agency saying that the Garden State shouldn’t be allowed to limit what it can raise from an individual donor.

As a New Jersey paper reported recently, “The Fund for Jobs and Growth filed the complaint against the state Election Law Enforcement Commission (ELEC) in federal district court on Friday.”

New Jersey says that there should be a limit per donor. But the group wants to raise money to make independent expenditures (i.e. political spending independent of the campaigns they are pushing) and based on the Citizens United case, they say that they should be able to wheedle from donors every penny that they can–and they are right, too.

“The Citizens United court stated in no uncertain terms that ‘independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption,’ thereby negating the only government interest strong enough to justify New Jersey’s restrictions on Plaintiff’s political speech,” reads the brief on behalf of the Fund for Jobs and Growth, prepared by prominent New Jersey election law attorney Angelo Genova.

Liberals across the country, of course, have excoriated the “evils of Citizens United,” since the ruling came down.

The ruling has absurdly been called the “greatest threat to our democracy,” and biased videos have been created by leftists to “prove” how bad it is.

Yet now we have a liberal group understanding juuuust how useful the ruling can be and want to use it for their own ends.

After calling the ruling “the end of our democracy” and after saying it is actually evil (as opposed to merely badly decided) now we have leftists using the ruling to their own ends.

In Realville we call that hypocrisy.

Meanwhile, enjoy Lee Doren’s wonderful little video that explains just how wrong the leftists are about the Citizens United case.

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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson

Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.

For a full bio, please CLICK HERE.


Copyright Publius Forum 2001