Where the Bucks Don't Stop: The Construction of Money as Speech and its Effects

Abstract

 From the founders to the modern era, the USA has struggled with the appropriate balance of competing principles—liberty, equality and good governance. For most of the country’s history, regulating political campaign contributions was seen as a fair means of protecting democratic principles and preventing corruption. That began to change, prompted by the court challenge, Buckley v. Valeo, which changed the legal view of money. The Supreme Court reversed the lower court’s view that money was a vehicle of speech, instead asserting that money is speech itself. That decision began the unraveling of the campaign regulation, which continues today. This paper traces the construction of money as speech through the congressional debates and the courts and places those arguments within the context of the key principles that are inherently attached to the issue.