The magazine of the North Carolina Center for Voter Education • Saturday May 19, 2012

Corporate Cash Shouldn't Drive Our Democracy

By Damon Circosta
Published: May 31, 2011

RALEIGH - Last weekend at Charlotte Motor Speedway the Coca-Cola 600, NASCAR’s longest race of the year, took place. Anyone familiar with NASCAR knows that they have done a superb job of attracting corporate sponsorship.

From the names of the races, to the hoods of the cars, to the outfits of the drivers, you can’t go to a NASCAR race without being inundated with the logos and messages of corporate America. It has been a tremendously successful business model. For a fee, a company can be associated with a NASCAR driver, and he will not only wear their logo, but might even appear in a commercial to help them sell their wares.

Just three days before the checkered flag went down in Charlotte, a federal judge in Richmond ruled that corporations cannot be prohibited from giving money directly to their favorite candidates for political office. The ruling, which relied heavily on the U.S. Supreme Court decision from last year called Citizens United v FEC, could open the doors to NASCAR-style sponsorship of our democracy.

Since the middle of last century, corporations (and employee unions as well) have been prohibited from giving money directly to candidates. The policy was enacted because there was concern that the people who controlled corporations would essentially be granted more control over our democracy than individual citizens.

In fact, since the federal corporate ban went into effect in 1947, the general trend for both the state and federal government was to rein in corporate influence in an effort to ensure that individuals did not have their free-speech rights trampled by the narrow slice of Americans who control large corporate interests.

That trend was reversed in 2010 when the U.S. Supreme Court essentially granted corporations and unions the same free speech rights that you and I enjoy under the First Amendment. Then, last Thursday, U.S. District Judge James Cacheris ruled that it wasn’t enough to allow corporations to spend money independently of candidates in order to affect elections. He says that it’s permissible for a corporation to write a check directly to a candidate. The case will likely reach the U.S. Supreme Court in the near future and it is there that we will ultimately learn how cozy of a sponsorship relationship is permissible between a candidate and a big business.

Corporations serve an extremely valuable role in our society. They provide a structure where individuals can pool their capital in an effort to advance the frontiers of knowledge, increase living standards and make a reasonable profit in exchange for their contributions. Without corporations we wouldn’t have many of the advances in medicine, science or the arts, and we most certainly wouldn’t have NASCAR.

But just because corporations are a helpful invention in our economy does not mean we should hand them the keys to our democracy. If individuals want to engage in elections by spending money, they are free to do so. But corporations are not individuals. They are fictional stand-ins for real people and only exist in order to spread risk and pool capital.  By putting corporations in the driver’s seat of our elections we are diminishing the role that we as individual citizens are supposed to play in self-government.

The people who own corporations already have a right to participate. We shouldn’t give those folks another pass, by letting them contribute both as individuals and again in the name of their business.

Let’s leave corporate sponsorship to NASCAR and keep it out of our elections. If we don’t, the idea that our democracy is of, by and for the people will be in the fast lane to the junkyard.