speech is unprotected if (1) ... and (2) ... and (3) "the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value"
Political speech especially is sacrosanct in US jurisprudence. It's widely held as the reason we even need free speech. On the balance of protected speech, having a legitimate political message is not a thumb so much as a foot on the scale.
If you grant that money spent to promote a political message counts as political expression, by limiting it we're talking about censoring a lot of speech, across the entirety of political discourse. You will not find any restriction on any speech anywhere in law that even approaches it in scope. And we'll be censoring exactly the speech we feel is most important not to. This will not fly.
So, you need to either come up with a reason not to consider money spent to promote a message as an expression of that message, or come up with a justification for why, despite this being speech with a valid political message, it is vitally necessary that it be censored.
Either of those could plausibly be argued, but the arguments I've seen are mainly along the lines of "Money obviously isn't speech!" and "Clearly, the rich shouldn't be allowed to speak louder than the poor!" In the eyes of Constitutional law, those things are neither obvious nor clear.
speech is unprotected if (1) ... and (2) ... and (3) "the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value"
Political speech especially is sacrosanct in US jurisprudence. It's widely held as the reason we even need free speech. On the balance of protected speech, having a legitimate political message is not a thumb so much as a foot on the scale.
If you grant that money spent to promote a political message counts as political expression, by limiting it we're talking about censoring a lot of speech, across the entirety of political discourse. You will not find any restriction on any speech anywhere in law that even approaches it in scope. And we'll be censoring exactly the speech we feel is most important not to. This will not fly.
So, you need to either come up with a reason not to consider money spent to promote a message as an expression of that message, or come up with a justification for why, despite this being speech with a valid political message, it is vitally necessary that it be censored.
Either of those could plausibly be argued, but the arguments I've seen are mainly along the lines of "Money obviously isn't speech!" and "Clearly, the rich shouldn't be allowed to speak louder than the poor!" In the eyes of Constitutional law, those things are neither obvious nor clear.