Analysis: High court ruling a game-changer for campaign spending

commentary by Political Journalist Roland S. Martin 
Campaign 2010 is in full swing: Massachusetts elected its new U.S. senator this week, and the first congressional primaries are just days away.

Now the first task for every federal candidate in this midterm election year will be to read the Supreme Court’s ruling Thursday on campaign finance for a reality-check road map to their political future. The 183-page decision promises to completely change the way independent spending on elections is conducted.

In Citizens v. Federal Election Commission, the justices in a large sense have erased the subtle but important distinction between corporate donors, which are subject to regulation, and individual donors, who largely are not.

“It’s about money,” said Lawrence Noble, former general counsel of the Federal Election Commission and a national expert on campaign spending. “It’s about free speech and it’s about the ability of corporations to influence elections through the use of their treasury money.”

The FEC will now be tasked with taking this high court opinion and crafting new rules to ease limits on corporate spending. The big winners will be businesses, unions and advocacy groups seeking to influence the elections, mainly through what are called “issue ads.” Other beneficiaries will be television networks like CNN and radio stations that regularly air these campaign commercials.