hey there and welcome back to heimlich's history now we've been going through unit 5 of the ap government curriculum and in this video that means it's time to talk about campaign finance so if you're ready to get them brain cows milked with a metric butt load of corporate free speech let's get to it so in this video here's what we're trying to do explain how the organization finance and strategies of national political campaigns affect the election process now in the last video we talked about how modern political campaigns are mind-blowingly expensive compared to previous decades over 14 billion dollars was spent on the most recent presidential election but despite the growing cost of campaigns there has been a growing body of regulatory laws and debates over the role that money ought to play in campaigns now the main part of the story here begins in 1974 with the passage of the federal elections campaign act or fica this law created a new federal commission called the federal election commission which was created to oversee and regulate the money being spent in political campaigns now as a result of these two things there were limits established for how much a person could give to a political candidate and how much money a candidate could spend on their campaign now let me say that again because it's important to understand that there are two realities that we're dealing with first is how much money can be given to a candidate and second is how much that candidate can spend on their campaign now the reason why this is a big deal is because of the non-required supreme court case called buckley v valeo in 1976 the court took up this limitation of spending and ruled that spending money on political campaigns is tightly tied to the first amendment's protection of the freedom of speech and you're like what like how is spending money on campaigns related to free speech well it's not that hard to understand like if you want to share your endorsement for a candidate with the people around you you have the freedom to do so but what if you want to share that endorsement with more than the people around you what if you want to share it with everyone in america well you could visit every household in the nation and say it with your mouth whole but just in case you want to finish that task in fewer than 700 years you're probably going to have to spend money and make advertisements you need to make ads for television and online sources and social media and that is very expensive so you can see that if there was a law capping how much you could spend to make those advertisements that would be the equivalent of restricting your freedom of speech and that's the part about how much a candidate can spend on their campaign but the case also took up the related problem of how much an individual could give to a candidate if there are no limits on how much a person or group can spend on a campaign then that might create a problem in a system like that who has the loudest voice well it's the one with the most money it's kind of like the list of commandments in animal farm the last of which says all animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others so yes technically speaking we all have equal access to free speech but if money equals speech at least in politics then there are some folks that are more equal than others and so what the court did in the buckley decision was a little complicated but stick with me basically what the court did was to uphold the part of the law that restricted the amount of money an individual could contribute to a candidate that in their opinion was the key to a free and fair election however they did strike down the part of the law that restricted how much a candidate could spend on their campaign that kind of restriction was deemed a violation of the first amendment okay so thankfully after that the matter of campaign finance was settled except that it wasn't because politics makes people crazy and they found a way around these limitations and for this i need to explain the difference between hard money and soft money hard money describes contributions given directly to a candidate that's the kind of money that was being restricted and regulated in all the legislation i just mentioned but if you want to give more money than you are able to by law well soft money is the way to go this is money donated not directly to a candidate but to a party or an interest group who could then buy advertising or whatever on the candidate's behalf and that was not subject to campaign finance law so there's a loophole we'd better close it up and that happened in 2002 with the bipartisan campaign reform act or bikram this law increased the amount of hard money that could be donated to a candidate and made provisions to regulate and make transparent the amount of soft money that could be given as well another provision in bikra was the stand by your ad provision of the law if you've ever seen a political ad you know what i'm talking about like at the end of the ads the candidate has to say i'm whatever the name is and i approve this message i'm ted cruz and i approve this message the hope here was that if a candidate was required to attach their name and face to an ad than the amount of negative advertising which was rampant during that time would decrease and then everybody was happy except they weren't and that brings us to a required case you need to know from 2010 namely citizens united via the federal election commission so remember in the buckley case the court ruled that limits on individual and corporate contributions to campaigns were constitutional but limits on how much a campaign could spend were unconstitutional the citizens united case challenged the limits placed upon individuals and corporations for campaign contributions they argued that bicker's limitations amounted to a violation of free speech like if a corporation or other entity wants to spend money to endorse a candidate they should be able to do so in unlimited measure and in this case the court ruled that the limits on contributions from individuals and corporations was a violation of free speech therefore corporate funding of ads and broadcasts cannot be limited the upshot of this decision was this political spending by corporations or associations or labor unions is a form of protected speech under the first amendment and that brings us right back to the old problem like if corporations have no limits on the money that they can spend for political purposes then the richest of them will dominate the conversation remember money equals influence in politics so that means that a very small percentage of the population that is to say those with enormous amounts of money are directing the political conversation at least that's how the critics of the ruling argue now not surprisingly since the citizens united decision the increase in campaign contributions has gone off the charts and there are a lot of entities spending money on politics but i just want to focus on one kind of organization called a political action committee more commonly known as a pac these are organizations that raise money for the sake of influencing the population to vote for their preferred candidate and there are three kinds that i want you to know first are connected packs and those are formed by corporations or other entities like labor unions it's a pack that's connected to these organizations so connected packs can only collect funds from the members of their organization and that money can be donated directly to candidates in limited quantities however they can raise unlimited amounts of money provided the individual limits are obeyed second are non-connected packs which are formed independently of an organization usually around a specific public interest like gun rights or women in politics again as in connected packs donations to non-connected packs are limited by law they can accept donations from anyone in the public and donate directly to candidates third are super pacs which have proliferated widely since the citizens united decision super pacs can be formed by anyone can accept unlimited donations but cannot directly coordinate with the candidate and these are the most controversial kind of pacts because critics argue that super pacs have the potential to limit democracy and give voice only to the wealthy and there we are right back again to the free speech problem so all this to say campaign finance has been hotly contested in the last 50 years and it's hard to know if things have gotten better or if things have gotten worse during that time okay thanks for watching click right here to grab my view packet which is gonna help you get an a in your class and a five on your exam in may if this video helped you and you want to send me the signal to keep making them then by all means hit that subscribe button and i shall oblige heimler out