Milwaukee Mike says: "Giving money to your favorite politician is protected by the 1st Amendment. Because Freedom of Speech protects political expression, it also protects donating to someone's campaign."
That was an instance of very cute disingenuous obfuscation, of the sort which is currently dismantling and destroying the United States of America. Giving money to your favorite politician is NOT protected by the First Amendment. It is, instead, protected by the radical right-wing majority on the Supreme Court which has equated money with speech in order to protect, not speech, but how many times you will be subjected to some specific individual's speech under the provably correct theory that the more times you hear something, the more likely you are to believe it. The so-called 'Citizen's United' decision which equated money with speech did NOT protect donating to someone's campaign because that was not the issue at all. The actual issue was how much you may contribute to negate the contributions of others, and whether or not you can contribute unrestricted amounts of money in absolute secrecy so that the American public may not know who it is who is subjecting them to the brainwashing tactics...and our radical right-wing loons and fools, in order to destroy America, chose to give the very, very, very wealthy the right to brainwash all of us on a continual basis, but most especially during the period just prior to every election.
Money is not speech. Money, in general, does not even buy speech. When the very wealthy individual gives money to a politician, he does so with the understanding that the politician whose votes he is buying will listen very carefully to the employee of the contributor as time goes on, and that he will do as he's told. The money, therefore, buys legislation. Now, the politician has a personal interest in remaining in power because that is primarily why he is engaged in politics in the first place, so he takes the money meant to buy his votes and he spends it on subjecting us to canned, recorded messages of his godlike perfection and the absolute evil represented by his opponent(s). Generally speaking, there is no way to completely remove such corruption from the electoral process; but either that corruption can be magnified beyond any semblance of human sanity (as in the Citizen's United decision) and beyond the capacity of the nation to survive it, or it can be reduced to a very, very tiny minimum so that governance, and those doing the governing, would be mostly concerned with the impact of legislation on the people and the nation instead of the impact of legislation on the volume of money donated to pass the legislation.
