The January 21 decision was a startling one.
Michael Waldman, former Bill Clinton speechwriter, now executive director of the Brennan Center, a non-partisan public policy institute that specializes in political reform, said this: “Exxon Mobil’s profits in 2008 were $45 billion. At 9 a.m. Thursday morning, Exxon’s managers could not spend any of that money to back candidates. And at noon on Thursday, after the Supreme Court ruled, they could. There is nothing to prevent them from spending Mike Bloomberg-level money in every congressional district in the country.”
Politics Daily put it this way, “A little more than a century ago – just about at the same time Congress outlawed all campaign contributions by corporations – humorist Finley Peter Dunne, channeling the diction of an Irish bartender, shrewdly wrote, ‘Th’ Supreme Court follows th’ election returns.’
“Normally, though, the Supreme Court has the self-restraint to wait more than two days. On Tuesday, Massachusetts voters rebelled against special interests, Wall Street bailouts, and one-party rule by vaulting Republican Scott Brown into the Senate.
“Thursday morning the Supreme Court, by an ideologically predictable 5-to-4 margin, overturned as unconstitutional laws that ban corporations from running TV ads explicitly backing or opposing candidates during election campaigns.”
Startling as the decision is, it’s also an opportunity for communications professionals to craft messages executives should be giving to their stakeholders in the coming weeks and months.
If corporations decide to take advantage of the ruling to back specific candidates with funding for campaign ads, the reasons for those decisions should be explained to employees, customers, investors and industry peers through speeches, blogs, podcasts, policy pieces, and other communications vehicles.
If some corporations decide not to use corporate funds in this manner, these are also opportunities to communicate why.
Corporate, executive and strategic communicators will be delighted to be in the thick of it all – happy to advise corporate leaders on the pros and cons of this new option based on corporate values, business goals and best practices.
And we’ll be even happier to write the communications materials required to disseminate information on these choices.
With apologies to Sally Field, “They need us, they really need us.”
Even a bad Supreme Court decision can be good news for communications professionals.
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Notwithstanding the claim that the Supreme Court follows election results, the real issue is whether the ruling was constitutional, not whether it followed anyone’s notion of what is good public policy.
I agree that it probably will help corporate communicators, although I suspect that given today’s hypercharged political environment, corporations would be reluctant to choose sides publicly. They would really have to do a cost-benefit analysis — and weigh their ability to provide decisive help to a friendly candidate over the cost of alienating consumers who support that candidate’s opponent.
God forbid, we should be awarded a job to do so. This economy has more or less decimated the squad of talented communications people out there. No doubt it would be fun to contribute to corporate contrition and vague thoughts about campaign contributions, but in my experience any political contributing is done sus table. But it will be interesting to see how the press covers all the likely suspects, such as Exxon and Chinese companies, and how their legions of cub communications people handle the inevitable press burps. The cat is out of the bag, so to speak, so as reporter I’d look for every Bag o’ Cash that is shipped to Washington henceforth. Meanwhile, Michael Bloomberg is probably saying: “Damn, if I’d waited a few months I wouldn’t have had to blow all this money myself”.
But is the SCOTUS decision “bad” when considered on its merits alone — that is, adherence to the Constitution itself?
As Chief Justice Roberts explained, “The Government urges us in this case to uphold a direct prohibition on political speech. It asks us to embrace a theory of the First Amendment that would allow censorship not only of television and radio broadcasts, but of pamphlets, posters, the Internet, and virtually any other medium that corporations and unions might find useful in expressing their views on matters of public concern. Its theory, if accepted, would empower the Government to prohibit newspapers from running editorials or opinion pieces supporting or opposing candidates for office, so long as the newspapers were owned by corporations—as the major ones are.”
Let’s be glad when constitutional principle trumps the politics of the moment. Everyone benefits in the long run.