https://beta.congress.gov/bill/113th-co ... on/19/text
--Section 1 has a debilitating weasel word in it: "reasonable". It's a subjective term that's wide open to interpretation. More germane, what is seen as reasonable to Congress may be seen as unreasonable to the Supreme Court. I think there's a good chance that this Court in particular would still strike down plenty of laws on a basis of unreasonability.Section 1. To advance democratic self-government and political
equality, and to protect the integrity of government and the electoral
process, Congress and the States may regulate and set reasonable limits
on the raising and spending of money by candidates and others to
influence elections.
Section 2. Congress and the States shall have power to implement
and enforce this article by appropriate legislation, and may
distinguish between natural persons and corporations or other
artificial entities created by law, including by prohibiting such
entities from spending money to influence elections.
Section 3. Nothing in this article shall be construed to grant
Congress or the States the power to abridge the freedom of the
press.
--The first clause of Section 2 is fairly straightforward, but the other two... A distinction between person and corporation may be workable on the contributions side, but it's wholly impractical for solely individuals to spend on campaigns in any effective manner. You'd have to allow people to form some sort of corporation to make it work, and then you run into another problem: Section 2 does not distinguish between one corporation and other. That means you could run into some Equal Protection Clause issues if you say that these corporations are exempt, but these aren't.
--The inclusion of Section 3 makes the amendment self-defeating and worthless. First of all, "freedom of the press" is not what the drafters of this think it is. Eugene Volokh convincingly argued here, it is better understood not as "freedom of the journalism industry", but "freedom of the usage of technology" (i.e., the printing press). This helps explain why the freedom of expression from the First Amendment is not solely limited to the spoken form. With Section 3, pretty much any attempted regulation would still be unconstitutional.
--But even if "freedom of the press" were construed to refer only the journalism industry, Section 3 would be self-defeating in a worse way. First, you'd have the messy question of who qualifies for "press". Second, the traditional forms of journalism are typically held by quite large corporations in the first place. GE owns NBC, Disney owns ABC, and so on. If you limit it to those traditional forms, you're shutting off the voices of quite a few powerless people and groups. If you don't, then as I've said before, what would stop an ExxonMobil or a Wal-Mart from spinning off a news agency to further whatever advocacy they wish?
tl;dr: This amendment was drafted really poorly. Good thing it's going nowhere anyway.
