Democracy for sale

The decision of the Supreme Court raising the cap on political campaign ads on TV and radio has been hailed as a triumph for the freedom of speech. That is an illusion. It upholds the freedom of speech of only one group, the politicians, and undermines democracy for everyone else. The Constitution speaks of equal access to opportunities for public service, and yet the Court will offer our democracy for sale to the highest bidder. It would make it appear that it is actually doing this for our own sake as voters. It pushes credulity too far.

Do those ads really tell us more about the candidates’ platforms? Do they make us more knowledgeable about the candidates so that we can choose wisely and our right to suffrage becomes more meaningful? Or do they merely recall what Justice Florentino Feliciano once lamented as the “marketing of ‘packaged’ candidates” through ads that “manipulate … the non-intellective faculties of [a] captive and passive audience”?

Now that the Court has made permanent its 2013 order abandoning this wisdom, we ask ourselves: Why do we flip-flop on these campaign rules when we all agree that the goal is to “level the playing field”?

It’s because we haven’t really made up our minds on what kind of leveling we need. Is it between rich and poor candidates, or between the celebrities and the obscure? When we speak of leveling, we seem to assume that we should target those with loaded war chests and bring them to the level of those without. Yet each time we cuff the capacity of candidates to buy mass media exposure, we cut them off from the cheapest and most effective way to reach the voters. The Commission on Elections’ draconian cap on political ads may cramp the reach of the loaded candidates, but it actually benefits celebrities and those from political families because they are already famous and can get noticed without having to buy airtime. Which is the greater evil? The hegemony of the rich, or the reign of the shallow? In this sense, the rise of televised political ads is the modern, political equivalent of the rise of the cash economy. It’s the way outsiders can gain entry without the benefit of either birth or status.

Stated otherwise, when the Court raises the cap on televised campaign ads, it tells us two things. One, the real enemy of Philippine democracy is the show biz and dynastic candidate, not the rich who can purchase name recognition. Two, if political ads are capped, the rich will simply shift their campaign funds to rallies, parades, motorcades and good old-fashioned vote-buying. The evil remains because wealth can still be used to buy political office. We can prevent the rich from buying airtime, but we can’t stop them from buying just about anything else. That is why the Court’s preferred solution is to regulate campaign spending across the board, not just for paid ads. That way, we achieve the same goal without impinging on the highly protected liberty of speech.

And indeed the Court is right. Where it errs is when it raises the cap so high that it increases even more the role that money plays in Philippine politics. A similar pattern has emerged in another, far more famous democracy, the United States; US President Barack Obama was alarmed enough to address it in his 2010 State of the Union Address. “With all due deference to separation of powers, last week the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests … to spend without limit in our elections. I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests ….” He was widely chastised for having shamed the Chief Justice, who was sitting in the audience.

Yet US Chief Justice John Roberts explained that “money in politics may … seem repugnant to some, but so too does much of what the First Amendment vigorously protects [including] flag burning, funeral protests and Nazi parades—despite the profound offense such spectacles cause—it surely protects political campaign speech …”

Money’s true mischief in politics is that it alienates the citizen from the democratic process. A dissenting US judge said: “Where enough money calls the tune, the general public will not be heard… And a cynical public can lose interest in political participation altogether.” In the Philippines, in an earlier case, Justice Vicente Mendoza concluded: “For Holmes’s marketplace of ideas can prove to be nothing but a romantic illusion if the electoral process is badly skewed, if not corrupted, by the unbridled use of money for campaign propaganda.”