I wonder if someone asked whether or not too much speech could lead to corruption. It's so strange to me that money could be equated with speech. Of course money can be used to promote a certain viewpoint, but money is not the viewpoint itself. Well, now it is. Still, not all speech is protected anyway. Even if money were speech, it doesn't follow that it should be protected speech.Precedent actually started with Buckley v. Valeo when the Supreme Court found some aspects of the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 unconstitutional, and ruled that we have a constitutional right to spend money in the political process because money equals speech (although here the court acknowledged that too much money could lead to corruption, so they upheld a limit on individual contributions to a candidate).
This is where I get a little sketchy in my info, but I believe a lot of the reasoning for this money = speech stuff comes out of cases involving the NAACP and unions that we're fighting for the rights of the people they represented. These poor people didn't have a big say at the time and a lot of them didn't understand the political process, so most pooled their money together in order to promote a common interest. The first PACs were born, I believe, in order to help these poor workers. And money was seen as speech in order to help them achieve their goal. Obviously corporations and private interests have now taken advantage of this, but at least lawmakers intended to do good. And I mostly agree, money as speech just doesn't work. Actually, a intresting precedent that came out if Velao is that the court, in reasoning why they kept the limitations on personal contributions, said their is a desire to not only limit corruption, but the appearance of corruption even if it does not exist. So I would imagine that the court would scrutinize any campaign finance laws way more since there is this important interest, but it doesn't look like that is/will happen. And sorry if I messed up any of the spelling - I'm on my phone and can't type worth shit haha