Ted Cruz: ‘Saturday Night Live’ Skits Illegal Under New Campaign Finance Proposal

[Aristotle]

This guy absolutely has to go. This is outrageous.

Ted Cruz: ‘Saturday Night Live’ Skits Illegal Under New Campaign Finance Proposal

I had to double check that this wasn't on The Onion.

[Red Syns]

Does he ever provide any logic besides "NBC is a corporation"? I feel like there has to be something else missing here.

This guy is so polarizing, he polarizes me as a person. On one side, he does things like walk out of a meeting that condemns Israel because they're Jewish, which I completely support. Then he says something like this, and I can't help but wonder what the hell he's talking about.

/facepalm

[Rosuav]

A new proposal for campaign finance reform...

That’s because, Cruz insisted, the amendment would give congress the “constitutional authority to prohibit” corporations “from engaging in political speech” and, “NBC, which airs Saturday Night Live, is a corporation.”

I'm not quite following, here. Surely "campaign finance" is all about money moving around? Why should anyone get to censor anyone based on that? Is the unstated premise here something along the lines of "this skit is a means for NBC to effectively sponsor this party or that party"?

If that's the line of argument, then the proposal's scope is way too broad. I mean, Frogdice is a company. Is the presence of the politics channel on Thresh somehow proof that you're funding the Republican Party's campaign, because the Democrats just did something stupid and are getting called out for it in public chat? AT&T is a company. Are they funding the Democrat's campaign, because the other lot did something stupid and people are phoning each other to laugh about it?

Ultimately, every single person has the power to help or hinder either party's campaign (and hindering one is tantamount to helping the other, in a mostly-two-party system), just by talking about politics. That's freedom of political speech. That's civic engagement. That's, yaknow, being a citizen of a country that has elected leaders. At what point does it become campaign funding?