The Supreme Court delves into campaign finance again
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Tune in and subscribe to Threat Vector wherever you get your podcasts. The Supreme Court delves into campaign finance again. From Marketplace, I'm Nancy Marshall-Genzer in for David Brancaccio. Happy Fourth of July.

Changes in the interpretation of campaign finance law could be on the horizon. The Supreme Court is revisiting the topic. It's been 15 years since the high court decided that corporations and unions can give unlimited amounts of money to candidates.

But political parties have to work within separate limits when it's money used in tandem by the party and the candidate. David Brancaccio is here with more. To understand this, the key word is coordination. Political party and candidate working hand in hand to coordinate where the money goes. Typically the big bucks thing, campaign advertising. I can spend all the money I like.

saying, vote for Jane Smith for president. And it's unlimited as long as I don't coordinate with her. But if I coordinate with her and say, Ms. Smith, I'd like to run an ad that highlights your vision on gun control. And she says, that's fantastic. Please do that. Then we've coordinated. That's David Kolker, senior counsel at the Campaign Legal Center. Now, he worked on a previous case involving this coordination issue that also ended up in the Supreme Court. In

In that one from 2001, the high court decided to keep limits on coordinated political party spending in an effort to minimize the effect of donors buying political influence. And then what the court has said is that because of the coordination, the potential for corruption is as great as if I had just written her a check.

So when there's coordination, it's equivalent to contributions, and therefore it can be subject to limits. But now the Supreme Court has agreed to look at this again after a Republican-backed challenge which claims the coordinated money restrictions violate free speech rules. If the Supreme Court next year sides with that argument, Kolker argues it'll cause a new surge of campaign money from multiple directions.

it's potentially going to lead to a huge circumvention of the limits that everybody lives with when they want to make direct contributions to candidates. You can only give about $3,000 or $4,000 to a candidate, but you can give a lot more than that to a political party. And if the political parties can take your money...

and then spend unlimited money to support a candidate. The incentive for you to give the maximum to the parties that they then use to help the candidates increases. That's David Kolker with the Campaign Legal Center in Washington, who spoke with Marketplace's David Brancaccio.

Social media is now the number one place Americans turn to for their news updates. That's from a report by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford. It finds that across the political spectrum, Americans use social media more than television or print. Our program Marketplace Tech spoke with Nick Newman, a co-author of the report, to talk about the state of news consumption in the U.S.

in the last year, we've seen a very significant increase in the percentage saying that they consume via some kind of social video network. So that's now over 50% and much higher with younger demographics as well. So that feels like a watershed moment. And, you know, I think it's fueled by

by some of the other trends that we see in the U.S. market, so the rise of the creator economy, individuals, personalities, leaving traditional media organizations, setting up on their own because they think they can have more control, and ultimately they can reach audiences in new ways at a much cheaper cost. And you can hear the full interview at marketplace.org. U.S. markets are closed for Independence Day. They'll reopen Monday morning at 9.30 Wall Street time.

Bye.

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It's been a little over a year since the Supreme Court ruled that cities can break up homeless encampments even if no alternative housing is available. Since then, state and local governments have ramped up efforts to move people into shelters. Today we hear more about a new approach in Northern California for people living in RVs. From KQED in San Francisco, Vanessa Roncagno reports.

Elvia Guzman, her husband, and their pit bull had been living in an RV for about four years when they ended up in an industrial corner of Berkeley.

There was a lot of RVs and a little community there. They couldn't afford an apartment, and the RV provided some privacy, security, and independence, but it wasn't ideal. Everything is like 10 times harder in an RV. Sometimes you don't have water, sometimes it's too cold or too hot, not enough space. And over time, the area got more chaotic.

Residents lined up to complain at city council meetings. Trash is spewing everywhere. Feces, urine, spoiled food, rats. Screaming. The city decided it had to shut the encampment down.

Peter Radu, who runs Berkeley's homeless response team, says past shelter offers to the residents had mostly failed. These folks largely don't consider themselves to be unsheltered. So Radu and his team decided to test a new strategy to get people out of their RVs. What if we could buy it for them? And would that change their willingness to engage with us?

If RV owners agreed to move into a motel shelter, the city would pay cash based on their vehicle size. Guzman and her husband got about $3,000 for their RV and promptly put it into savings. That gives them some reassurance in case they get kicked out of the shelter or the program runs out of funding. We don't have another RV to go to or like a plan B, you know, so we've got to have something. By late spring, the motel shelter was full.

Of the 32 RVs outreach workers came across in the encampment, just three remain on the streets. By that metric, it was a resounding success and something that we're looking to stand upon in other encampments. In West Berkeley, there's little trace of the encampment. The heaps of garbage are gone, and dozens of new street signs threaten would-be lodgers with arrest.

There's not an RV in sight, and 36 people who were on the street are now living in a city-leased motel. The idea is to get those folks into permanent housing as soon as possible. In Berkeley, I'm Vanessa Rancagno for Marketplace. And in Washington, I'm Nancy Marshall-Genzer with the Marketplace Morning Report. From APM, American Public Media. Hey, everyone. I'm Rima Jerez, and I'm excited to join Kimberly Adams on Make Me Smart.

Together, we'll unpack the day's news, whether it's a tariff switch up, the latest on Trump's immigration policy, or the future of clean energy. Join us each weekday so we can make sense of it all together, because none of us is as smart as all of us. Listen to Make Me Smart wherever you get your podcasts.