In 2010, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United that corporations were legal persons with respect to the First Amendment and so had rights to political speech that could not be abridged. In practical terms, the Court allowed corporations to make unlimited contributions to Political Action Committees and other nonprofits at any time.

In 2013, the Hobby Lobby chain of Craft Stores sued to overturn a law requiring employers to include contraception in the healthcare packages offered to employees. Hobby Lobby, and in its wake many other corporations, argued inter alia that the law violated its First Amendment rights to freedom of religion. The reaction of US Appellate Courts was mixed, and the Supreme Court decided the case narrowly and without reaching the First Amendment issue. (1)

Hobby Lobby's majority ownership professes Christianity, and to my knowledge no majority-Jewish-owned corporation has yet made a similar claim. Some Jewish groups have, however, come out strongly against Citizens United. (2) In each case, their argument is that treating corporations as people gives disproportionate power to the very rich, who are unaware of the needs and desires of ordinary folk.

Now the Torah in several places (3) forbids accepting bribes, and the Rabbis extend that prohibition even to accepting money "so as to judge fairly",(4) on the premise that accepting money creates a natural desire to provide reciprocal favors. This might be read as the basis for a Jewish prohibition against any private campaign financing.

A similar moral might be derived from the Biblical requirement that materials for the ritual in the Temple be financed by an egalitarian head tax of half a shekel--"The rich must not add, and the poor must not subtract, from the half shekel". (5)

In my opinion, however, it is unproductive and poor moral reasoning to seek to map the detailed past conclusions of Jewish law directly onto the political practice of contemporary America. Each sociopolitical reality has its own balance of forces, and so the law must be adjusted to take that specific balance into account. A system which approaches justice in one context may breed oligarchy in another, and tyranny of the majority in a third. Past Jewish legal decisions were made with regard to societies which accepted Jewish law in toto, and must not be applied to pluralistic contexts without careful and rigorous thought.

For example--banning private campaign financing might generate a system in which every person has an exactly equal capacity to run successfully for office, and in which victorious candidates feel no obligations toward any individual more than to any other. But the same system, combined with a requirement that many signatures be required on nominating petitions, might in practice yield the result that only candidates approved by electoral "machines" are listed on the ballot. When combined with a low level of public financing, the same system might mean that positions seen as "fringe" by the more powerful media outlets never get the opportunity to be seriously considered by voters.

And as it happens, the Rabbis understood the half-shekel as a minimum tax, set aside to buy the animals for public sacrifices, which did not preclude the wealthy from making large additional voluntary donations of wood to fuel those sacrifices, or to maintain the temple, or even from paying additional half-shekels on behalf of the poor. (6) Thus rich donors could rightly feel that they contributed disproportionately toward fulfilling the public's religious obligations.

What we can say productively is that the Rabbis made a strong claim about psychological reality, and that an authentic Jewish perspective on political financing must account for that claim. In other words, the Rabbis presumed that contributions generate influence, even if both the donor and the candidate can say sincerely that the money involved neither an explicit nor a tacit quid pro quo. …