Should the SEC regulate corporate political speech?

Ten leading corporate and securities law professors have petitioned the SEC to develop rules to require companies to disclose their political spending.

This is the latest iteration of efforts to end-run Citizens United’s restrictions on regulating corporate campaign activities by calling it corporate governance regulation.  See my recent post on the Shareholder Protection Act.  I’ve written on these issues in my recently published The First Amendment and Corporate Governance.

The proposed regulation has a good chance of passing muster under the First Amendment because it would focus on disclosure rather than imposing substantive restrictions on corporate speech. Nevertheless, the First Amendment is still relevant.  I have already noted my view that the SEC’s proxy access rule (which is also basically a disclosure rule) avoided a confrontation with the First Amendment only because the DC Circuit could invalidate it on other grounds. At some point mandatory disclosure can sufficiently burden corporate speech to be unconstitutional.  To give just one example, requiring firms to pre-disclose all of their spending for the coming year, thereby preventing them to respond flexibly to changes in the political environment, could push the line.

Even if the SEC rules are constitutional, they would still not necessarily be good policy.  Notably, the law professors’ rulemaking petition, while spending some time discussing the supposed importance to investors of corporate political spending, said nothing about whether an SEC rule was necessary.  The petition highlighted the fact that many corporations already were voluntarily disclosing political spending, sometimes even without shareholder request. Why not continue the experimentation and evolution rather than locking down a one-size-fits-all rule?  Do the benefits of standardization outweigh the costs of experimentation?

The petition cites precedents such as executive compensation disclosure as evidence of the “evolving nature of disclosure requirements.”  But there’s nothing about this evolution that suggests it needs to proceed toward more disclosure about every political hot-button issue.

No doubt the SEC will proceed as the petition requests.  After all, it needs a juicy political issue to deflect attention from the recent questions about the SEC’s soundness and competence as a financial cop. But let’s at least hope that the Commission has learned something from its most recent run-in with the DC Circuit and tries to get some data on exactly who would be helped and hurt by regulation of political disclosures and how much. As with proxy access, would this be all about empowering certain activists at the expense of others, or passive diversified shareholders?  My article discusses some of these tradeoffs. The SEC’s analysis  might benefit from data on exactly what was accomplished by the Commission’s past disclosure enhancements the petitioners highlight.

The danger that the SEC will fall prey to the arbitrariness the DC Circuit criticized is especially intense given the petitioners’ argument that the “symbolic significance of corporate spending on politics suggests setting an appropriately low threshold” on when disclosure is required. I don’t even want to think about the consequences of inviting the SEC to weigh the benefit of “symbolism” against the direct and indirect costs of disclosure.

Anyway, get ready for a contentious debate which, while providing an enjoyable distraction, does nothing to protect investors from the fraud and market dangers that are supposed to be the SEC’s top priority.