Op-Ed: The Court’s Blow to Democracy
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| Thu, 01-21-2010 - 11:12pm |
The Court’s Blow to Democracy
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/22/opinion/22fri1.html
With a single, disastrous 5-to-4 ruling, the Supreme Court has thrust politics back to the robber-baron era of the 19th century. Disingenuously waving the flag of the First Amendment, the court’s conservative majority has paved the way for corporations to use their vast treasuries to overwhelm elections and intimidate elected officials into doing their bidding.
Congress must act immediately to limit the damage of this radical decision, which strikes at the heart of democracy.
As a result of Thursday’s ruling, corporations have been unleashed from the longstanding ban against their spending directly on political campaigns and will be free to spend as much money as they want to elect and defeat candidates. If a member of Congress tries to stand up to a wealthy special interest, its lobbyists can credibly threaten: We’ll spend whatever it takes to defeat you.
The ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission radically reverses well-established law and erodes a wall that has stood for a century between corporations and electoral politics. (The ruling also frees up labor unions to spend, though they have far less money at their disposal.)
The founders of this nation warned about the dangers of corporate influence. The Constitution they wrote mentions many things and assigns them rights and protections — the people, militias, the press, religions. But it does not mention corporations.
In 1907, as corporations reached new heights of wealth and power, Congress made its views of the relationship between corporations and campaigning clear: It banned them from contributing to candidates. At midcentury, it enacted the broader ban on spending that was repeatedly reaffirmed over the decades until it was struck down on Thursday.
This issue should never have been before the court. The justices overreached and seized on a case involving a narrower, technical question involving the broadcast of a movie that attacked Hillary Rodham Clinton during the 2008 campaign. The court elevated that case to a forum for striking down the entire ban on corporate spending and then rushed the process of hearing the case at breakneck speed. It gave lawyers a month to prepare briefs on an issue of enormous complexity, and it scheduled arguments during its vacation.
Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., no doubt aware of how sharply these actions clash with his confirmation-time vow to be judicially modest and simply “call balls and strikes,†wrote a separate opinion trying to excuse the shameless judicial overreaching.
The majority is deeply wrong on the law. Most wrongheaded of all is its insistence that corporations are just like people and entitled to the same First Amendment rights. It is an odd claim since companies are creations of the state that exist to make money. They are given special privileges, including different tax rates, to do just that. It was a fundamental misreading of the Constitution to say that these artificial legal constructs have the same right to spend money on politics as ordinary Americans have to speak out in support of a candidate.
The majority also makes the nonsensical claim that, unlike campaign contributions, which are still prohibited, independent expenditures by corporations “do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.†If Wall Street bankers told members of Congress that they would spend millions of dollars to defeat anyone who opposed their bailout, and then did so, it would certainly look corrupt.
After the court heard the case, Senator John McCain told reporters that he was troubled by the “extreme naïveté†some of the justices showed about the role of special-interest money in Congressional lawmaking.
In dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens warned that the ruling not only threatens democracy but “will, I fear, do damage to this institution.†History is indeed likely to look harshly not only on the decision but the court that delivered it. The Citizens United ruling is likely to be viewed as a shameful bookend to Bush v. Gore. With one 5-to-4 decision, the court’s conservative majority stopped valid votes from being counted to ensure the election of a conservative president. Now a similar conservative majority has distorted the political system to ensure that Republican candidates will be at an enormous advantage in future elections.
Congress and members of the public who care about fair elections and clean government need to mobilize right away, a cause President Obama has said he would join. Congress should repair the presidential public finance system and create another one for Congressional elections to help ordinary Americans contribute to campaigns. It should also enact a law requiring publicly traded corporations to get the approval of their shareholders before spending on political campaigns.
These would be important steps, but they will not be enough. The real solution lies in getting the court’s ruling overturned. The four dissenters made an eloquent case for why the decision was wrong on the law and dangerous. With one more vote, they can rescue democracy.





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Blog: Corporations are not people; money is not speech
http://blogs.ajc.com/jay-bookman-blog/2010/01/21/corporations-are-not-people-money-is-not-speech/?cxntfid=blogs_jay_bookman_blog
Today’s Supreme Court ruling is an Alice in Wonderland exercise. The five-justice majority reached the outcome it sought — an outcome that greatly expands the legal rights and political power of corporations — by trying to redefine basic reality.
No matter what the Court majority may prefer to argue or believe, corporations are not people and money is not speech. They simply are not.
Nor did the Founding Fathers perceive them as such. The notion that corporations — a useful legal fiction created by government — should have the same rights as natural human beings would have astounded Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and John Marshall. The theory of natural rights that animated the Declaration of Independence proclaimed that it is people and only people who are endowed with inalienable, natural rights. At the time, they did not even extend that theory to apply to those people who were held as slaves.
Corporations and unions are merely tools. And like any manmade tool, they can be remade however we wish to make them perform better in our service. They are not natural persons with rights inherent in their existence. If we choose to endow corporations with certain rights and deny them other rights so they might better serve our purposes, we ought to be perfectly free to do so. They are our creations.
Yet at its core, the Supreme Court’s majority decision in Citizens United attempts to erase that distinction and give corporations and people equal standing. The judges proclaimed point blank that it is in fact unconstitutional to treat corporations and people differently in matters of political speech:
In other words, inanimate, lifeless corporations cannot be “disfavored speakers” under the Constitution. They must be given the same natural rights as human beings.
And these judges proclaim themselves originalists. Amazing.
Justice John Paul Stevens, writing for the minority, is clearly confounded by what his colleagues are attempting:
To rule that Congress cannot limit the rights of corporations that are invented by man and controlled by man — to endow those legal fictions with the same natural rights as living, human beings — is absurd. To claim the U.S. Constitution as the basis for that ruling is an outright fabrication.
It's a terrible day for America. I've known for a long time, that
The sound you hear is Lincoln turning over in the grave. From the Gettysburg address:
"that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
Maybe we started the slippery slope when we put ailing corporations on life support and deemed them too important to lose, thus starting to treat them as people. Added to that, they already have the right to marry. I'm awaiting the resurgent power of tobacco companies as they put in candidates who will vote that cigarettes are, indeed, healthful.
Yep! Now it's blatantly obvious who's running the 'show'.
Corporations will also be able to buy business friendly justices.
>"A day after the United States Supreme Court ruled that the federal government may not ban political spending by corporations or unions in candidate elections, officials across the country were rushing to cope with the fallout, as laws in 24 states were directly or indirectly called into question by the ruling.
“One day the Constitution of Colorado is the highest law of the state,” said Robert F. Williams, a law professor at Rutgers University. “The next day it’s wastepaper.”
The states that explicitly prohibit independent expenditures by unions and corporations will be most affected by the ruling. The decision, however, has consequences for all states, since they are now effectively prohibited from adopting restrictions on corporate and union spending on political campaigns."<
>"Richard Hasen, an election law specialist at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, said he expected state judicial races to be especially affected by the Supreme Court decision.
In recent years, he said, the states where corporate contributions were permitted saw an explosion in spending in judicial races. With the new ruling, those states and others where such donations were limited or banned are likely to see more money spent on these races.
Between 2000 and 2009, spending on state supreme court races across 22 states that had competitive elections was about $207 million, up from $86 million between 1990 and 2000, according Justice at Stake, at watchdog group that monitors money in court races."<
Segments from.......
24 States’ Laws Open to Attack After Campaign Finance Ruling
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/23/us/politics/23states.html?hp=&pagewanted=print
The robber barons take over again.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VILl5tHY-2M
As ridiculous as the Brown victory is, it is not any where near the tragedy that the Supreme Court's decision is.
I am afraid, very afraid of what this decision means in terms of personal freedoms.
Maybe we started the slippery slope when we put ailing corporations on life support and deemed them too important to lose, thus starting to treat them as people.
No, IMHO,
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