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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O’Connor Mildly Criticizes Court’s Campaign Finance Decision
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/26/oconnor-mildly-criticizes-courts-campaign-finance-decision/
Retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor offered some thoughts this morning “about what’s been going on here at the Supreme Court.”
“Gosh,” she said of last week’s campaign finance bombshell, “I step away for a couple of years and there’s no telling what’s going to happen.”
Justice O’Connor was giving the keynote address at a Georgetown law school conference devoted in part to how Thursday’s campaign finance decision, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, will affect judicial elections.
Her answer: “In invalidating some of the existing checks on campaign spending, the majority in Citizens United has signaled that the problem of campaign contributions in judicial elections might get considerably worse and quite soon.”
Justice O’Connor criticized the decision only obliquely, reminding the audience that she had been among the authors of McConnell v. Federal Election Commission, the 2003 decision overruled in large part on Thursday.
“If you want my legal opinion” about Citizens United,” Justice O’Connor said, “you can go read” McConnell.
Justice O’Connor has become increasingly vocal in recent years about the need to do away with state judicial elections.
“Judicial elections are just difficult to justify in a constitutional democracy in which even the majority is bound by the law’s restraints,” she said Tuesday.
And Thursday’s decision, she said, only made making the case for elected judges harder.
“Judicial campaigning,” she said, “makes last week’s decision in Citizens United an increasing problem for maintaining an independent judiciary.”
Last year, the Supreme Court ruled that a state supreme court justice in West Virginia elected with the help of millions of dollars in campaign spending from a coal executive should have disqualified himself from a case involving the executive’s company.
“These two cases,” Justice O’Connor said, referring to Citizens United and the one from West Virginia, Caperton v. A.T. Massey Coal Co., “should be a warning to states that still choose their judges by popular election.”
Federal judges are appointed for life and are insulated from political pressure. But most state judges are elected.
“Judges have to be assured,” Justice O’Connor said, that “they’re not going to be subject to political retaliation for their judicial acts
Had the Supreme Court followed the popular will in 1954, when it banned racial segregation in public school, or in 1967, when it struck down a Virginia law forbidding interracial marriage, she said, the United States would be a very different place.
Justice O’Connor sketched out what the future may look like in the wake of Citizens United.
“I think today we can anticipate that labor unions and trial lawyers, for instance, might have the financial means to win one particular state judicial election,” she said, “And maybe tobacco firms and energy companies have enough to win the next one. And if both sides unleash their campaign spending monies without restrictions, then I think mutually assured destruction is the most likely outcome.”
I think
Yes - and the link works for me.
Some snip-its:
"their wallet cords"
"forced to move from state to state looking for better tax codes..."
"it's AT&T not AT&Steve"
"accumulate enough wealth"
Op-Ed: Does Corporate Money Lead to Political Corruption?
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/24/weekinreview/24kirkpatrick.html?hpw
WASHINGTON — “There are two things that are important in politics,” Mark Hanna, the great Republican kingmaker of the late 19th century, once said. “The first thing is money, and I can’t remember what the second one is.”
What was true in Hanna’s century remained true in the next, and since the Watergate scandal of the 1970s, Congress has imposed stricter regulations on money in politics. Advocates of those rules argue that they rein in corruption and increase public trust in government.
But after more than three decades, has the system made a difference?
The question took on new urgency last week as the Supreme Court threw out regulations that prohibited corporations from buying campaign commercials that explicitly advocate the election or defeat of candidates. Democrats called the ruling a threat to democracy; Republicans cheered it as a victory for free speech.
Legal scholars and social scientists say the evidence is meager, at best, that the post-Watergate campaign finance system has accomplished the broad goals its supporters asserted.
Justice Anthony M. Kennedy noted in his opinion that no evidence was marshaled in 100,000 pages of legal briefs to show that unrestricted campaign money ever bought a lawmaker’s vote. And even after Congress further tightened the rules with the landmark McCain-Feingold law in 2002, banning hundreds of millions of dollars in unlimited contributions to the political parties, public trust in government fell to new lows, according to polls.
And what about the corporations that contributed so much of that money? A review of the biggest corporate donors found that their stock prices were unaffected after they stopped giving to the parties. The results suggest that those companies did not lose their influence and may have been giving “because they were shaken down by politicians,” said Nathaniel Persily, a professor at Columbia Law School who has studied the law’s impact.
“There is no evidence that stricter campaign finance rules reduce corruption or raise positive assessments of government,” said Kenneth Mayer, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “It seems like such an obvious relationship but it has proven impossible to prove.”
It is not merely an academic question. The Supreme Court has consistently said that only fighting corruption or the appearance of corruption justifies laws that restrict political spending. Other rationales — like leveling the playing field between the haves and have-nots — are not enough.
Defenders of the rules say their case for tighter restrictions on campaign money is obvious to anyone who knows Washington. Private influence-seekers shower big contributions on politicians because they want to gain access and shape policy; they would not spend the money if they got nothing in return.
But even supporters of the rules acknowledge that the benefits can be hard to measure. “I happen to think the campaign finance laws have done some modest good,” said Richard L. Hasen, an expert on political law at the Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. “How much good? We may soon find out,” he added, in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s ruling on Thursday in Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission.
Supporters of the restrictions point to Britain to show that governments can police corruption without imperiling free speech. Britain started regulating political spending as far back as 1883 and has tightened the rules steadily ever since.
Those British restrictions would violate the Supreme Court’s view of the First Amendment, yet Britain’s political debates are as robust as they are in the United States.
Opponents of restrictions, on the other hand, point out that Australia barely regulates political money. Individuals and corporations can give without limit. Parties can spend freely. And there is not much disclosure about who gives what to whom. But political corruption has not threatened a vibrant democracy there.
In the United States, studies comparing states like Virginia with scant regulation against those like Wisconsin with strict rules have not found much difference in levels of corruption or public trust, several scholars said. Jeff Milyo, an economist at the University of Missouri, has compared states with strict bans on corporate contributions to political parties against those with no limits at all. “There is just no good evidence that campaign finance laws have any effect on actual corruption,” he said.
The most insistent advocates of the campaign finance laws argue that the benefits are real even if academics can’t measure them. Fred Wertheimer, the dean of campaign finance “reformers,” pointed to the presidential campaign finance system as the best example of success. For five elections beginning in 1976, the presidential candidates of both major parties took public financing and did not receive private campaign contributions. “You can’t prove a negative,” Mr. Wertheimer said, “but in the Carter and Reagan presidencies there were no news stories about campaign contributions influencing presidential decisions.”
By the 2008 election, however, that system had grown obsolete. Candidates could raise far more from private donors, and President Obama became the first major candidate since Richard M. Nixon to win election without public money.
Polls have shown that relatively few people understand or are even aware of the campaign finance rules. Those who are aware of them usually assume that smart donors will be able to steer around the rules. But Mr. Wertheimer said that a cat-and-mouse game of election rule-makers forever trying to catch up with the latest evasions by big money donors was only natural, “part of the ongoing battle to prevent government corruption.”
But some politicians say reformers like Mr. Wertheimer are unrealistic about how money and politicians mix. They cite an old political maxim, attributed in a more vulgar form to the onetime California kingpin Jesse Unruh: If you can’t take their money and vote against them, you don’t belong in politics.
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For the sake of those Republicans who are in favor of free speech, I hope the very first "corporation" to throw money into the ring is the porn industry. We'll see how that sits with their Christian values. LOL
How many
LOL I'm sure they's take the $$$
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