SCOTUS Sells US Gov't to Highest Bidder

[TampaYankee]

Supreme Court Rolls Back Campaign Finance Restrictions

First Posted: 01-21-10 10:19 AM | Updated: 01-21-10 03:48 PM

By a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court on Thursday rolled back restrictions on corporate spending on federal campaigns. The decision could unleash a torrent of corporate-funded attack ads in upcoming elections.

"Because speech is an essential mechanism of democracy -- it is the means to hold officials accountable to the people -- political speech must prevail against laws that would suppress it by design or inadvertence," wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy for the majority.

In his dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens accused the majority of judicial activism and attacked the use of corporate personhood in the case: "The conceit that corporations must be treated identically to natural persons in the political sphere is not only inaccurate but also inadequate to justify the Court's disposition of this case."

For the remainder of the article...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/21/supreme-court-rolls-back_n_431227.html

The Doctrine of Corporate Personhood puts the lie to those Originalists and Strict Constructionists that somehow manage to line up behind this decision in the name of Free Speach. Nowhere does the Constitution or the Bill of Rights or any other Constitutional Ammendment call out Corporate Personhood as a fundamental principle of the Constitution or any enacted Ammendment.

This is clearly a victory for the power of Commerce at the crushing expense of the individual. Thank you Bush Supreme Court. May the SCOTUS majority in the decision be cursed with bloated and bleeding hemmorhoids for the remainder of their days.

I see little recourse to this decision other than a future SCOTUS overturning this travesty or better yet the Doctrine of Corporate Personhood or the passage of a Constitutional Ammendment overturning either this decision or better, the Doctrine of Corporate Personhood. The latter is preferred but probably impossible.

For more on the Doctrine of Coporate Personhood see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood_debate

and for a more entertaining exposition see: http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/18472

[Guest Conway]

Come now, even McCain-Feingold was nothing more than a clusterfuck of campaign finance exceptions that allowed the process to be influenced through other sources. It certainly did nothing to reform our electoral system. Corporations and the very wealthy continued to manipulate the system through non-profits and media consortiums.

[TampaYankee]

Come now, even McCain-Feingold was nothing more than a clusterfuck of campaign finance exceptions that allowed the process to be influenced through other sources. It certainly did nothing to reform our electoral system. Corporations and the very wealthy continued to manipulate the system through non-profits and media consortiums.

I hope that your percieved shortcomings of McCain-Feingold are not being put forth as a justification of this sweepting SCOTUS opinion? Mc-F was flawed and while I appreciate what it tried to do it I think it missed the heart of the problem and created the all too often encountered 'unintended consequences'.

IMO, the heart of the problem is the nonconstitutional and nonstatutory Doctrine of Coporate Personhood and the very undue leverage that provides to distort our political process.

I have much less problem with PACs as they are real associations of real people with common interests funded by individual contributors. IMO that is a consitutionally grounded measure for free speech with right of assembly. The power of the PACs is rooted in the number of like-minded individual contributors rather than the number of world-wide customers buying soap or a gallon of gasoline who have no consensus viewpoint on specific policy issues.

[Guest StuCotts]

This latest decision is perfectly of a piece with the Court putting Bush into office, and as such, entirely predictable. Nonetheless, the punditocracy is expending massive quantities of hot air over it, from the squeaks of triumph at one end of the spectrum to the wails of despair at the other. It is all instantly forgettable and none of it avails the nation anything.

However misguided, the decision is now the law of the land. What matters is its effect in practical terms. The door is open for unlimited sums to be thrown at political advertising. My prediction is that the right will rev up their tradition of lying character assassination in the swiftboating mode, and raise it to the power of 100. The left will either recoil from any part of shit-flinging, thus ending up on the receiving end of all of it, or will take a stab at it and fumble, stumble, trip over their own feet and finally invite ridicule on the arguments they try to make.

It's not exactly about history repeating itself the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce. But the thought has been heavily on my mind lately.

[TampaYankee]

This latest decision is perfectly of a piece with the Court putting Bush into office, and as such, entirely predictable. ...

However misguided, the decision is now the law of the land.

I think this highlights how very important it is to keep Supreme Court appointments in Democratic hands for the next 7 years at least.

[Guest JamesWilson]

Interesting perspectives from Jeffrey Toobin, especially the one about the impact this will have on judicial elections:

http://readersupportednews.org/off-site-opinion-section/72-politics/818-bad-judgment

Bad Judgment

Posted by Jeffrey Toobin

The New Yorker (blog)

January 22, 2010

The basic ruling in yesterday’s five-to-four Supreme Court decision was straightforward and, in many ways, predictable. Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., and his four conservative colleagues almost invariably rule in favor of corporate interests, and the Citizens United case was no exception. The Court ruled that corporations (and labor unions and other organizations) have the right, under the First Amendment, to participate in political campaigns by spending as much money as they want on behalf of political candidates. In other words, companies can produce commercials and buy time to support or oppose candidates for office.

Two thoughts. First, Republicans will benefit, of course. Corporations have vastly more money than unions, and corporations by and large prefer to support the G.O.P. But the spectre of Exxon buying time to support Barack Obama’s opponent in 2012 seems unlikely to me. Presidential campaigns are high-profile and generally well-funded; Exxon (or its ilk) would probably not make much difference—and likely draw a consumer boycott with a controversial choice.

The much bigger implication of the decision is likely to come in judicial elections. In the states that elect judges (about two-thirds of them), most voters pay relatively little attention to the races, but the contests, especially for the state supreme courts, tend to be vicious and expensive. Corporate interests often have a huge stake in the outcome, because most personal-injury lawsuits and other civil cases are handled at the state level. The whole notion of electing judges is tawdry and awful; Justice Sandra Day O’Connor has devoted a great deal of energy, during her retirement from the Supreme Court, to urging states to move to appointive systems. Corporate freedom to dump untold amounts of money into these races will make bad systems worse.

Second, it has long been a staple of conservative thought to criticize “judicial activism”—the practice of unelected judges imposing their own policy judgments to overrule the will of the people’s elected representatives. But it is hard to imagine a more activist decision than the Citizens Union case. Congress passed the McCain-Feingold law, and President George W. Bush signed it, in the knowledge that the Supreme Court had repeatedly blessed restrictions on corporate political activity. But Justice Anthony Kennedy’s opinion blithely overturned Court precedent, and rejected the work of the elected branches—all in service of the bizarre legal theories that (1) corporations have the same rights as human beings, and (2) spending money is the same thing as speaking. This was judicial activism of the most egregious kind. Indeed, it wasn’t as much a judicial opinion as it was Republican talking points.

[Guest Conway]

Certainly there would be those (myself included) that would argue that businesses represent people with common interests the same way that PACs do. I guess the court agrees. There's a new Gallup poll today in which a majority of the respondents took this position. Interestingly enough, the respondents also thought that the now former system worked well.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/125333/Public-Agrees-Court-Campaign-Money-Free-Speech.aspx

I think that if you look at the list of the largest campaign PAC campaign contributors to each of the major party candidates in the last election, you'll see that they represented the interest of private businesses, in Obama's case, The US Government and large educational institutions:

McCain:

http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/contrib.php?cycle=2008&cid=n00006424

Obama:

http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/contrib.php?cycle=2008&cid=N00009638

[MsGuy]

This article demonstrates an inherent danger in allowing unlimited independant political spending by corporations and wealthy individuals hiding behind innoculously named PACs.

Does anyone here believe the hedge fund moguls financing American Crossroads intended to further public debate on the question of whether the loophole allowing their earnings to be taxed at 1/2 the rate everyone else pays should be closed? Or were they simply paying for attack ads on whatever unrelated issues might damage any politician who might have the gall to question the retention of their (not so) little tax boondoggle?

You and I may not have been priviledged to know the motives behind American Crossroads ads but I assure you that every pol in D.C. sure sat up and took notice. Anyone care to bet on the prospect of taxing the earned income of hedge fund owners at normal rates after this little attack ad blitz?

"Impeach Roberts"

[Lucky]

Kudos to Stu Cotts, who got it right way back when!

"The door is open for unlimited sums to be thrown at political advertising. My prediction is that the right will rev up their tradition of lying character assassination in the swiftboating mode, and raise it to the power of 100. The left will either recoil from any part of shit-flinging, thus ending up on the receiving end of all of it, or will take a stab at it and fumble, stumble, trip over their own feet and finally invite ridicule on the arguments they try to make."