Docket 08-205 - Goliath Wins

In light of my recent decision to pick up blogging again for whatever reason, I thought I could go back and re-post some previous things I've written (mostly on Facebook), at least to have them in a single location. So for starters, this is basically just stolen from Maddow's rant on the Citizens United case a few months back. In brief, in a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court declared limits on corporate spending in political races to be unconstitutional, citing the First Amendment and identifying corporations as "persons," an absurd idea by many measures. 


*Originally written January 22, 2010 - Imported from Facebook Notes*


Regardless of whether or not you like her, Rachel Maddow summarized the recent Supreme Court Ruling as follows. While I'm hesitant to cry 'doomsday for democracy', I do in essence share those views as expressed here:

"And now, a bolt of lightning has struck the entire American political system. . . .

The Supreme Court today swept away rules that go back more than a century—rules that have constrained the way that corporate interests can influence the American political system. In 1907, Congress passed a law banning corporations from donating money directly to politicians. Over the next century, Congress passed a number of laws aimed at stopping corporate money from completely controlling America‘s political debate.

They‘re laws that have been upheld multiple times by the Supreme Court. Like in 1990 when the Supreme Court ruled it was constitutional to restrict corporate political spending. Or 2003, when the Supreme Court ruled specifically that the McCain/Feingold corporate campaign finance rules were OK.

Well, today, in one of the most radical Supreme Court actions in years, Justice Roberts and Alito and their five-member conservative majority overthrew at least a decade of settled law and congressional action and multiple Supreme Court precedence to wipe those laws away. Corporations are free to inject unregulated billions, absolutely unlimited money into the political system now.

If you are a regular person who‘s ever made a campaign donation before, forget about ever having to do that again. What‘s the point in individual people trying to influence politics with donations if Exxon or some other company can quite literally match and therefore cancel out the combined donations of every single individual donor in the nation whenever it wants in one check? And it can do it every year, in every campaign, in every state, in every race.

Going forward, corporations will be able to use unlimited money to support or oppose candidates in federal office. This isn‘t CEOs, individual rich guys using their private money. It isn‘t people forming political associations to do political work. It is big business being allowed to use its profits to flood the airwaves with ads against one candidate or for another.

So, if you‘re, say, a giant health insurance company who doesn‘t want the current system to change because you‘re making a killing, there‘s now nothing stopping you from tapping into your company‘s millions of dollars of profits to try to defeat a candidate who will vote against your interests. And you can do it without limit. If you have $2 billion in your company bank account, and you see stopping health reform as an existential (ph) issue for your company, you can and your shareholders probably think you should spend all $2 billion of those dollars running ads against health reform directly. Feel free.

This ruling rolls back decades of protections against corporate interference and control of governance. Justice John Paul Stevens read from the bench his scathing 20-minute dissent of the court‘s decision today. He said, “The court‘s ruling threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions across the nation. It‘s a rejection of the common sense of the American people who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self-government since the founding. While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.”

Today‘s ruling affects everything going forward. If this ruling is not curtailed somehow through legislation, I personally think it is impossible to overstate the impact this will have on American politics. Every major issue that our government deals with will change because the field has just been dramatically tilted, like 90 degrees tilted toward corporate interests.