-- John Kenneth Galbraith
Chief Justice John Roberts, in handing down a bombshell of a decision yesterday warned: "The fact that the law currently grants a favored position to media corporations is no reason to overlook the danger inherent in accepting a theory that would allow government restrictions on their political speech." And there's the rub.
The entirety of this decision rests on the idea that a corporation should have the same rights as an individual citizen. This ruling overturns over a century of legal precedent against such a concept. If this is not "judicial activism", I don't know what is.
The case for why this is such an egregious case of activism is made by Michael Waldman in the Washington Post:
"For starters, the court boldly reached to consider a major constitutional case when it didn't have to. The case itself addressed an arcane issue: whether campaign finance laws were properly applied to an infomercial critical of Hillary Clinton. The justices easily could have ruled on narrow statutory grounds. Instead, last summer, they announced a rushed re-argument, making clear they were itching to overturn a century of constitutional doctrine, even though the case offered no factual or trial record on the broad question of corporate spending. This week the justices struck down laws in 22 states and overturned key decisions from 1990 and 2003 -- all in the middle of a new election cycle. It is hard to remember an instance where the justices reached so far to make major constitutional law. It will have immediate political consequences. Business managers now will be able to spend at will Bloomberg-level sums in congressional races across the country. In partisan and political impact, this rivals Bush v. Gore."
We are fast becoming something that we will not like. All of the "tea-partiers" wanting the "average guy" to be heard need to kiss that dream goodbye. This is a game changer in the largest sense. We no longer have representative democracy in my opinion, unless you feel like you are represented by a corporation. What is next? Will we have candidates decked out in clothing covered by sponsor emblems? Will our next congressional representative look like a european soccer player?
In his dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens said this:
At bottom, the Court's opinion is thus 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, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt. It is a strange time to repudiate that common sense. 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.
So true...we are now awash in the very thing that almost everyone agrees is the major cause of gridlock and corruption at the congressional level. If you think that you don't see any action from Congress now, just wait. All it will take is a couple of incumbents being badly beaten thanks to corporate spending in response to a political ruling against their interest to have everyone at Capitol Hill afraid to even legislate anything but the mildest of appeals.
So, as I heard one commentator wonder out loud...have we now given citizenship rights to foreigners? Halliburton, for one, is registered in the Cayman Islands as a tax shelter. Why does that corporation which calls another country its headquarters get the same rights that I do as an American citizen?
Corporations are not people! They are made up of people and that is where their representation comes from. Money poisons the well again and we will soon know that power corrupts...and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
A very sad day in American history.
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