Some worthwhile comments on the Supreme Court's decision for corporate wealth and power

Some worthwhile comments on the Supreme Court's decision for corporate wealth and power

(1) Another Battle of the 2nd American Revolution has begun . . .

P R E A M B L E

"We the Corporations of a New Global Imperialism,
in Order to form a more perfect Profit,
establish Dominion over all lands of the Earth,
insure international Wealth superiority,
provide for our common defense, promote Corporate Welfare,
and secure the Blessings of Wealth to ourselves
and our limited Posterity, do ordain and establish this Plan
for subjugation of the citizens of the United States of America."
------ United States Supreme Court, 21 January 2010
===========================================
Corporations are legal fictions, not living breathing human beings.
.
Corporations have no life, no soul.
.
Corporations have no rights under the United States Constitution.
.
Corporations are ownable by international cartels.
.
Corporations are NOT citizens of any Nation.
.
Corporations cannot vote in any election in the United States.
.
Corporations cannot be elected to any Office anywhere in America.
.
Corporations have no right to influence any Election, anywhere, ever.

(2) Conservatives embrace judicial activism in campaign finance ruling
The Supreme Court's decision in favor of corporate spending in elections makes previous rhetoric laughable.

By Erwin Chemerinsky

The Los Angeles Times

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-chemerinsky22-2010jan22,0,5829403.story?coll=la-opinion-center

January 22, 2010

The Supreme Court's 5-4 decision holding that corporations and unions can spend unlimited amounts of money in election campaigns is a stunning example of judicial activism by its five most conservative justices. In striking down a federal statute and explicitly overturning prior decisions, the court has changed the nature of elections in the United States. At the same time, the conservative justices have demonstrated that decades of conservative criticism of judicial activism was nonsense. Conservative justices are happy to be activists when it serves their ideological agenda.

Since Richard Nixon ran for president in 1968, a central feature of Republican and conservative rhetoric has been to attack judicial activism. The phrase is never defined with any precision and has often been used to refer to decisions that conservatives simply don't like. But if judicial activism has any meaning, it surely refers to decisions that overturn laws and overrule precedents. In contrast, judicial restraint occurs when courts defer to the other branches of government and follow precedents.

By this definition, judicial activism can be good or bad. Brown vs. Board of Education was activist in that it declared unconstitutional laws in many states requiring the segregation of the races in education. To do so, the justices overruled a 58-year-old precedent upholding such laws. But virtually all agree today that Brown was one of the greatest moments in Supreme Court history.

To conservatives, though, the phrase "judicial activism" has come to mean any decision with a liberal outcome. President George W. Bush declared: "The judges ought not to take the place of the legislative branch of government. . . . I don't believe in liberal activist judges. I believe in strict constructionists." The 2008 Republican platform declared that "[j]udicial activism is a grave threat to the rule of law because unaccountable federal judges are usurping democracy, ignoring the Constitution and its separation of powers, and imposing their personal opinions upon the public."

The court's campaign finance decision makes this conservative rhetoric laughable. The ruling, which grew out of a conservative nonprofit corporation's attempt to air an anti-Hillary Rodham Clinton documentary during the 2008 primary, throws out a key component of the McCain-Feingold Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002. Among other things, the law banned corporations from paying to broadcast "electioneering communications" for or against candidates in the final weeks of presidential primaries and general elections.

McCain-Feingold was a continuation of statutes that have existed since 1906 limiting corporate spending in federal election campaigns. The act was intended to prevent the enormous wealth of corporations from distorting elections and protect corporate shareholders from having their money used for purposes with which they disagree.

For years, conservatives have argued that judicial restraint requires deferring to the choices of the elected branches of government. No such deference was evident when the court's five most conservative justices struck down this provision of the McCain-Feingold law on Thursday.

Nor did the decision defer to judicial precedent. In 2003, in McConnell vs. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision upheld this same law. In fact, in an earlier case in 1990, the court said that legislatures may restrict corporate spending in election campaigns. The court's decision on Thursday expressly overruled these decisions.

What changed over the last eight years? In the 2003 decision, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor joined with John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer to make up the majority. O'Connor's replacement, Samuel A. Alito Jr. voted the other way and joined with conservatives John G. Roberts Jr., Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy and Clarence Thomas to declare the same law unconstitutional.

For decades, conservatives have argued that judicial restraint requires that courts protect rights only if they are stated in the text of the Constitution or were clearly intended by the document's framers. This, for example, is the core of the conservative attack on Roe vs. Wade. But there is not the slightest shred of evidence that the framers of the 1st Amendment meant to protect the rights of corporations to spend money in election campaigns. The conservatives were glad to abandon the "original meaning" when it served their purposes.

The conservative majority, which in recent years has dramatically limited free speech in other areas -- such as for government employees and for students -- was willing to expand the free speech of corporations. There is no way to see this other than as the conservative justices using judicial review to advance the traditional conservative ideological agenda.

Almost 10 years ago, in Bush vs. Gore, the five conservative justices for the first time decided a presidential election. One would have thought that decision would have laid to rest the notion that judicial activism is a tool of liberal judges and revealed that the real judicial activism today is from the right. Perhaps Thursday's decision will finally reveal the truth.

Erwin Chemerinsky is dean of the University of California-Irvine School of Law.
(3) The Supreme Court ruling on corporate political spending
23 January 2010
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/jan2010/pers-j23.shtml

The ruling issued Thursday by the United States Supreme Court lifting long-standing restrictions on corporate financing of elections represents a far-reaching attack on democratic rights. The 5-4 decision ensures that the American political system will be dominated even more directly and completely by the financial elite.

The ruling is a naked assertion of the interests of the American financial elite. It lays bare the reality of class rule beneath the threadbare trappings of democracy in America.

The decision in the case Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which overturns more than 100 years of legal precedent, strengthens the grip of big business over the political process. It gives legal sanction to the buying of politicians and offices at every level of government to do the bidding of the rich.

The ruling cloaks this attack on democratic rights as a defense of freedom of speech. Its basic premise—that corporations are entitled to the same rights of speech and political advocacy as individuals—is patently absurd. It makes a mockery of the democratic and Enlightenment principles that animated the revolutionaries who led the American War for Independence and drafted the Constitution. Jefferson, for one, counted the influence of finance on politics as “more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies.”

The ruling is the outcome of decades of political reaction, the ever-greater concentration of wealth in the hands of a narrow elite, and increasing attacks on the social conditions of the people.

It culminates years of anti-democratic decisions by the Supreme Court. For the past three decades, the high court has whittled away at civil liberties and the ability of citizens to seek redress in cases of corporate criminality. In recent years it has upheld and expanded the ability of the executive branch to wage war, invade citizens’ private lives, and arrest and incarcerate without trial those the president declares to be enemies. The Supreme Court has consistently ruled against the rights of third-parties, especially left-wing parties, to ballot access.

Barely ten years ago, the same institution, in another politically-driven 5-4 ruling, halted the counting of votes in Florida in order to sanction the theft of the 2000 presidential election and install in power the Republican candidate George W. Bush, who had lost the popular vote.

The Democratic Party is complicit in the attacks on democratic rights, from its abject acceptance of the Supreme Court’s installation of Bush, to its support for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, to its cowardly refusal to mount a filibuster to block the confirmation of Bush nominees Justice Samuel Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts.

It was Roberts who played the critical role in seizing on Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission—a narrow lawsuit challenging the applicability of the McCain-Feingold restrictions on campaign advertising to a particular anti-Hillary Clinton documentary—and using it to undo all restraints on the corporate financing of politics.

This in a country where corporate money already manipulates elections, bribes politicians and largely dictates government policy. As Justice John Paul Stevens noted in his dissent, “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.”

The Supreme Court’s decision reflects the drive of the American financial aristocracy to throw off any and all restraints on its political domination.

A major concern of those within the establishment who have attacked the ruling is that it will further undermine public confidence in the Supreme Court and all official institutions. The decision “will, I fear, do damage to this institution,” Stevens wrote.

In fact, the ruling shows that working people, the vast majority of the population, cannot defend their interests through the existing political system. The Supreme Court, the Congress, the presidency and both political parties are controlled by the financial elite.

Recognition of this basic fact is growing, especially after a year of broken promises and right-wing policies by the Obama administration, which was carried to office by cynically appealing to popular hatred of the Bush administration and its policies of war, repression and social reaction.

More fundamentally, the ruling demonstrates that the socio-economic structure of American capitalist society is incompatible with democracy. Democratic forms become mere covers for plutocratic rule and must ultimately give way in a society with such vast disparities of wealth as exist in the United States.

The answer to the Supreme Court’s ruling and all of the attacks on democratic rights is to establish the political independence of the working class and fight for a workers’ government. Democratic rights can be defended only through the struggle for socialism—the transformation of society on the basis of the democratic control of economic life by the working class to meet social needs, rather than the accumulation of corporate profit and personal wealth by the ruling elite.

Tom Eley

The author also recommends:

US Supreme Court abolishes restrictions on big business political spending
[22 January 2010]


(4) Supreme Court Sanctioned Murder Of Democracy
Important Keith Olbermann Segment on YouTube

Part 1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMTJ--JWJqM

Part 2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9ZeUjSpF5g



(5) The Supreme Court decision further weakens our democracy

By Ralph Nader (about the author)

Yesterday's 5-4 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission shreds the fabric of our already weakened democracy by allowing corporations to more completely dominate our corrupted electoral process. It is outrageous that corporations already attempt to influence or bribe our political candidates through their political action committees (PACs), which solicit employees and shareholders for donations.

With this decision, corporations can now directly pour vast amounts of corporate money, through independent expenditures, into the electoral swamp already flooded with corporate campaign PAC contribution dollars. Without approval from their shareholders, corporations can reward or intimidate people running for office at the local, state, and national levels.

Much of this 183 page opinion requires readers to enter into a fantasy world and accept the twisted logic of Justice Kennedy, who delivered the opinion of the Court, joined by Chief Justice Roberts, and Justices Scalia, Alito, and Thomas. Imagine the majority saying the "Government may not suppress political speech based on the speaker's corporate identity."

Perhaps Justice Kennedy didn't hear that the financial sector invested more than $5 billion in political influence purchasing in Washington over the past decade, with as many as 3,000 lobbyists winning deregulation and other policy decisions that led directly to the current financial collapse, according to a 231-page report titled: "Sold Out: How Wall Street and Washington Betrayed America" (See: WallStreetWatch.org).

The Center for Responsive Politics reported that last year the U.S. Chamber of Commerce spent $144 million to influence Congress and state legislatures.

The Center also reported big lobbying expenditures by the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) which spent $26 million in 2009. Drug companies like Pfizer, Amgen and Eli Lilly also poured tens of millions of dollars into federal lobbying in 2009. The health insurance industry trade group America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) also spent several million lobbying Congress. No wonder Single Payer Health insurance - supported by the majority of people, doctors, and nurses - isn't moving in Congress.

Energy companies like ExxonMobil and Chevron are also big spenders. No wonder we have a national energy policy that is pro-fossil fuel and that does little to advance renewable energy (See: OpenSecrets.Org).

No wonder we have the best Congress money can buy.

I suppose Justice Kennedy thinks corporations that overwhelm members of Congress with campaign contributions need to have still more influence in the electoral arena. Spending millions to lobby Congress and making substantial PAC contributions just isn't enough for a majority of the Supreme Court. The dictate by the five activist Justices was too much for even Republican Senator John McCain, who commented that he was troubled by their "extreme naivete."

There is a glimmer of hope and a touch of reality in yesterday's Supreme Court decision. Unfortunately it is the powerful 90 page dissent in this case by Justice Stevens joined by Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, and Sotomayor. Justice Stevens recognizes the power corporations wield in our political economy. Justice Stevens finds it "absurd to think that the First Amendment prohibits legislatures from taking into account the corporate identity of a sponsor of electoral advocacy." He flatly declares that, "The Court's ruling threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions across the Nation."

He notes that the, Framers of our Constitution "had little trouble distinguishing corporations from human beings, and when they constitutionalized the right to free speech in the First Amendment, it was the free speech of individual Americans that they had in mind." Right he is, for the words "corporation" or "company" do not exist in our Constitution.

Justice Stevens concludes his dissent as follows:

"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."

Indeed, this corporatist, anti-voter majority decision is so extreme that it should galvanize a grassroots effort to enact a simple Constitutional amendment to once and for all end corporate personhood and curtail the corrosive impact of big money on politics. It is time to prevent corporate campaign contributions from commercializing our elections and drowning out the voices and values of citizens and voters. It is way overdue to overthrow "King Corporation" and restore the sovereignty of "We the People"! Remember that corporations, chartered by the state, are our servants, not our masters.

Legislation sponsored by Senator Richard Durbin (D-IL) and Representative John Larson (D-CT) would encourage unlimited small-dollar donations from individuals and provide candidates with public funding in exchange for refusing corporate contributions or private contributions of more than $100.

It is also time for shareholder resolutions, company by company, directing the corporate boards of directors to pledge not to use company money to directly favor or oppose candidates for public office.

If you want to join the efforts to rollback the corporate concessions the Supreme Court made yesterday, visit Citizen.Org and freespeechforpeople.org.
More: http://www.opednews.com/articles/2/The-Supreme-Court-decision-by-Ralph-Nader-100122-424.html


(6) Really Simple: We Need to Get Rid of the Perverse Notion of "Corporate Personhood"

Posted by Joshua Holland, AlterNet at 4:31 PM on January 21, 2010.

http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/www.alternet.org/145331/
Corporations are not people too.

With the unbelievable right-wing judicial activism of the Roberts court, we are now on the brink of losing our Republic and seeing our political system devolve into something like Mussolini's definition of Fascism (Mussolini said: "Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power"). Don't think this is an exaggeration.

People for the American Way (do I need to disclose that PFAW gave me a very modest fellowship 5 year ago?), is mounting a campaign to preserve our nominal democracy by passing a Constitutional amendment giving Congress the power to regulate corporate campaign money. It'll be an uphill battle -- the last Amendment to the Constitution, the 27th, was enacted 18 years ago; it had originally been submitted in 1789.

I don't know the specifics of their preferred amendment. But I'm pleased to see a piece of the progressive establishment take on this issue. Sign their petition here.

Update: a friend sends a link to movetoamend.org. Another good one --check it out.

What follows is a piece I wrote in July, 2006, after another Supreme Court decision struck down a different campaign finance law. I deleted the first few graphs discussing that case, and I think it stands up pretty well today.

Corporations Aren't People

The [2006] decision reveals yet again how deeply entrenched the role of big money is in the American political system. Over the last 150 years, bizarre legal doctrines have developed that have effectively codified the power of special interests. In addition to the idea in [Buckley v Valeo] that "money equals speech," we've been saddled with the Orwellian concept of "corporate personhood."

"Corporate personhood" gives corporations -- entirely artificial entities created by the state -- the same individual rights that the framers fought and died to secure for flesh-and-blood citizens (or at least for white male property holders, but you get the idea). The doctrine started in England reasonably enough; it was only by considering corporations "persons" that they could be taken to court and sued. But during the 19th century, the Robber Barons and a few corrupt jurists deep in their pockets took the concept to a whole new level. After the Civil War, while many of those same interests were fighting to keep African-Americans from being enfranchised, the doctrine took on new weight -- the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment was extended to corporations, and Thomas Jefferson slowly rolled over in his grave. The trend of granting more and more rights to corporations continues today.

As long as these ideas are embedded in our legal system, talk of cleaning up government -- of campaign finance and lobby reform -- are just that: talk. On these fundamental issues of democratic participation, incremental reform is a road leading nowhere.

Which is why we need bold, populist ideas for real structural reform. I say let's rip a page from Karl Rove's Scorched-Earth Politics for Dummies and offer a progressive constitutional amendment that would end this madness once and for all.


That could be as simple as a one-line amendment that rolls back Buckley by explicitly stating that regulating the amount of money donated to campaigns or setting limits on what candidates spend on advertising isn't the same as putting limits on political speech.

But I think something even bolder is in order. I think it's time for a Defense of Human Citizenship Amendment -- language that would strip the "personhood" from corporations and give reformers a fighting chance to establish a true democracy in the United States.

It should be as brief and straightforward as the Republicans' gay marriage amendment:

SECTION 1. Citizenship in the United States shall be conferred only on human beings. Neither this Constitution nor the constitution of any state, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to require that citizenship or the legal incidents thereof be granted to corporations, partnerships, proprietorships or trusts.

This would be great policy if enacted, and great politics regardless of whether it were to become law. A failing campaign to restore human citizenship would bring what has long been a contentious debate in legal and public policy circles into the mainstream. It would be the left's turn to decry "judicial activism" of the most pernicious kind, and it would be a valuable opportunity for some real civic education for the broader electorate. We need that; polls show that a majority of voters feel that corporations have too much influence over the political realm, but most Americans don't understand the mechanisms with which they maintain and wield that power.

It's an approach that might take a while to gain traction. But think about what the right has been able to accomplish with the constitutional amendments they push to ban flag burning or gay marriage. They've taken a wonky narrative about "judicial tyranny" which, on its face, is a ludicrously bad political argument, and they've made it into a hot-button issue.

They did that with 25 years of Federalist Society conferences and Wall Street Journal op-eds, and the result is that a point of contention between legal scholars became a central campaign line for the reelection of George W. Bush.

The Bush team offered up his divisive-but-popular federal "marriage amendment" during the 2004 campaign, even though it had no chance of actually passing. But on the state level, similar measures passed 18 times, thanks always to a predictable spike in Republican turnout -- big turnouts that helped Bush win a second term.

Defending human citizenship is a chance to excite the progressive base in the same way that the right's wedge-issue amendments rally their fundamentalist ground troops time and time again.

There's nothing new about turning your opponents' best tactics against them. A demoralized right did it when they were trying to regroup after the pummeling Barry Goldwater, their Golden Boy, took in his landslide election loss in 1964. They looked to the then dominant Democratic coalition for a clue as to how to turn it around.

Paul Weyrich, founder of the Free Congress Foundation, reminisced about those heady days:

"… study and application of your opposition's best practices can spur greater innovation and success. … Back in the 1970s … we stressed the importance of grass-roots organizing. We took a page from organized labor's playbook, modified it to fit our constituency and purposes, and started winning primaries and elections."

Constitutional amendments that fire up the Republican base are among the Rovian right's "best practices," and there's no reason progressives can't emulate them.

We hear all the time that there's a dearth of big ideas on the left. Here's one that would have a profound impact on a broken political system. Some smaller groups have been lobbying for this kind of reform for years -- it's time for someone in the progressive establishment to pick it up and run with it.



(7) Supreme Court on Corporations

Supreme Court Rules Corporations Are Free to Dominate
Elections

Citizens' Movement Emerges to Overrule the Court

National coordinated campaigns unite to revoke
corporate personhood, corporate "free speech," and
secure citizens' rights

Reclaim Democracy - Restoring Citizen Authority Over
Corporations

http://reclaimdemocracy.org/

Jan 20, 2010 Breaking News, Jan 21: Rep. Donna Edwards
announces bill to amend the Constitution and overrule
the Court. Rep. Leonard Boswell also announces plan.
See our home page for Edwards' video announcement.

BOZEMAN, MT - The Supreme Court dropped the pretense of
impartially interpreting the Constitution today in
favor of unabashed activism on behalf of corporate
power, overruling century-old legislative precedent and
decades-old precedent of its own.

The Court enshrined corporations -- an entity
unmentioned in the U.S. Constitution -- with the
political rights of human beings, overturning settled
law that distinguishes between corporate and individual
expenditures in elections.

In response, two citizen coalitions have emerged with
the explicit mission of overruling the Supreme Court
via amending the Constitution. ReclaimDemocracy.org is
among more than one dozen citizen groups that have
joined forces to advance Move to Amend, a call to amend
the Constitution to revoke the Court's illegitimate
creation of "corporate personhood," as well as
establishing a constitutional Right to Vote and
safeguarding local democracy.

A more narrowly-focused coalition has emerged
specifically to overrule the Court's invention of
corporate "political free speech." The groups, Voter
Action, Public Citizen, the Center for Corporate
Policy, and the American Independent Business Alliance,
also unveiled a new website to launch their campaign:
FreeSpeechForPeople.org.

Their goal is to amend the Constitution to make clear
that corporations are not people entitled to free
speech rights under the First Amendment. A bill may be
introduced in Congress as early as today.

Please take immediate action

Use the tools provided on the websites above to spread
word in every manner possible. Ask your elected
officials to get on board at every level of government.
We've provided primers to help you write effective
letters to the editor and to spread word via talk
radio. And don't forget social media! A few suggested
talking points:

** The Supreme Court's attribution of constitutional
rights to corporations is unsupported by the U.S.
Constitution or the writing of the Constitution's
authors. The invention of corporate personhood was an
act of raw judicial activism that undermines our
Constitution's promise of a republican form of
government.

** While our Constitution's authors were alive,
corporations were completely subordinate to democracy.
They could not own stock, engage in activities other
than those essential to their business, nor could they
make any political or charitable contributions.
Corporate lobbying also was prohibited. Maybe they were
onto something?

** No human being's First Amendment rights will be
infringed by preventing corporations from engaging in
electoral advocacy. Though we dissent from the Supreme
Court's view that spending money to influence election
outcomes is equivalent to speech, every corporate
executive remains free to spend unlimited amounts of
his/her own money to advocate for or against a
political candidate or party (only direct investments
to a candidate's campaign fund are limited by law).

** Corporations are artificial creations of governments
(in the U.S., through the Secretary of State's office
in a particular state). No group can decide to give
themselves limited liability, immunity from prosecution
for corporate crimes, or other privileges. Only
governments bestow such privilege. As government
creations, corporations should be subject to democratic
control, not enabled to control democracy.

** The many special powers and privileges the government
grants corporations (e.g. limited liability, perpetual
lifespan, etc.), make limiting their political power
essential.


**Corporate personhood allows giant corporations to
undermine free enterprise by extracting political
favors that distort market competition. This harms the
vast majority of businesses seeking to prosper by
providing needed goods and services, rather than
through legal bribery. Two of the three broad-based
national business organizations filing briefs in the
Citizens United case argued against expanding corporate
"political speech."

** (from the Citizens United dissent of Justices Stevens
(joined by Justices Sotomayor, Ginsburg, ". . . .
corporations have no consciences, no beliefs, no
feelings, no thoughts, no desires. Corporations help
structure and facilitate the activities of human
beings, to be sure, and their "personhood" often serves
as a useful legal fiction. But they are not themselves
members of "We the People" by whom and for whom our
Constitution was established."

An additional suggestion: go to news websites and make
comments to articles or commentaries with links to
MovetoAmend.org or here, drawing people to the broader
issues and the amendment campaign. It needs to be among
the first 10 or so comments, as most readers will never
go beyond that. You can easily visit the latest
articles on the case via Google News.

We are ready to help you with editing (send drafts
here). Please point people to ReclaimDemocracy.org's
online resources for educational material or to support
the effort financially. It's time to fund the Democracy
Movement at the level of national political campaigns
and launch a major media presence!

Please help make the Supreme Court's overreach the dawn
of a movement for real change to Reclaim Democracy!
Your efforts can help turn this attack on democracy
into a pivotal moment in American History. To read the
Court's opinions and a see a roundup of some of the
best reporting and analysis of the ruling, click here
More of our pre-decision reporting is here. Read more
on the underlying issue of Corporate Personhood

ReclaimDemocracy.org send us your comments or questions
(c) 2009 ReclaimDemocracy.org 222 South Black Ave.*
Bozeman * MT * 59715 * 406-582-1224



(8) Teddy Roosevelt Was Right: Ban ALL Corporate
Contributions

posted by JOHN NICHOLS
on 01/21/2010 @ 5:01pm
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/thebeat/519819/teddy_roosevelt_was_right_ban_all_corporate_contributions

What to do about the decision by U.S. Supreme Court to
-- in the words of Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold --
"(ignore) important principles of judicial restraint
and respect for precedent" in order to make
corporations the dominant players in American politics?

Of course, there will be legislative scrambling at the
local, state and federal levels. The decision by Chief
Justice John Roberts and four other justices to reject
history and precedent in order to put a radical pro-
corporate spin on the First Amendment throws into
question rules designed to regulate even the worst
campaign abuses by business interests.

Feingold, the Wisconsin Democrat who leant his name to
the McCain-Feingold Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform
Act of 2002, will be working overtime to defend not
just the progress he has made as a reformer but a
century of clean-government legislation.

"It is important to note that the decision does not
affect McCain-Feingold's soft money ban, which will
continue to prevent corporate contributions to the
political parties from corrupting the political
process. But this decision was a terrible mistake,"
says the Wisconsin senator. "Presented with a
relatively narrow legal issue, the Supreme Court chose
to roll back laws that have limited the role of
corporate money in federal elections since Teddy
Roosevelt was president. Ignoring important principles
of judicial restraint and respect for precedent, the
Court has given corporate money a breathtaking new role
in federal campaigns. Just six years ago, the Court
said that the prohibition on corporations and unions
dipping into their treasuries to influence campaigns
was `firmly embedded in our law.' Yet this Court has
just upended that prohibition, and a century's worth of
campaign finance law designed to stem corruption in
government. The American people will pay dearly for
this decision when, more than ever, their voices are
drowned out by corporate spending in our federal
elections. In the coming weeks, I will work with my
colleagues to pass legislation restoring as many of the
critical restraints on corporate control of our
elections as possible."

When all is said and done, however, that may not be
enough.

It may be that the United States Constitution will need
to be amended in order to restore to the Teddy
Roosevelt principle:

"All contributions by corporations to any political
committee or for any political purpose should be
forbidden by law," said Roosevelt in the first years of
the 20th century, when he was also proposing public
financing of federal election.

The court's ruling in the case of Citizens United v.
FEC is a game-changer that, in the words of Feingold
says corporations "can just open their treasuries (and)
completely buy up all the television time, and drown
out everyone else's voices."

There's a small measure of nuance in the ruling.

In their 5-4 decision, the majority maintained
restrictions on direct donations by corporations to
candidates and political parties.

But corporations - with their immense resources and
their immense desire to influence the political and
governing processes - will be able to spend as freely
as their like (on television commercials and other
forms of communication) to secure the election results
they seek.

It's a recipe for democratic disaster, as wealth and
power will define the debate that sets the parameters
of our politics.

Says Senator Charles Schumer, D-New York: "The Supreme
Court just predetermined the winners of next November's
elections. It won't be Republicans. It won't be
Democrats. It will be corporate America."

To paraphrase a particular television network, there
will be no fairness and no balance.

That threat demands a response sufficient to the
challenge it poses to electoral democracy. As Lisa
Graves, the executive director of the Center for Media
and Democracy, says: "We cannot just wring our hands,
in my view, and let this stand. There is a great deal
of work to be done."

Graves, a lawyer with long experience in both the
executive and legislative branches of the federal
government, offers a savvy analysis of the motivations
behind the court's ruling.

"When I worked for the Senate Judiciary Committee
reviewing President George W. Bush's judicial nominees
and their agendas, I feared this day would come. That's
why I tried to help keep John Roberts off the appellate
court, and then was so saddened the day he was
appointed and when I saw President Bush promote him to
become Chief Justice after I had left the government,"
she says. "In reading the biographies, writings, and
speeches of right-wing nominees, it became clear to me
that a revolution in the law was being fomented to
undermine the power of ordinary people to regulate
corporations in their communities. Today's decision is
a huge gift to corporations from a Supreme Court that
has been radicalized by right-wing ideology, whose
political agenda was made obvious in the Bush v. Gore
case and whose very political decision today only makes
things worse. I think we have to rebuke the Court's
arrogant decision and make sure the law puts Americans
before corporations."

There will be talk of legislative interventions, the
best of which is almost certainly rapid passage of the
Fair Elections Now Act, which would set up a system of
public financing of elections.

"This would establish citizen-funded elections," says
Harvard Law School professor Larry Lessig.

But there are a number of reformers who fear that any
legislative initiative will be made difficult by the
high court's misinterpretation of the first amendment
to read: whoever has the most money gets the most free
speech.

That stranglehold on real democracy may, in the view of
these activists, only be broken by a constitutional
amendment, and democracy and clean government
campaigners are proposing just that - with some
suggesting the traditional route of having Congress
propose an amendment, while others imagine asking
legislatures across the country to call a
constitutional convention to develop an amendment.

Graves and others are backing a Move to Amend campaign,
which debuted a website for activists moments after the
court ruling came down.

The Move to Amend coalition declares:

On January 21, 2010, with its ruling in Citizens United
v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court ruled
that corporations are persons, entitled by the U.S.
Constitution to buy elections and run our government.
Human beings are people; corporations are legal
fictions. The Supreme Court is misguided in principle,
and wrong on the law. In a democracy, the people rule.

We Move to Amend.

We, the People of the United States of America, reject
the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Citizens United, and
move to amend our Constitution to:

1. Firmly establish that money is not speech, and that
human beings, not corporations, are persons entitled to
constitutional rights.

2. Guarantee the right to vote and to participate, and
to have our votes and participation count.

3. Protect local communities, their economies, and
democracies against illegitimate "preemption" actions
by global, national, and state governments.

Within hours of the decision, more than 3,500 Americans
had signed on as backers of this particular initiative.

Whatever the specific route, and whatever the specific
language (Graves suggests: "No corporation shall be
considered to be a person who is permitted to raise or
spend money on federal, state, or local elections of
any kind"), the goal of any amendment strategy should
be to enshrine in the Constitution of this land the
fundamental democratic principle proposed more than a
century ago by a Republican president, Teddy Roosevelt:
"All contributions by corporations to any political
committee or for any political purpose should be
forbidden by law."

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(9) A Supreme Victory for Special Interests
Posted on Jan 21, 2010

By John Dean

The conservative majority of the U.S. Supreme Court has given a monumental victory to special interests—i.e., the big money corporations, the folks who already dominate Washington politics—with its ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. Chief Justice John Roberts, along with Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Anthony Kennedy (who wrote the court’s opinion), have gone out of their way to further obliterate serious efforts to reform out-of-control campaign spending—spending that conspicuously distorts democracy in favor of those who can buy political influence. This ruling is of the same judical activism ilk that produced Bush v. Gore, not to mention the ensuing eight years of a disastrous Bush/Cheney presidency from which the nation has yet to recover. Understandably, President Obama is flummoxed.

This decision is long, at 183 pages. It includes a powerful dissent by the four centrist justices (there are no liberals on this court). And the ruling is chock full of nuanced information that spells out what Congress can and cannot do to reform our dysfunctional and money-hungry election system. This is not a ruling that lends itself to instant analysis. Those who follow this subject far closer than I do will be figuring it out for days, if not months. However, I would recommend the following sites for a quick take on the ruling: Slate (good overview), SCOTUSBLOG (which has followed the case closely), and, in particular, The Brennan Center (which filed an amicus brief in the case and will be leading the way in sorting out the full meaning). To understand what the court majority did, scroll down to about Page 88 of your .pdf reader and read the dissent written by Justice John Paul Stevens, and joined by Justices Ruth Ginsburg, Steven Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor. It is an eye-opener.

Aside from the fact that the majority ruling reeks of conservative politics, what I find most striking about conservative judicial activism typified by this ruling is the fact that the justices involved are totally out of touch with reality. None of the men involved in this historic decision have been elected to anything, ever. They have no idea how difficult it is for elected officials to deal in the contemporary money-flooded milieu of Washington. The work experience of those who have further opened the floodgates for money in politics is restricted to the executive branch, high-priced law firms, or the chambers of the lower federal appellate courts. Not since the late Justice Hugo Black, a former U.S. senator who retired in 1971, has the court had a member of Congress on its bench, someone who can explain the real world to the other justices. These conservative justices live in a bubble, and they have little true understanding of what they have done, other than, of course, to know that they have taken care of conservatives, the so-called Citizens United who filed this lawsuit. (Yes, David N. Bossie, the president of Citizens United, is the same fellow who worked overtime to impeach President Bill Clinton.)

After I fully digest this decision and speak with friends in Washington who have long been concerned that the Bush/Cheney legacy that now controls the high court might do as they have in fact done, I will share further thoughts about the damage this ruling will bring, and what can and will be done. For this ruling has the potential of being even more pernicious than Bush v. Gore, since it reaches not merely the presidency but every elective office in the United States. Conservatives may not know how to govern when they are in power, but they sure know how to make certain that centrists, progressives and liberals are not given a sustained opportunity to work their will.


John Dean served as Richard M. Nixon’s White House lawyer for 1,000 days and is the author of several books, including “Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush” and ” Conservatives Without Conscience.”
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/a_supreme_victory_for_special_interests_20100121/
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