E.J. Dionne is right. The Supreme Court is on the verge of striking down the ban of direct corporate donations to political campaigns. We have enough corporate money washing around our political system already, and most reform efforts have been aimed at reducing corporate influence, not setting the dogs loose. Ask John McCain.
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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And the right-wingers say Dem nominees are judicial activists. This is radical.
And I always thought that (in theory at least) a democracy is made up of citizen’s rather than corporate entities. Will corporations be given the vote next? Will they be explicitly allowed to trade, buy and sell political favours as one does commercial services? This used to be called bribery, but now it seems it’s just another form of politics.
That this even requires Robert’s swing vote to swing the right way is a measure of how corrupted US political discourse has become.
They’re already explicitly allowed to trade, buy and sell political favours as one does commercial services. What else does it mean when we hear about the “power of the insurance lobby”? The only power they have is the power to bribe their friends and defame the rest. In terms of corruption, the only difference between the US and some banana republic is that we still have tons of money to keep it hidden.
hey dave- we are a bannana republic. where have you been?
Not only buy and sell but construct exchanges and futures options. They will be allowed to construct Collateralized Political Obligations and cut them into tranches and sell them. Also Political Default Swaps in case one has a fit of integrity and conscience.
I was castigated by the junior legal team at Eschaton for this, but Burns “Packing the Court” is a very timely reminder of the dangers of right wing judicial supremacy.
Abraham Lincoln offered yet another variation on the departmentalist theme. Lincoln developed this position at length in responding to the Dred Scott decision in his 1858 “debates” with Stephen Douglas. Lincoln noted that “I do not propose to disturb or resist the [Court’s] decision” as it applied to Dred Scott and his family. But he would not make the Court’s constitutional understanding “a rule of political action, for the people and all the departments of the government.” Adding “something to the authority in favor of my own position,” Lincoln rehearsed at length Jefferson and Jackson’s departmentalist theories.31 He repeated and adhered to that understanding upon gaining the White House. Central to the Court’s holding in Dred Scott was the argument that free blacks were not citizens under the Constitution. In the course of its daily business the Lincoln administration was faced with the question of whether or not to adhere to the Court’s understanding of citizenship and chose to break from the Court. Federal statute required, for example, that the masters of coastal trading ships be American citizens, raising the “question whether or not colored men can be citizens of the United States . . . and therefore competent to command American vessels.”32 Lincoln’s Attorney General, Edward Bates, wrote a lengthy formal opinion providing a detailed rebuttal to Chief Justice Roger Taney’s argument against black citizenship. That opinion became the basis for the subsequent decisions by the administration, on encouragement from abolitionist Republican legislators, to begin granting passports and patents to blacks.33 Congress and the president likewise enacted legislation abolishing slavery in all federal territories and the District of Columbia, directly rejecting the Court’s specific argument that the federal territories had to be open to slavery and with Lincoln noting that he “never doubted the constitutional authority of Congress” to take such action.34
http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/politics/seminars/whittington.pdf
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Citizens United, it should be noted, turned to seasoned Court advocate Theodore B. Olson, former U.S. Solicitor General and a principal legal architect of President George W. Bush’s legal fight in winning the 2000 election, to do its merits brief, and for the oral argument. James Bopp, Jr., the Terre Haute, Ind., lawyer and conservative advocate who had been handling Citizens United’s case, filed a merits brief on behalf of an amicus, the Committee for Truth in Politics, Inc.
The FEC and the Justice Department, in the government’s merits brief, insisted that the Supreme Court’s McConnell decision in 2003 controls the outcome of this new test. Using corporate dollars to pay for an “unmistakable” appeal for voters to reject Sen. Clinton, the brief asserted, is exactly what the McConnell ruling allowed the government to ban.
In the competition over amici support, Citizens United emerged with numerically greater support, coming mainly from conservative advocacy groups (ranging from the National Rifle Association to the Cato Institute). However, the appeal also picked up notable support from a liberal-leaning group, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. The Reporters Committee argued that the District Court ruling would allow the government to “suppress a documentary that is objectively indistinguishable from other news media commentary,” and “removes this intuitive bright-line distinction that allowed journalists to do their jobs without fear of the criminal penalties associated with violating FEC regulations.”
…
Citizens United, as its case approached oral argument, was going for a maximum victory — a sweeping rejection of congressional authority to regulate campaign spending by corporations (and, perhaps, by labor unions, too). Its brief thus seems quite audacious. But it may not turn out to be unrealistic. Just about two years ago, four dissenting Justices lamented that a majority of the Court had — at least by implication — overturned the 2003 decision in McConnell v. FEC, at least in the part upholding the ban on “electioneering communications.” That was their protest to the 5-4 ruling in FEC v. Wisconsin Right to Life.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."