Hard on the heels of the gut punch of Massachusetts' special election comes possibly the worst Supreme Court decision of our generation, Citizens United v. FEC. (Here's the pdf ruling.) In short, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations may spend freely on political campaigns. The effect?
A lobbyist can now tell any elected official: if you vote wrong, my company, labor union or interest group will spend unlimited sums explicitly advertising against your re-election.
"We have got a million we can spend advertising for you or against you - whichever one you want,' " a lobbyist can tell lawmakers, said Lawrence M. Noble, a lawyer at Skadden Arps in Washington and former general counsel of the Federal Election Commission.
The majority opinion essentially found that corporations - with the rights of "legal personhood" - enjoyed extensive First Amendment rights, utterly oblivious to the to the fact that corporations, well, aren't people.
In his dissent (pdf), Justice Stevens questioned the wisdom of granting corporations such sweeping individual rights, noting that the majority, in ruling the case this way broke with a hundred years' of precedent.
In the context of election to public office, the distinction between corporate and human speakers is significant. Although they make enormous contributions to our society, corporations are not actually members of it. They cannot vote or run for office. Because they may be managed and controlled by nonresidents, their interests may conflict in fundamental respects with the interests of eligible voters. The financial resources, legal structure, and instrumental orientation of corporations raise legitimate concerns about their role in the electoral process. Our lawmakers have a compelling constitutional basis, if not also a democratic duty, to take measures designed to guard against the potentially deleterious effects of corporate spending in local and national races.
Dahlia Lithwick:
But you can plainly see the weariness in Stevens eyes and hear it in his voice today as he is forced to contend with a legal fiction that has come to life today, a sort of constitutional Frankenstein moment when corporate speech becomes even more compelling than the "voices of the real people" who will be drowned out. Even former Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist once warned that treating corporate spending as the First Amendment equivalent of individual free speech is "to confuse metaphor with reality." Today that metaphor won a very real victory at the Supreme Court. And as a consequence some very real corporations are feeling very, very good.
(Check out SCOTUSblog analysis by Lyle Dennison of the implications on corporate personhood Citizens United v. FEC has.)
The New York Times:
Congress and members of the public who care about fair elections and clean government need to mobilize right away, a cause President Obama has said he would join. Congress should repair the presidential public finance system and create another one for Congressional elections to help ordinary Americans contribute to campaigns. It should also enact a law requiring publicly traded corporations to get the approval of their shareholders before spending on political campaigns.
These would be important steps, but they would not be enough. The real solution lies in getting the court's ruling overturned. The four dissenters made an eloquent case for why the decision was wrong on the law and dangerous. With one more vote, they could rescue democracy.
That's right. The New York Times is claiming our democratic system is at stake with this ruling.
The paper is absolutely correct. Already corporations control our political systems; this ruling rolls back the meager protection we've had from mega-capital a hundred years. It's a raw piece of judicial activism, a blow against equality and economic egalitarianism, and will further erode whatever structures of meritocracy existent in the county, replacing it with a kind of plutocratic aristocracy, whose coats of arms will be company logos.
Oh, and the ruling will probably benefit Republicans in the 2010 midterms. But, as is too often the case with the SCOTUS' conservative majority, that's not a bug, that's a feature. |
