Shorter US Supreme Court: “Yeah, we know the band-aid was applied over a gaping ax wound. That band-aid still has to come off”:
Corporations can spend freely to support or oppose candidates for president and Congress, the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday in a landmark decision that allows massive sums to be spent to influence future elections. The 5-4 ruling split the high court along conservative and liberal lines.
It was a defeat for the Obama administration and supporters of campaign finance laws who said that ending the limits would unleash a flood of corporate money into the political system. The ruling will transform the political landscape and the rules on how money can be spent in this year’s congressional election and the 2012 presidential contest.Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy said the limits violated constitutional free-speech rights. “We find no basis for the proposition that, in the context of political speech, the government may impose restrictions on certain disfavored speakers,” he wrote.
In his sharply worded dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote, “The court’s ruling threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions across the nation.”
Anyone with two functioning eyes knows that nothing has actually changed here. Corporate interests have been getting along just fine in the time between the passage of McCain-Feingold, and in fact never left their previous perch. Besides, preventing someone from running a campaign ad was about as obvious a 1st Amendment violation as you could possibly get. Taken in context, the particular case was open & shut.
Here’s the rub: the context itself is what’s truly wrong.
Unless you are willing to argue that you can conjure up human life from paper & ink (in which case, you should head your magical ass to Vegas and make some real money), a corporation is not a person. It is a legal construct, the functional purpose of which is to deflect responsibility for what a business does from the people who actually control it, offloading costs on the rest of the population by way of government favors. Their direct influence on campaigns is, for the most part, for the purpose of blocking any proposed salve to those affected by their actions*, no matter how piddling the crumbs in comparison to what they receive. The thought that maybe those efforts are the only thing standing between them & revolt never enters into it, the brains of their owners only function as far as the next quarterly profits report.
Yet the law treats corporations as if they think, eat, breathe, laugh, love, fuck.
Is it constitutional for the government to restrict what a person can say? Obviously not. This is what makes the complaints about this from within the “mainstream” so amusing. They entirely gloss over the root of the issue to instead gripe about the Court not taking into account results when ruling — which, according to their job description, they’re not supposed to do anyway.
That said…no, the federal courts are not a matter of who is closer to the Constitution. They’re a matter of who gets to pick, and how close they can come to putting in people who agree with them, period. In an alternate reality where I didn’t reject politics out of hand, and somehow ended up in position to do anything about this, I would be brutally honest about what I’d be looking for, and if the opposition threw a hissy fit over it, whatever. At least this charade wouldn’t exist.
BTW:
In the 2008 election cycle, nearly $6 billion was spent on all federal campaigns, including more than $1 billion from corporate political action committees, trade associations, executives and lobbyists.
The ruling will almost certainly allow labor unions to spend more freely in political campaigns also and it posed a threat to similar limits that had been imposed in about half of the country’s 50 states. (emphasis mine)
That this isn’t seen as a plus for the mainstream Left shows just how choked blue it has been. Is it any wonder the Wobblies didn’t bother?
(* – yes, I know the specific case involved an ideological group rather than a business lobby, but the point remains. The bulk of the screaming concerns business interests, so that’s what I address)
