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<DIV style="BACKGROUND: #e4e4e4; font-color: black"><B>From:</B> <A
title=tanstl@aol.com href="mailto:tanstl@aol.com">David Sladky</A> </DIV>
<DIV><B>To:</B> <A title=undisclosed-recipients:
href="mailto:undisclosed-recipients:">undisclosed-recipients:</A> </DIV>
<DIV><B>Sent:</B> Sunday, January 24, 2010 6:35 PM</DIV>
<DIV><B>Subject:</B> US Supreme Court abolishes restrictions on big business
political spending</DIV></DIV>
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<H2>US Supreme Court abolishes restrictions on big business political spending
</H2>
<H5>By Tom Carter <BR>22 January 2010</H5>In a profoundly anti-democratic
decision with far-reaching implications, the US Supreme Court on Thursday struck
down a law limiting the ability of corporations to spend money in support of
political campaigns.<BR><BR>The five-to-four ruling, in the case of <EM>Citizens
United v. Federal Election Commission</EM>, declared that corporations have a
“right” to unfettered campaign spending. The extreme right-wing four-justice
bloc on the court was joined by the “centrist” Justice Anthony Kennedy, who
wrote the majority decision.<BR>The ruling is a landmark in the erosion of
democratic principles in the United States, and will result in even greater
corporate manipulation of elections and more open bribery and corruption. It
amounts to a legal blank check for corporations and the financial elite that
controls them to openly purchase politicians and install them in power. It
renders even more threadbare the pretension that the formal holding of elections
in the US constitutes genuine democracy.<BR>“[W]e now conclude that independent
expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to
corruption or the appearance of corruption,” wrote Justice Kennedy. “The fact
that speakers [i.e., donors] may have influence over or access to elected
officials does not mean that these officials are corrupt.”<BR>The opinion goes
on, quoting from Kennedy’s prior opinions, to make the case for unrestrained
corporate spending on elections:<BR>“Favoritism and influence are not …
avoidable in representative politics. It is in the nature of an elected
representative to favor certain policies, and, by necessary corollary, to favor
the voters and contributors who support those policies. It is well understood
that a substantial and legitimate reason, if not the only reason, to cast a vote
for, or to make a contribution to, one candidate over another is that the
candidate will respond by producing those political outcomes the supporter
favors. Democracy is premised on responsiveness.”<BR>In other words, according
to the Supreme Court, when corporations spend billions manipulating elections
and obtain the desired results, this is “democracy.” This Orwellian
characterization of democracy could have been dictated by the hedge funds,
financial institutions, insurance companies and pharmaceutical corporations that
routinely inject billions into American politics in return for favors from both
corporate-controlled parties.<BR>Up to now, under established law and Supreme
Court precedent, corporations were obliged to funnel their campaign bribes
though “independent” political action committees, or PACs. This placed certain
legal and public relations restraints on their manipulation of the electoral
process. Now, even these restraints are lifted.<BR>From a legal standpoint, the
majority opinion rests primarily on the specious claim that corporate campaign
spending is protected by the First Amendment guarantee of free speech. The
majority opinion baldly asserts, in disregard for the historical origins of the
Bill of Rights, the democratic conceptions of its authors, and the egalitarian
traditions that are deeply ingrained in the public consciousness, that corporate
money equals speech.<BR>This legal fiction turns the First Amendment upside
down.<BR>The First Amendment, adopted in 1791 in the aftermath of the American
Revolution as part of the Bill of Rights, was celebrated at the end of the 18th
century as one of the great codifications in law of democratic Enlightenment
principles. The First Amendment separates church and state and protects freedoms
of religion, speech, press, assembly and the right to petition the government
for redress. The US Supreme Court has historically asserted the power to
invalidate laws that violate the US Constitution and its amendments.<BR>The law
that restricted corporate spending on elections was the Bipartisan Campaign
Reform Act (BCRA), also known as the McCain–Feingold Act after its leading
senatorial advocates. Passed in 2002, the BCRA is itself of dubious
constitutional validity, although for different reasons than those articulated
yesterday by the Supreme Court. It includes blanket restrictions on individual
and organized political spending, periods prior to election day during which
some forms of electoral advocacy by organizations is prohibited, and numerous
provisions that further buttress the two-party system.<BR>The case of
<EM>Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission</EM> arrived in the Supreme
Court by an unusual route. In 2008, Citizens United, a multi-million-dollar
right-wing political organization, ran television commercials promoting its film
<EM>Hillary: The Movie</EM>, a documentary attacking then-Senator Hillary
Clinton for being a “socialist” in the run-up to the Democratic presidential
primary elections.<BR>The film was available in theaters and on “on demand”
television. The Federal Election Commission (FEC) charged that the film violated
the BCRA, which prohibits corporations as well as unions from using their
general funds to pay for “electioneering communications” 30 days before a
presidential primary and 60 days prior to a general election.<BR>Citizens United
appealed from a ruling in favor of the FEC in the United States District Court
for the District of Columbia. The Supreme Court originally heard oral arguments
on the case on March 24, 2009, on the narrow issue of whether the BCRA applied
to this particular film. Citizens United argued that the film was not an
“electioneering communication” and was simply a factual documentary; the FEC
argued it was not.<BR>However, on September 9, 2009, the Supreme Court ordered a
re-hearing on a new issue: whether corporate political spending was
constitutionally protected. As Justice John Paul Stevens pointed out in his
dissent on Thursday, the issue of corporate political spending in general was
not presented to the Supreme Court, so the court’s seizure of that issue was
illegitimate.<BR>On the basis of the September re-hearing, the Supreme Court
effected a massive change in the law in favor of big business, invalidating laws
that had been in place since the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt and overruling
two previous cases: <EM>Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce</EM> (1990) and
<EM>McConnell v. FEC</EM> (2002).<BR>The opinion in <EM>Citizens United v.
Federal Election Commission</EM> does not address the question of direct
contributions to candidates because Citizens United did not give money directly
to a candidate. However, under the sweeping new doctrine announced in the case,
the Supreme Court could consider all corporate spending constitutionally
protected. Kennedy’s opinion was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and
Justices Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas.<BR>Roberts and Alito
filed a separate concurrence—a document agreeing with the result of the majority
opinion but offering a separate rationale—to defend themselves against Justice
Stevens’s accusation that they were not “serious about judicial restraint.”
Roberts and Alito are notorious for denouncing any extension of constitutional
protection to ordinary people as “judicial activism” or a failure to exercise
“judicial restraint.”<BR>Scalia also filed a concurring opinion, in which Alito
and Thomas joined, to attack Stevens’s characterization of the general attitude
towards corporate political influence that predominated when the First Amendment
was drafted at the end of the 18th century.<BR>Stevens read his dissent from the
bench, a rare practice that suggests the dissenting justice’s lack of respect
for the majorty opinion. Stevens’s sharp 90-page dissent was joined by Justices
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, and the recently appointed Sonia
Sotomayor.<BR><BR>“The Framers [of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights] took
it as a given that corporations could be comprehensively regulated in the
service of the public welfare,” Stevens wrote. “Unlike our colleagues, they 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.<SUP> </SUP>While
individuals might join together to exercise their speech rights, business
corporations, at least, were plainly not seen as facilitating such associational
or expressive ends.”<BR>The opinion in <EM>Citizens United v. Federal Election
Commission</EM> often resorts to arguments that are transparently spurious.
Kennedy at one point complains that under the Supreme Court’s prior opinions,
“Congress could also ban political speech of media corporations.” Stevens
observes that this is unlikely for a host of reasons, not the least of which is
that freedom of the press is separately protected in the First
Amendment.<BR><EM>Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission</EM> also
upholds, by an eight-to-one majority, disclosure requirements in the BCRA for
groups that mount political advertising campaigns. Only Justice Clarence Thomas
would have abolished the disclosure requirement.<BR>Thomas justified his dissent
on this issue on the basis of reported instances where “donors to certain causes
were blacklisted, threatened, or otherwise targeted for retaliation.” In other
words, a corporation must not only be allowed to spend unlimited money on
candidates, but must also be allowed to remain anonymous while doing so. That
way, the corporation is insulated from the popular resentment that results from
the policies it has secretly purchased.<BR>Several leading Democratic
politicians, including President Obama, denounced the decision. Obama released a
written statement predicting that the decision would lead to a “stampede of
special interest money in our politics.” Such statements no doubt reflect the
concern that unlimited spending by corporations on elections would even further
undermine public confidence in their legitimacy.<BR>Something must be said about
the Supreme Court’s double standard regarding constitutional rights. While the
Supreme Court finds more and more “rights” in the Constitution for corporations
to enjoy, it is simultaneously effecting a sweeping rollback of democratic
rights for ordinary people.<BR>While the Supreme Court strikes down laws
preventing corporations from spending billions on elections in the name of
protecting “free speech,” it has in other cases refused to strike down
anti-democratic obstacles to ballot access for independent and third-party
candidates. Military commissions and imprisonment without trial, torture,
barbaric prison conditions, domestic spying, corrupt prosecutors, and police
misconduct are routinely tolerated as not violative of constitutional rights.
Restrictions on corporations are not.<BR>The conception of the corporation
announced by the Supreme Court yesterday has implications far outside elections.
It is not hard to imagine how the doctrine of corporate constitutional rights
could be extended to attack the minimum wage, child labor laws, workplace safety
laws, environmental regulations, or any other legal restrictions on corporate
activities.<BR>It is worth remembering that the first minimum wage laws in the
US, adopted in a number of states more than a century ago in the midst of social
upheaval, were attacked in the Supreme Court on the grounds that they violated
constitutional freedoms. In the notorious case of <EM>Lochner v. New York</EM>
(1905), the Supreme Court held that a New York law limiting the number of hours
that a baker could work each week to 60 violated the “liberty of contact.” These
and other “freedoms” are returning to the pages of Supreme Court
opinions.<BR>“This case will have a profound effect in changing the nature of
elections in the United States,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of UC Irvine
School of Law and author of a major treatise on US constitutional law, in an
interview with <EM>Wall Street Cheat Sheet</EM> in September.<BR>He continued:
“This case will have a very significant effect on federal, state and local
elections. Corporations have tremendous wealth and they could then use it to get
the candidates of their choice elected or the candidates they opposed
defeated.”<BR>This ruling comes at a time when confidence in the Obama
administration and the two corporate parties has significantly deteriorated. The
bourgeoisie is faced with steadily eroding support for its disastrous military
adventures and its economic policy of self-enrichment at all costs. It is
increasingly anxious to block popular opposition from developing from below. The
Supreme Court’s ruling facilitates further control by big business over US
electoral politics.<BR>Even with the prior restrictions in place, the 2008 US
presidential election cycle featured a record intervention by corporations and
the wealthy to the tune of an estimated $5.3 billion. As Justice Stevens noted
sardonically 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.”<BR>As regards 2010, the floodgates are now open.
Republican campaign attorney Ben Ginsberg told the <EM>Washington Post</EM>,
“It’s going to be the Wild, Wild West.”<BR><EM>The author also
recommends:</EM><BR><A
href="http://wsws.org/articles/2009/sep2009/supr-s12.shtml" target=_blank>US
Supreme Court set to ease rules on corporate campaign cash<BR></A>[12 September
2009]<BR><BR>
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