"MONEY GRUBERS"

[Cha]

<snip>

"The Supreme Court kills campaign finance reform."

By Richard L. Hasen

It is time for everyone to drop all the talk about the Roberts court's "judicial minimalism," with Chief Justice Roberts as an "umpire" who just calls balls and strikes. Make no mistake, this is an activist court that is well on its way to recrafting constitutional law in its image. The best example of that is this morning's transformative opinion in Citizens United v. FEC. Today the court struck down decades-old limits on corporate and union spending in elections (including judicial elections) and opened up our political system to a money free-for-all.

Yahoo! Buzz FacebookMySpace Mixx Digg Reddit del.icio.us Furl Ma.gnolia SphereStumbleUponCLOSEBack in June, I explained to Slate readers the basics of this case. Citizens United is an ideological group, like the NRA or Planned Parenthood, except that it takes for-profit corporate funding. It produced an anti-Hillary Clinton documentary. The group wanted to air the documentary during the 2008 presidential primary season through a cable television video-on-demand service and to advertise for it on television. In exchange for a $1.2 million fee, a cable-television-operator consortium would have made the documentary available to subscribers to download free on demand. The McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law passed in 2002 bars certain corporate-funded television broadcasts, such as this documentary, in the 60 days before a general election (or the 30 days before a primary). And the law requires disclosure by the funders of election-related broadcast advertising, such as these ads. Citizens United argued against the corporate-spending ban.

Citizens United's broadest argument was that the court should overrule its 1990 case Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, which upheld limits on corporate spending in candidate elections. Before argument, I expected the court to take a different course by deciding this case narrowly. The court could have done that by saying that McCain-Feingold's statutory rules barring corporate-funded television broadcasts don't apply to video-on-demand broadcasts. That would be in line with some of the past decisions of the Roberts court, when it had preferred to chip away at existing precedent rather than dramatically move the law rightward. But, as Dahlia Lithwick explained, at oral argument the government's lawyer got into some trouble in suggesting that the government would have the constitutional power to ban corporate-published books just before the election. The exchange made it seem like the court could well be poised to overrule Austin.

<more>
http://www.slate.com/id/2242209/

[treestar]

1. the book analogy would make me nervous

The concept of banned books in this country just freaks me out. Even if limited to the 60 days before an election.

There is so much in the media nowadays and we have the internet, for people to comment and question to each other rather than just sit there and hear things without the input of others to help think critically. Anyway I'm feeling pollyanna-ish and don't think this is so deadly.

There's so much media noise now - I almost wonder if that Hillary movie would have had any effect at all. Especially in the primary.