You'll need this for Scalia's next corrupt opinion - whether in dissent or in the majority, he will definitely be arguing in Citizens United for the UNLIMITED right of corporations to spend money on political candidate campaigns. In this 1884 a unanimous US Supreme Court compared "free use of money" as quintessential corruption, as much of a severe threat to elections as Ku Klux Klan violence (which it found criminally liable under federal law in this case):
THE KU KLUX CASES, 110 U.S. 651, 666-67 (1884) “It is as essential to the successful working of this government that the great organisms of its executive and legislative branches should be the free choice of the people, as that the original form of it should be so. In absolute governments, where the monarch is the source of all power, it is still held to be important that the exercise of that power shall be free from the influence of extraneous violence and internal corruption. In a republican government, like ours, where political power is reposed in representatives of the entire body of the people, chosen at short intervals by popular elections, the temptations to control these elections by violence and by corruption is a constant source of danger. Such has been the history of all republics, and, though ours <110 U.S. 651, 667> has been comparatively free from both these evils in the past, no lover of his country can shut his eyes to the fear of future danger from both sources. If the recurrence of such acts as these prisoners stand convicted of are too common in one quarter of the country, and give omen of danger from lawless violence, the free use of money in elections, arising from the vast growth of recent wealth in other quarters, presents equal cause for anxiety. If the government of the United States has within its constitutional domain no authority to provide against these evils,-if the very sources of power may be poisoned by corruption or controlled by violence and outrage, without legal restraint,-then, indeed, is the country in danger, and its best powers, its highest purposes, the hopes which it inspires, and the love which enshrines it, are at the mercy of the combinations of those who respect no right but brute force on the one hand, and unprincipled corruptionists on the other.
The US Supreme Court continued this theme of whether the government had the power to protect itself from money corruption and violence-corruption:
That a government whose essential character is republican, whose executive head and legislative body are both elective, whose numerous and powerful branch of the legislature is elected by the people directly, has no power by appropriate laws to secure this election from the influence of violence, of corruption, and of fraud, is a proposition so startling as to arrest attention and demand the gravest consideration. If this government is anything more than a mere aggregation of delegated agents of other states and governments, each <110 U.S. 651, 658> of which is superior to the general government, it must have the power to protect the elections on which its existence depends, from violence and corruption. If it has not this power, it is left helpless before the two great natural and historical enemies of all republics, open violence and insidious corruption.
The Court also addressed the implied powers to protect the operations of government, responding to common arguments that no such specific power existed in the Constitution or laws:
We know of no express authority to pass laws to punish theft or burglary of the treasury of the United States. Is there therefore no power in congress to protect the treasury by punishing such theft and burglary? Are the mails of the United States, and the money carried in them, to be left at the mercy of robbers and of thieves who may handle the mail, because the constitution contains no express words of power in congress to enact laws for the punishment of those offenses? The principle, if sound, would abolish the entire criminal jurisdiction of the courts of the United States, and the laws which confer that jurisdiction. <110 U.S. 651, 659> It is said that the states can pass the necessary law on this subject, and no necessity exists for such action by congress. But the existence of state laws punishing the counterfeiting of the coin of the United States has never been held to supersede the acts of congress passed for that purpose, or to justify the United States in failing to enforce its own laws to protect the circulation of the coin which it issues.
CONCLUDING THIS LINE OF THOUGHT:
"In both cases it is the duty of that government to see that he may exercise this right freely, and to protect him from violence while so doing, or on account of so doing. This duty does not arise solely from the interest of the party concerned, but from the necessity of the government itself that its service shall be free from the adverse influence of force and fraud practiced on its agents, and that the votes by which its members of congress and its president are elected shall be the free votes of the electors, and the officers thus chosen the free and uncorrupted choice of those who have the right to take part in that choice."
Keep money, force and fraud OUT of any distorting influence on politics.
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