Supreme Court Strikes Down Key Campaign-Finance Provision

[cali]

Zachary Roth | January 21, 2010, 10:10AM


In a ruling that radically reshapes campaign-finance law, the Supreme Court has
struck down a key provision of the McCain-Feingold measure that bars corporations and unions from pouring money into political ads.

The long-awaited 5-4 ruling, in the Citizens United v. FEC case, presents advocates of regulation with a major challenge in limiting the flow of corporate money into campaigns, and potentially opens the door for unrestricted amounts of corporate money to flow into American politics.

Tom Goldstein of SCOTUSblog calls the decision "a small revolution in campaign finance law."

In the case at issue, Citizens United (CU), a conservative advocacy group, was challenging a ruling by the FEC that barred it from airing a negative movie about Hillary Clinton. CU received corporate donations and the movie advocated the defeat of a political candidate within 60 days of an election. CU argued that the FEC ruling violated its freedom of speech, and that the relevant provision of McCain-Feingold was unconstitutional.

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http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/01/supreme_court_strikes_down_key_campaign-finance_pr.php

[cali]

1. let me just say there is no way to overemphasize just how bad this is

[dgibby]

11. Welcome to the FSA (Fascist States of Amerika),

where the Government is bought and paid for, and your vote no longer counts.

I'm guessing the Constitution will have to be amended to read "We the Corporations" instead of "We the People".

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

2. I am torn

I am civil libertarian enough to think people should be free to combine in whatever combinations or structures they see fit to advance political views, but human enough to fear the consequences.

I have no doubt this will deform American politics even further.

[cali]

3. I don't believe that corporations are persons and I certainly

think the consequences are dire.

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

13. I also do not think corporations are persons

The personal rights for corporations concept is crap.

But a union isn't a person either, the Sierra Club isn't a person, move-on.org isn't a person, etc.

I do not take this stuff at all lightly on either side. For a First Amendment absolutist like myself the world is full of genuinely difficult issues.

[clear eye]

23. Let me help you resolve your ambivalency.

Even w/ a complete ban on corporate campaign donations singly or via PACs or industry-wide associations, every single individual person associated in any way w/ any corporation, from the Chairman of Board, the CEO, the major & minor stockholders, down to the cleaning women would still have complete freedom of political expression for themselves. Even if they chose to express ideas or back candidates in a way that was dishonest and colored by calculations about how it would affect the corporation with which they were affiliated. The only thing they couldn't do was to use the resources of the corporation to do it.

The reason this limitation makes sense in terms of liberty is that the laws of incorporation of for-profits warp what speech can be uttered in its name, especially when monetary resources are used in its expression. When an employee or board member is using corporate resources, by law they can only use them to advance the profitability of the corporation, either short or long term. If they do otherwise they are open to legal reprecussions from other stakeholders (e.g. a stockholder lawsuit) all the way up to and including the loss of their position, restitution and fines. So even if a person w/ a high position in, say, a coal company feels strongly about the danger of climate change and its impact on humanity, if it will be more profitable to flout regulations for the next ten years, that company executive cannot give corporate money or equivalent resources to support a candidate or bill that might significantly strengthen regulations or their enforcement w/o facing those negative consequences.

This reality makes the impact of corporate donations a very poor reflection of the collective best judgment of the persons whose money is being donated, and even further from the best judgment of society as a whole. The influence of such donations been described as "sociopathic" in its fixation on the effects on profits to the exclusion of all other considerations including such transcendently important ones as the continuation of representative government or avoidance of ruinous wars.

If you tend to agree w/ this explanation but find yourself w/ cognitive dissonance regarding the ACLU's role in advocating in favor of the ruling, perhaps it will help you to know that the ACLU is normally paid very well when it assists a wealthy company or individual and can expect many add'l donations from other corporate coffers for protecting their "rights". In hard times when it may be a little shaky financially, that may have affected its judgment. At any rate, its interpretation of the issues involved is certainly not held unanimously by civil libertarians. It is in agreement w/ the Libertarian Party's, though.

Personally their position on this and their part in the resulting disaster has so alienated me that I prefer to support instead in any way I can, the Brennan Center (which argued on the opposite side of this case), Human Rights Campaign (for LGBT advocacy) and the Center for Constitutional Rights (currently defending ACORN). I feel that any freedom for me, my loved ones and all U.S. citizens that the ACLU may have helped protect in the past is dwarfed by the loss of responsiveness of the federal government to our needs that this ruling causes.

Btw, a study found that for-profit corporations and their associations lobbied Congress w/ money that was over 60:1 what non-profits, like the Sierra Club and unions spent combined. I'm sure they would be happy to forswear their ability to donate to campaigns and stick to advocacy and lobbying rather than have that corporate money moved to swamp the political process. Hope you've found this useful.

[TexasObserver]

4. Recommend. This is a disaster.

[alsame]

5. We absolutely need a fifth seat or things will continue to get worse. nt

[BurtWorm]

6. I wish I had the money to change myself into a corporation,.

They've got a lot more rights than we the people do.

[Nye Bevan]

24. You need $164.95 in NY

http://www.amerilawyer.com/ny_profit_corporations.htm

[BurtWorm]

26. I need the money to freely express myself.

:patriot:

[lumberjack_jeff]

7. The hits just keep coming. n/t

[Fuzz]

8. The Supreme Court has never been more politicized. Fucking disastrous.

[drm604]

9. Disaster

:cry:

[G_j]

10. it's official

Democracy is DEAD

[sufrommich]

12. Welcome to The United States Inc. nt

[yodermon]

14. end of America as we know it n/t

[derby378]

19. Actually, the 2000 "election" of Bush was the end as we know it

This ruling is a result of Bush and the mess he created.

We haven't even started cleaning up the mess yet.

[kentuck]

15. That was the last straw...

for saving our system. Democrats believe they have a cash cow with the Internet, as witnessed by the last election. How shocked they will be when they find that that cow has dried up. Then the corporations will rule everything.

[Selatius]

20. The internet is no match for the purchasing power of Wall Street. We've been defeated. nt

[liberal N proud]

16. Money = Power will be the rule

[Gregorian]

17. The Framers wasted their precious time and effort.

Fuck it. I was jubilant when I misread the thread title. I was imagining that somehow Obama put a bug in the Court's ear, and they actually did the right thing. Wrong!

The careless have killed what the careful tried so hard to create and preserve.

Somebody show me that I'm wrong. Another case? Some small print? Anything?

[Selatius]

18. Fait accompli.

Look at how damaging corporate money was to the health care reform bill in the Senate. The SCOTUS decision simply formalizes the reality on paper. The reality in America has been this way for quite some time.

The US was permanently crippled when that douchebag clerk wrote in the side margins of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886) that corporations are entitled to constitutional protections afforded under the 14th Amendment.

This wasn't helped by the SCOTUS decision in Buckley v. Valeo that formally enshrined 1st Amendment protection for corporations (1976).

The striking down of McCain-Feingold simply reaffirms the SCOTUS finding in the infamous 1976 decision.

[ima_sinnic]

21. fucking assholes.

sheesh--for the first time EVER, I am actually glad I'm kind of old and probably won't live to see the disaster the United States is shaping up to be--though I would have loved to be part of a revolution. My heart goes out to the young (my children, and esp. my grandchildren), who will bear all the pain and suffering caused by repression and greed.

The experiment in democracy worked for a while, but 235 years really isn't that old as far as countries go.

[Phoebe Loosinhouse]

22. Add that to the decision that said Fox News had no affirmative responsibility to report TRUTH

http://www.ceasespin.org/ceasespin_blog/ceasespin_blogger_files/fox_news_gets_okay_to_misinform_public.html

and imagine what we are going to end up with on our airwaves. Now think about who owns the airwaves.

Reflect on how the Supreme Court: stopped the election process and delivered Bush


Now TRY imagine how completely and totally F!@#ed this country is and the Facist/Corpocrat Country we are about to become.

[clear eye]

25. Everything members of Congress will do from now on will have to position themselves

to avoid motivating the mega-corporations into funding someone running against them. This is a body-blow to our citizenry and to the representative gov't we enjoyed for ~200 years.

[Arkansas Granny]

27. This adds a whole new dimension to the phrase "the best government that money can buy".

It certainly won't be the interests of we the people who get represented. There is no way that individual donations can compete with corporate money.