Justice Kennedy was key to conservatives' win in campaign finance decision

[alp227]

Source: Robert Barnes, The Washington Post

If there was a new boldness from the Supreme Court's conservative majority in last week's landmark ruling on campaign finance laws, there was also an underlying and familiar truth:

When the Roberts court has broken with the past and shifted the court's jurisprudence, it has gone only so far as the place where Justice Anthony M. Kennedy already is comfortable.

On the high-profile issues that draw public attention -- abortion rights, race, campaign finance -- Kennedy's dissents from the past provide a blueprint for today's majority opinions.

It was no surprise that Kennedy wrote for the majority in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which erased two of the court's precedents and panned decades of legislative restrictions on corporate spending in election campaigns.

The 73-year-old Ronald Reagan nominee had been a dissenter in both of the overturned cases: the 1990 decision in Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, which said corporations could not use their profits to support or oppose candidates, and the court's 2003 decision upholding the constitutionality of corporate spending restrictions in the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform act.

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/23/AR2010012302679_pf.html

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Read the part about Kennedy's dissenting opinions in the overturned cases. Seems he...or Reagan...was plotting to KO spending restrictions from the bench. I guess that surely shows what kind of views on campaign finance Reagan had!

[Divine Discontent]

1. 1st we lose a great Kennedy, then the seat he held, then a fraud Kennedy makes this ruling

essentially tip to the corporafascists...

seriously.

I hope we get a liberal champion - and soon.

[aquart]

2. One of the original Filthy Five, what did you expect?

[W T F]

3. In contrast to the Morse V. Frederick decision....

The 5 conservative activist judges deny free speech to a high school school student because he held up a banner that made a reference to "illegal" drug use in Alaska even though marijuana is not illegal in that state. Regardless, under their ruling, any political speech referencing illegal drug use is not protected free speech. Assholes!

[davidpdx]

4. I think if O'Conner had still been on the bench, this ruling would have had a different outcome

She seemed to moderate Kennedy a bit and between the two of them, may have made it a 6-3 the other direction. I tend to wonder what her thoughts would be about this ruling. There was a lot of discussion about the two of them in Toobin's book The Nine which gave good insight about the both of them.

[No Elephants]

5. Don't think so. She was with Kennedy & Scalia in the Austin case, even though

her pal, Rehnquist, voted with the majority in that cazse. http://www.oyez.org/cases/1980-1989/1989/1989_88_1569

[davidpdx]

6. Interesting, maybe she would have still ruled against campaign finance reform

but I think she got more liberal the longer she was on the bench. That ruling was quite early in her tenure (I think only 8 or so years in). She was particularly pissed at her own party after the 2000 election and Bush's antics in his first term. If it hadn't been for her husband being sick, we may not have gotten a second Repug nominee.

[Unvanguard]

7. She voted with the majority in McConnell, though. I think she would have been with the dissenters.

Or would at least have made the majority opinion far less sweeping. She seemed to grow more liberal a bit over time; for instance, she voted with the majority in both Bowers v. Hardwick and Lawrence v. Texas.