[Jenisoisy]

By James Vicini James Vicini – Thu Jan 21, 2:42 pm ET
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Corporations can spend freely to support or oppose candidates for president and Congress, the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday, a landmark decision denounced by President Barack Obama for giving special interests more power.
"The Supreme Court has given a green light to a new stampede of special interest money in our politics," Obama said after the 5-4 ruling that divided the nation's high court along conservative and liberal lines.
"It is a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans," Obama said.
Obama said he instructed administration officials "to get to work immediately with Congress on this issue" and "talk with bipartisan congressional leaders to develop a forceful response to this decision."
The ruling, a defeat for Obama and supporters of campaign finance limits, is expected to unleash a flood of money to be spent in this year's congressional election and the 2012 presidential contest.
Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy said the long-standing campaign finance limits violated constitutional free-speech rights of corporations.
"The government may regulate corporate political speech through disclaimer and disclosure requirements, but it may not suppress that speech altogether," he wrote.
The four liberal dissenters said allowing corporate money to flood the political marketplace will corrupt democracy.
RULING COULD UNDERMINE INTEGRITY-DISSENT
In his sharply worded dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote, "The court's ruling threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions across the nation."
The justices overturned Supreme Court precedents from 2003 and 1990 that upheld federal and state limits on independent expenditures by corporate treasuries to support or oppose candidates.
In the 2008 election cycle, nearly $6 billion was spent on all federal campaigns, including more than $1 billion from corporate political action committees, trade associations, executives and lobbyists.
The ruling will almost certainly allow labor unions to spend more freely in political campaigns also and it posed a threat to similar limits that had been imposed in about half of the country's 50 states.
The top court struck down the part of the federal law that restricted broadcast advertisements for or against political candidates right before elections that are paid for by corporations, labor unions and advocacy groups.
The 2002 campaign finance law at issue was named after Senator John McCain, the unsuccessful Republican presidential nominee in 2008, and Democratic Senator Russell Feingold.
Republican Party Chairman Michael Steele praised the ruling and said, "Free speech strengths our democracy."
Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, long an opponent of the law, said, "For too long, some in this country have been deprived of full participation in the political process."
But the law's supporters said the ruling will allow corporations to spend unlimited sums to influence elections.
"The bottom line is, the Supreme Court has just predetermined the winners of next November's election. It won't be the Republican or the Democrats and it won't be the American people; it will be corporate America," Senator Charles Schumer, a Democrat from New York, said.
The decision was a victory for a conservative advocacy group's challenge to the campaign finance law as part of its efforts to broadcast and promote a 2008 movie critical of then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. She later became Obama's secretary of state.
The Obama administration defended the law's restrictions on election-related spending by corporations, unions and interest groups.
The court's conservative majority, with the addition of Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, both appointees of then-President George W. Bush, in the ruling made a dramatic change in the campaign finance law designed to regulate the role of money in politics and prevent corruption.

[pavlik]

Ladies and Gents, we've been sold to the highest bidder. Never in my life, have I've been so upset at our Supreme Court. Totally disgusting.

[engacenus]

Maybe change the title of the thread to Supreme Court Defends Free Speech (Doesn't Rule on Corporate Personhood)

See:
What the Supreme Court got right
BY GLENN GREENWALD

A purely pragmatic view is reflected in this comment by geoih:
Maybe you could explain how McCain-Feingold was doing anything except entrenching the encumbant power already making the government bigger.

The problem isn't money buying power, it's money buying government power. Money will always buy power, but government power is absolute. The only real solution is to take the power away from government. McCain-Feingold does exactly the opposite.

This decision takes power away from government, and that is a good thing. "Congress shall make no law" is pretty straightforward after all... at least for some of the Supremes. *shudder*

[KkJvrG4d]

Why not let corporations vote as well? Now, with unqualified equal personhood to other citizens, they are entitled to that other basic right..

[greekbeast]

"This decision takes power away from government, and that is a good thing."

That is a bad thing. Government is by the people and for the people.

But corporations?

[BDDkDvgZ]

Recent history has been big corporations against the people. That's what accounts for the economic crash, the debacle that is described as health insurance, and the imperialistic wars. Only the government can stand up to the robber barons, and now the barons have given themselves the power to choose the government.

[miel]

Respectfully ablarc, click the links in this post, and examine your facile 'conventional progressive' rhetoric.

Anyway, all this about corporate personhood, government by the people, robber barons, etc. is beside the point, i.e., no authority exists within congress' delegated powers enabling it to make any law limiting speech of any kind -- by humans, corporations, dogs, cats -- you name it. Even without the bill of rights McCain-Feingold would be unconstitutional for this very reason.

The constitution limits the government. The entire American political/jurisprudential system is based on this prudent principle. (That the government itself can liberally construe and interpret these limits with impunity has been a major flaw.)

[dayclaccikere]

Maybe change the title of the thread to Supreme Court Defends Free Speech (Doesn't Rule on Corporate Personhood)

I agree regarding the thread title; this one is a bit slanted - “allows corporate political cash”.

In legal terms, I think that would be called ‘leading the witness’.

Cheers.

[masteryxisman]

It's not speech that was being limited, Jasonik, it's bribery.

Bribery has always sought to limit speech to what the briber desires to have the public hear.

[jeraveike]

From today's Washington Post:

Court's campaign finance decision a case of shoddy scholarship

By Ruth Marcus
Saturday, January 23, 2010

In opening the floodgates for corporate money in election campaigns, the Supreme Court did not simply engage in a brazen power grab. It did so in an opinion stunning in its intellectual dishonesty.

Many of those commenting on the decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission have focused on the power-grab part. I agree with them. It was unnecessary for the court to go so far when there were several less-radical grounds available. It was audacious to seize the opportunity to overrule precedents when the parties had not pressed this issue and the lower courts had not considered it. It was the height of activism to usurp the judgments of Congress and state legislatures about how best to prevent corruption of the political process.

"If it is not necessary to decide more, it is necessary not to decide more," a wise judge once wrote. That was Chief Justice John G. Roberts -- back when -- and dissenting Justice John Paul Stevens rightly turned that line against him.

As bad as the court's activism, though, was its shoddy scholarship.

First, the majority flung about dark warnings of "censorship" and "banned" speech as if upholding the existing rules would leave corporations and labor unions with no voice in the political process. Untrue. Under federal election law before the Supreme Court demolished it, corporations and labor unions were free to say whatever they wanted about political candidates whenever they wanted to say it. They simply were not permitted to use unlimited general treasury funds to do so. Instead, they were required to use money raised by their political action committees from employees and members. This is hardly banning speech.

Second, in the face of logic and history, the majority acted as if there could be no constitutional distinction between a corporation and a human being. Untrue. The Supreme Court has long held that corporations are considered "persons" under the Constitution and are therefore entitled to its protections. For more than a century, Congress has barred corporations from making direct contributions to political candidates, with no suggestion that it must treat corporate persons the same as real ones; that prohibition stands, at least for now. The "conceit" of corporate personhood, as Stevens called it, does not mandate absolute equivalence. That corporations enjoy free-speech protections does not mean they enjoy every protection afforded an actual person. Is a corporation entitled to vote? To run for office?

Third, misreading its precedents and cherry-picking quotations, the majority acted as if the chief case it overturned was an outlier. In that 1990 case, Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, a six-member majority came to the unsurprising conclusion that a state law prohibiting corporations from making unlimited independent expenditures from their general funds was constitutional. The court dismissed this ruling as "a significant departure from ancient First Amendment principles." Again, untrue.

In a 1982 case, the court -- in a unanimous opinion by then-Justice William Rehnquist -- noted that Congress, in writing campaign finance law, was entitled to "considerable deference" in taking into account "the particular legal and economic attributes of corporations and labor organizations" and had made "a permissible assessment of the dangers posed by those entities to the electoral process." Four years later, even as it carved out an exception for nonprofit corporations, the court reaffirmed "the need to restrict the influence of political war chests funneled through the corporate form."

The Citizens United majority relied heavily on a 1978 case overturning a Massachusetts law that prohibited corporations from spending their own money to defeat certain referendums. But that decision specifically noted that "a corporation's right to speak on issues of general public interest implies no comparable right in the quite different context of participation in a political campaign for election to public office."

Fourth, the majority bizarrely invoked the "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" defense. Under the Austin ruling, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy argued, lawmakers unhappy with being lampooned in the movie "could have done more than discourage its distribution -- they could have banned the film." Beyond untrue. There is no scenario under which works of art about fictional lawmakers could be limited by campaign finance laws.

That the majority would stoop to this claim underscores the weakness of its case -- and the audacity of the result it has inflicted on the political process.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...012203897.html

[Rapiddude]

We've long known that money gives access to power.

Now it has a new set of lictors to clear its way: the Free Speech boys.

Bearers of fasces, and Goons.

[mnhloot]

As for the question of whether corporations possess "personhood," that's an interesting issue and, as I said, I'm very sympathetic to the argument that they do not, but the majority's ruling here did not really turn on that question. That's because the First Amendment does not only vest rights in "persons." It says nothing about "persons." It simply bans Congress from making any laws abridging freedom of speech.

"We the People of the United States..."

[assohillA]

The Court’s Blow to Democracy
Published: January 21, 2010 - NYTimes

With a single, disastrous 5-to-4 ruling, the Supreme Court has thrust politics back to the robber-baron era of the 19th century. Disingenuously waving the flag of the First Amendment, the court’s conservative majority has paved the way for corporations to use their vast treasuries to overwhelm elections and intimidate elected officials into doing their bidding.

Congress must act immediately to limit the damage of this radical decision, which strikes at the heart of democracy.

As a result of Thursday’s ruling, corporations have been unleashed from the longstanding ban against their spending directly on political campaigns and will be free to spend as much money as they want to elect and defeat candidates. If a member of Congress tries to stand up to a wealthy special interest, its lobbyists can credibly threaten: We’ll spend whatever it takes to defeat you.

The ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission radically reverses well-established law and erodes a wall that has stood for a century between corporations and electoral politics. (The ruling also frees up labor unions to spend, though they have far less money at their disposal.)

The founders of this nation warned about the dangers of corporate influence. The Constitution they wrote mentions many things and assigns them rights and protections — the people, militias, the press, religions. But it does not mention corporations.

In 1907, as corporations reached new heights of wealth and power, Congress made its views of the relationship between corporations and campaigning clear: It banned them from contributing to candidates. At midcentury, it enacted the broader ban on spending that was repeatedly reaffirmed over the decades until it was struck down on Thursday.

This issue should never have been before the court. The justices overreached and seized on a case involving a narrower, technical question involving the broadcast of a movie that attacked Hillary Rodham Clinton during the 2008 campaign. The court elevated that case to a forum for striking down the entire ban on corporate spending and then rushed the process of hearing the case at breakneck speed. It gave lawyers a month to prepare briefs on an issue of enormous complexity, and it scheduled arguments during its vacation.

Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., no doubt aware of how sharply these actions clash with his confirmation-time vow to be judicially modest and simply “call balls and strikes,” wrote a separate opinion trying to excuse the shameless judicial overreaching.

The majority is deeply wrong on the law. Most wrongheaded of all is its insistence that corporations are just like people and entitled to the same First Amendment rights. It is an odd claim since companies are creations of the state that exist to make money. They are given special privileges, including different tax rates, to do just that. It was a fundamental misreading of the Constitution to say that these artificial legal constructs have the same right to spend money on politics as ordinary Americans have to speak out in support of a candidate.

The majority also makes the nonsensical claim that, unlike campaign contributions, which are still prohibited, independent expenditures by corporations “do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.” If Wall Street bankers told members of Congress that they would spend millions of dollars to defeat anyone who opposed their bailout, and then did so, it would certainly look corrupt.

After the court heard the case, Senator John McCain told reporters that he was troubled by the “extreme naïveté” some of the justices showed about the role of special-interest money in Congressional lawmaking.

In dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens warned that the ruling not only threatens democracy but “will, I fear, do damage to this institution.” History is, indeed, likely to look harshly not only on the decision but the court that delivered it. The Citizens United ruling is likely to be viewed as a shameful bookend to Bush v. Gore. With one 5-to-4 decision, the court’s conservative majority stopped valid votes from being counted to ensure the election of a conservative president. Now a similar conservative majority has distorted the political system to ensure that Republican candidates will be at an enormous advantage in future elections.

Congress and members of the public who care about fair elections and clean government need to mobilize right away, a cause President Obama has said he would join. Congress should repair the presidential public finance system and create another one for Congressional elections to help ordinary Americans contribute to campaigns. It should also enact a law requiring publicly traded corporations to get the approval of their shareholders before spending on political campaigns.

These would be important steps, but they would not be enough. The real solution lies in getting the court’s ruling overturned. The four dissenters made an eloquent case for why the decision was wrong on the law and dangerous. With one more vote, they could rescue democracy.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/22/op...22fri1.html?em

[st01en_lox]

Beyond shameful.

Treasonous.

[Sierabiera]

It's not speech that was being limited, Jasonik, it's bribery.

Isn't bribery already a crime?

The special interests want favors from government. Limiting the ability of government to dole out favors by restricting the scope of its powers disincentivizes corrupt corporate rent seeking. It is manifestly ironic that by obstinately championing a powerful government of nearly unlimited scope to intervene against business, those who claim to be against corporate influence in politics actually invite it with the creation of the very regulatory mechanisms whose levers corporate interests wish to grasp.

"We the People of the United States..."

[paraphrasing] ...create a bicameral legislative body having only the specific powers granted herein (and for good measure because we don't trust legislators) especially prohibited from certain actions, first of which is limiting freedom of speech or of the press.

A more fruitful line of inquiry than corporate personhood, is just how a group of people composing, financing, and printing up leaflets (blogs, TV ads, films, etc) change from free political expression into something nefarious and criminal? And how would a statute or constitutional amendment be structured to make the distinction?

[seooptiman]

Follow the money.

This isn't about freedom of speech. This is about influence-peddling.

Don't be disingenuous.

[LoisCampon]

Follow the money.

No, follow the MANY -

Laws that restrict any ‘entity’ (corporate or individual) from fully expressing their political viewpoint is clearly a violation of the first amendmant.

Corporations that choose to use their own funds in order to ‘express’ those political views are simply excersizing a fundamental constitutional right which is fully protected by the first amendment: an obvious fact to anyone who understands - and upholds - constitutional constructionist principals.

This is not a matter of ‘what I like’, it’s a matter of ‘what is the rule of law’ regarding constitutionality - as it was understood by the framers of that very constitution.

This ruling is simply correcting a prior flawed decision; and is in good standing with the majority americans - according to the gallup poll anyway.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/125333/Pu...spx?CSTS=alert

exerpt -
January 22, 2010
Public Agrees With Court: Campaign Money Is "Free Speech"
But have mixed views on other issues at heart of new Supreme Court ruling
by Lydia Saad
PRINCETON, NJ -- Americans' broad views about corporate spending in elections generally accord with the Supreme Court's decision Thursday that abolished some decades-old restrictions on corporate political activity. Fifty-seven percent of Americans consider campaign donations to be a protected form of free speech, and 55% say corporate and union donations should be treated the same way under the law as donations from individuals are. At the same time, the majority think it is more important to limit campaign donations than to protect this free-speech right.

[aaaaaaaabbbby]

Then toss out all laws about slander, libel, etc.

Scream "Fire" in a crowded theater just for fun; you're now protected to rant at will, no matter the consequences.

Declare an intent to do harm to all sorts of high ranking folks.

Lie about the benefits of your snake oil.

According to the argument put forth: All of that is A-OK.

Following this line of thought then what basis is there for any -- ANY -- law?

The government (by consent of the people) puts limitations on speech of various sorts in order to the benefit the citizenry as a whole.

Belief that all persons will always do good and should be left fully free to exercise whatever whims pop into their (its) head is, at best, naive.

[Celeliamend]

This ruling is simply correcting a prior flawed decision

A flawed decision in place for over 100 years.

From the NYTimes article posted previously:

"In 1907, as corporations reached new heights of wealth and power, Congress made its views of the relationship between corporations and campaigning clear: It banned them from contributing to candidates. At midcentury, it enacted the broader ban on spending that was repeatedly reaffirmed over the decades until it was struck down on Thursday."

--

About that Gallup poll:

"Fifty-seven percent of Americans consider campaign donations to be a protected form of free speech, and 55% say corporate and union donations should be treated the same way under the law as donations from individuals are. "

I wonder what the results would have been if people were asked if campaign donations from banks should be treated the same way under the law as donations from individuals are. After all: banks are corporations too.


--

[Gypejeva]

Campaign finance laws are a bit like gun control statutes: actual criminals continue to possess large stockpiles of weapons, but law-abiding citizens are disarmed.

An apt analogy, although not intended.

Apply the interpretation of the 2nd amendment to the result - a society with the highest firearm homicide rate in the developed world.

Laws that restrict any ‘entity’ (corporate or individual) from fully expressing their political viewpoint is clearly a violation of the first amendmant.

Yes, clearly a unanimous decision.