The Court ’s Blow to Democracy

[Cees Binkhorst]

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Het artikel dat ik gisteren naar de lijst stuurde heeft al meer dan 2000
commentaren op de website van de NYT ;)

Groet / Cees

January 22, 2010
Editorial
The Court’s Blow to Democracy
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/22/opinion/22fri1.html

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.

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