De 'beweging' achter het politieke vonnis Supreme Court

[Cees Binkhorst]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

Een hoop moeite voor het ontmantelen van regels, die volgens de Supreme
Court géén effect hebben. Maar wél bijna overal elders worden aangehouden.

Groet / Cees

PS Tijd voor een vakidioot, die aantoont dat de First Amendment alleen
van toepassing is op personen, omdat alléén die daarin worden genoemd én
  de organisaties van groepen personen, die mogen meepraten, aan
lidmaatschapsvoorwaarden moeten voldoen.

January 25, 2010
Crusader Bent on Dismantling Spending Rules
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/25/us/politics/25bopp.html
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

WASHINGTON — James Bopp Jr. likes to begin speeches by reading the First
Amendment. He calls opponents, including President Obama, “socialists.”
He runs a national law practice out of a small office in Terre Haute,
Ind., because he prefers the city’s conservative culture.

And for most of the last 35 years, he has been a lonely Quixote tilting
at the very idea of regulating political donations as an affront to free
speech.

Not anymore. Mr. Bopp won his biggest victory last week when the Supreme
Court ruled that corporations, unions and nonprofit groups have the
right to spend as much as they want supporting or opposing the election
of a candidate.

Mr. Bopp was not present in the courtroom. His client — not for the
first time — replaced him with a less ideological and more experienced
Washington lawyer when the case reached the justices.

But it was Mr. Bopp who had first advised the winning plaintiff, the
conservative group Citizens United, about using its campaign-season film
“Hillary: The Movie” as a deliberate test of the limits on corporate
political spending. And he shepherded the case through appeals to the
Supreme Court as part of a long-term legal strategy that he says he has
just begun.

“We had a 10-year plan to take all this down,” he said in an interview.
“And if we do it right, I think we can pretty well dismantle the entire
regulatory regime that is called campaign finance law.”

“We have been awfully successful,” he added, “and we are not done yet.”

The Citizens United case “was really Jim’s brainchild,” said Richard L.
Hasen, an expert on election law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.

“He has manufactured these cases to present certain questions to the
Supreme Court in a certain order and achieve a certain result,” Mr.
Hasen said. “He is a litigation machine.”

The same week the court issued its ruling, it agreed to hear Mr. Bopp’s
next appeal: seeking to prevent the public release of the names of
people who signed a Washington State petition opposing same-sex
marriage, on the ground that gay rights supporters might harass them.

For Mr. Bopp, it is a chance to chip away at some of the disclosure laws
left intact by the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Citizens United case.

Then there is his suit on behalf of the Republican National Committee,
pending in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of
Columbia Circuit, seeking to overturn some of the limits on direct
corporate contributions to the political parties. When Mr. Bopp filed it
a few years ago, many legal scholars considered the suit almost
pointless because of Supreme Court precedents. But the court’s opinion
last week — from a slightly different set of justices — has cast it in a
far more favorable light.

“If you cannot ban corporate spending on ads, how is it that you are
allowed to ban corporate contributions to candidates?” asked Nathaniel
Persily, a professor at Columbia Law School. “That is the next shoe to
drop.”

Mr. Bopp, for his part, said he had no complaints about being removed
from the case before the Supreme Court, even if the lawyer who argued
it, Theodore B. Olson, a solicitor general in the Bush administration,
won with an approach Mr. Bopp originally left out. (It was Mr. Olson who
decided to go after the ban on corporate spending; Mr. Bopp hoped to
challenge disclosure rules, which the court upheld last week.)

“I understand that law is art,” Mr. Bopp said. “Picasso, Van Gogh,
Michelangelo — they are all very different, but all create masterpieces.”

Mr. Bopp also makes no apologies for his partisanship. A veteran member
of the Republican National Committee, he is the leader of a movement to
deny party support to any candidate who fails to affirm at least 8 of 10
principles, including opposition to “government-run health care,”
“amnesty” for illegal immigrants and “Obama’s socialist agenda.”

Liberal bloggers have ridiculed the proposal as a “purity test.” But
that just revealed “what liberals think of ‘purity,’ ” Mr. Bopp said.
“We would call ‘purity’ 100 percent, not 80. Marriage doesn’t mean you
can commit adultery 20 percent of the time.”

At stake, he said, is the fate of the party and the country. If
Republicans fail to restore their credibility with grass-roots
conservatives, Mr. Bopp said, “we are going to be facing a third-party
effort that will guarantee Obama’s re-election and the literal — not
just virtual — destruction of the country as we know it.”

Mr. Bopp’s career as a conservative advocate began in the late 1960s at
Indiana University, where he headed its chapter of Young Americans for
Freedom, William F. Buckley’s answer to the leftist Students for a
Democratic Society.

A few years after Mr. Bopp graduated from the University of Florida
College of Law in 1973, a friend in Indianapolis, M. Stanton Evans,
introduced him to the state’s chapter of the fledgling National Right to
Life Committee. By age 29, Mr. Bopp was its first general counsel,
overseeing the dissemination of the 1980 “voter guides” that some said
helped elect Ronald Reagan president.

Mr. Bopp’s success defending the voter guides from legal challenges made
him the go-to lawyer for right-leaning groups fighting election rules.
“He is absolutely tenacious, a bulldog litigator,” said Ralph Reed, the
former head of the Christian Coalition, who hired Mr. Bopp to represent
it in a legal battle over its guides and political activities.

In 1996, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, a fierce opponent of
campaign finance laws who is now the Senate Republican leader, helped
Mr. Bopp set up his own nonprofit litigation center, the James Madison
Center for Free Speech. (Mr. McConnell was its honorary chairman). After
Congress passed the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law in 2002, Mr.
McConnell hired Mr. Bopp to challenge it.

Shortly before the Supreme Court hearings, however, Mr. Bopp was dropped
from representing Mr. McConnell because of a dispute over tactics with
the other lawyers on Mr. McConnell’s team.

The court upheld most of McCain-Feingold in 2003. But Mr. Bopp was soon
back, in 2007, with a challenge on behalf of the Wisconsin Right to Life
Committee. With Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. having replaced Sandra Day
O’Connor, the court leaned the other way, striking down some of the
prohibitions on corporate political commercials and setting the stage
for last week’s ruling.

Mr. Bopp said the next step in his 10-year plan is to roll back the
disclosure rules.

“Groups have to be relieved of reporting their donors if lifting the
prohibition on their political speech is going to have any meaning,” he
said. Requiring groups that buy political commercials to report their
donors is almost as punitive, he said, “as an outright criminal
go-to-jail-time prohibition.”

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