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Of course! It is all so clear now!


The reasons to seat the Supreme Court with ideologues and yes men! We've seen the same 5 judges and their conservative activism from the bench, unabashedly vote pro-corporate, pro-establishment, and most recently pro-white.


Rather than publish an opinion at the end of the term as expected in an obscure campaign finance case, Citizens United v. FEC, the court issued a rare order for re-argument of the case in September! Before the usual start of their term.
At that point, the court will consider whether to overrule its two previous decisions that in 1990 and 2003 upheld limits on corporate spending in federal elections.


The ramifications are fairly obvious given the corporatist leanings of the 5 conservative judges.


Given their conservative activism, there is a great chance the justices will use the opportunity to overrule limits on how much money corporations can spend supporting candidate.


I'll say that another way.


In addition to the legalized bribes Lobbyists give politicians to curry favor, now the corporations themselves, can spend unlimited amounts to get their preferred candidates elected!


Obama earned $600 million from individual citizen campaign contributions in the 2008 election.
McCain trailed him by a lot. Monsanto for example could pay all of the campaign costs, effectively buying the new president's favor.

Citizens United produced an anti-Hillary Clinton documentary. The group wanted to air the documentary during the 2008 presidential primary season through a cable television "video on demand" service and to advertise for it on television. In exchange for a $1.2 million fee, a cable television operator consortium would have made the documentary available to cable subscribers to download free "on demand," as part of an "Election '08" series.


Citizens United is an ideological group (like the NRA or Planned Parenthood), but it takes for-profit corporate funding. The McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law passed in 2002 bars certain corporate-funded television broadcasts, such as this documentary, in the period before an election. And the law requires disclosure by the funders of election-related broadcast advertising, such as these ads.


Citizens United argued against the corporate-spending ban. (It also attacked the disclosure provisions, but they're probably not really in trouble.) Citizens United made a series of alternate arguments as well, from narrow statutory ones to the broad argument that the court should overrule its 1990 case Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, which upheld limits on corporate spending in candidate elections. Before argument, I expected the court to decide this case narrowly, by reading McCain-Feingold's statutory rules barring corporate-funded television broadcasts as not applying to video-on-demand broadcasts. That would be in line with the Roberts court: The chief justice has tended to prefer a chipping away at existing precedent rather than dramatic decisions to move the law in his direction. But, as Dahlia Lithwick explained, at oral argument the government's lawyer got into some trouble in suggesting that the government would have the constitutional power to ban corporate-published books just before the election. That made it seem like the court could well be poised to overrule Austin.


Though three Justices (Kennedy, Scalia, and Thomas) have voted repeatedly for Austin to be overruled, Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito thus far have moved more cautiously. In each of the campaign-finance cases decided by the Roberts court, these justices have sided with those challenging the law, but in an incremental way. If Roberts or Alito were ready to go the narrow route again in Citizens United, however, there would have been no reason to set the case for reargument explicitly asking the parties to brief the constitutional question, and certainly no reason to rush the case to September so it can be decided before the 2010 election season goes into full swing.

Current Mood:
nervous nervous

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