“Walking In Justice Morrison R. Waite’s Footsteps”: Citizens United’s Legal Roots Lie In The Jim Crow Supreme Court
As John Roberts begins his second decade as the chief justice, a number of Supreme Court rulings during his tenure are once more in the news, perhaps none more so than Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission. The 5-4 decision, which applied First Amendment guarantees of freedom of speech to a private corporation, has been targeted lately by Democrat presidential candidates Hillary Clinton (“Citizens United was about me. Think how that makes me feel.”) and Bernie Sanders, who declared this week, “No nominee of mine to the United States Supreme Court will get that job unless he or she is loud and clear that one of their first orders of business will be to overturn Citizens United.” Americans are equally hostile to the decision: A national poll released by Bloomberg Politics this week found that 78 percent of respondents want Citizens United overturned, while only 17 percent support the ruling.
What many Americans might not know, however, is that the manner in which corporations came to be granted personal rights is inextricably linked to a series of late nineteenth century Supreme Court rulings that disemboweled the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments and ushered in the Jim Crow era, when state and local laws were passed to create racial segregation.
The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, was aimed at securing fundamental rights for the four million newly freed slaves. Section 1 conferred citizenship on any person born in the United States, made them citizens of the state in which they resided, and guaranteed all Americans “due process of law” and “equal protection of the laws.” To the man who drafted that section of the amendment, Representative John Bingham of Ohio, this meant that the personal guarantees of the Bill of Rights would apply to state as well as federal law. Most in Congress who voted for the amendment agreed, and we take such guarantees against state action for granted today. And the Fifteenth Amendment, of course, guaranteed black men the right to vote.
But after Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase died in 1873, protections for black Americans began to unravel, all enabled and often mandated by the Supreme Court.
President Ulysses Grant had a great deal of difficulty filling Chase’s seat. Having failed three times to find an acceptable candidate, he settled on Morrison R. Waite. It was not a choice based on excellence. Waite was described by Grant’s attorney general as “sufficiently obscure for the occasion,” and characterized by the Nation as firmly “in the first rank of second rank lawyers.” Stung by the criticism and determined to make his mark, Waite decided to author the majority opinion in the most inflammatory case on the 1876 docket, United States v. Cruikshank.
On Easter Sunday, 1873, 250 heavily armed white men, dragging a cannon behind them, besieged 150 black men who, in the wake of a ferociously disputed gubernatorial election, had taken refuge in the courthouse in Colfax, Louisiana. The hopelessly outgunned black men surrendered, whereupon the whites proceeded to slaughter them. At least 100 died, some burned alive in the courthouse, others hunted down as they tried to escape into the woods. Federal prosecutors feared that state courts would acquit any of the whites charged, so they turned to a law that transferred race crimes to federal court and indicted one hundred whites for violating the Constitutional rights of the murdered black men. Only three were convicted. (The suspects could not be tried for murder, which was strictly a state crime.) The three appealed on the grounds that under the Fourteenth Amendment, the federal government had no right to restrict the actions of individuals, only states.
Waite agreed. Only if an attack could be proven to have been racially motivated could individuals run afoul of federal law, and the mere fact that 100 black men were massacred by an armed force of whites was not proof enough. Cruikshank and his fellow defendants went free.
Once emboldened, the Court continued to chip away. Also in 1876, in United States v. Reese, the Court ruled that the Fifteenth Amendment did not actually guarantee the right to vote, but only that the right to vote not be restricted on racial grounds. And such restrictions would be almost impossible to prove. In Virginia v. Rives (1879), the Court ruled that a state had to announce that a law was discriminatory in order to violate Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendment guarantees. In other words, that virtually no black men in Virginia were on the voting roles or called for jury service was not in itself proof of discrimination. As a result, restricting voting rights through such contrivances as poll taxes, literacy requirements, grandfather clauses, or other ludicrous tests was perfectly acceptable under federal law.
Then, in 1883, the Waite Court administered the coup de grâce to equal rights when it ruled 8-1 that Congress had no authority to outlaw discrimination by private individuals or organizations and declared the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional.
The Civil Rights Act of 1875 was perhaps the most far-reaching legislation of its kind ever enacted by Congress. Section 1 stipulated, “That all persons within the jurisdiction of the United States shall be entitled to the full and equal and enjoyment of the accommodations, advantages, facilities, and privileges of inns, public conveyances on land or water, theaters, and other places of public amusement.” But it was also extremely unpopular. Few white Americans, in the South as well as North, were prepared to sit next a black person in a theater, dine in the same restaurant, or even walk in the same park. Restaurants and hotels closed rather than accept black customers. A New York Times editorial denounced the law: “It has put us back in the art of governing men more than two hundred years … startling proof how far and fast we are wandering from the principles of 1787, once so loudly extolled and so fondly cherished.”
It took eight years, but five cases were combined and brought before the Court. Three were from the North and none from the Deep South. Justice Joseph Bradley, writing for the majority, could not have been more clear. “Individual invasion of individual rights is not the subject matter of the [Fourteenth] amendment.”
In the wake of the Court’s decision and after a number of other cases where the Court claimed to adhere to the letter of the law while bulldozing its spirit, every southern state rewrote its Constitution in a manner that effectively removed black citizens from the political process. Between 1897 and 1900 in Louisiana, for example, the number of black men registered to vote fell from 130,344 to 5,320. And so Jim Crow was born. Between 1890 and 1903, 1,405 black Americans were lynched in the United States.
Then, having rewritten the Fourteenth Amendment to the detriment of African-Americans, the Court rewrote it once more to protect American corporations. It was an era of burgeoning corporate power, particularly railroads, and many of the justices had specialized in corporate law before being elevated to bench. In a seemingly innocuous 1886 case, Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, a unanimous Court ruled that a railroad could not be taxed for fences that had been erected by the state and were therefore not part of the railroad’s property. More significant, however, was an aside taken down by a court reporter, in which Chief Justice Waite asserted, “The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does.”
From there, corporations began to receive the very same Fourteenth Amendment and Bill of Rights protections that had been denied to black Americans, so much so that the eminent legal historian Edward S. Corwin wrote in 1909, “This tribunal began a reinterpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment in the light of the principles of Lockian individualism and of Spencerian Laissez Faire, which traverses the results it had previously reached at every point.” Corporate power soared still more in the wake of the Court’s stance, with critics accusing railroad men and other corporate giants of trying to buy the country.
And these corporate protections, wholly extra-Constitutional, continue to be reinforced today. So in Citizens United, when Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority to grant free speech rights to a corporation established for the sole purpose of trying to buy an election, he was walking in Morrison Waite’s footsteps. Not a particularly exalted place to be.
By: Lawrence Goldstone, The New Republic, October 2, 2015
“Fully Fledged Substitutes For Campaigns”: When Is A Campaign Not A Campaign? When It’s A Super Pac
These days, presidential candidates are not just raising money for their own campaigns. They are also raising money for outside groups with generic sounding names like Priorities USA, Right to Rise and Our American Renewal.
These are Super Pacs (political action committees), affiliated with each outside campaign but nominally independent. In 2012, they were helpful appendages. This year, heading into 2016, they are becoming fully fledged substitutes for campaigns, taking over functions including opposition research, polling and even knocking on doors.
Super Pacs are just five years old. Like most developments in modern campaign finance law, they were created by accident through judicial decisions, not by legislation.
First, in 2010 the Citizens United supreme court decision struck down restrictions on independent expenditures in campaigns by nonprofits. Citizens United was followed the same year by a decision by the DC circuit court of appeals in a case called SpeechNOW, which said political groups that sought to make only independent expenditures could not be subject to federal campaign contribution limits.
These two decisions combined to create “super” versions of previously existing political action committees, that would make expenditures independently of the candidates they supported and thus could raise as much money as they wanted. In other words, one donor can fund an entire Super Pac.
In the 2012 Republican primary, Super Pacs were credited with keeping the campaigns of Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum alive for months, extending the race into the spring.
In that race and the general election that followed, Super Pacs were primarily used to run television ads. American campaigns have long focused on saturating the airwaves with advertisements; Super Pacs provided a new vehicle to air even more commercials. Campaigns, however, still have major advantages over Super Pacs when it comes to buying television time.
Within 60 days of a general election or 45 days of a primary, political campaigns are entitled to something called “lowest unit rate”. It means that a political campaign gets the lowest rate a television station offers to any advertiser, and it is coupled with the requirement that stations give political campaigns “reasonable access” to run ads. Lowest unit rate also means TV stations cannot censor or restrict ads that federal campaigns seek to run.
None of these rules apply to Super Pacs. This means that they have to pay a much higher rate per ad and may find it more difficult to get their advertisements on television.
However, all such advantages for campaigns pale next to the fact that Super Pacs can raised unlimited money from an individual donor. Federal campaigns can only take $5,400 from any individual ($2,700 for a primary election and another $2,700 for a general election). So while campaigns can get more value for their money when spending on advertising, Super Pacs don’t have to worry too much about value.
And this year, they are not worrying too much about just running television ads.
The nascent campaign of Jeb Bush has been entirely headquartered out of an organization called Right to Rise. The group is on pace to raise more than $100m in May alone and is expected to be significantly better-funded than Bush’s inevitable presidential campaign.
Bush has also set up a connected nonprofit, Right to Rise Policy Solutions, which is serving as a parking place for campaign policy advisers until the former Florida governor announces his candidacy.
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Right to Rise is that it is expected to be led by Bush’s top political adviser, Mike Murphy. Because Super Pacs cannot coordinate with campaigns, this means that Bush will probably be unable to communicate with Murphy for the duration of the campaign.
While Bush has yet to declare his candidacy, Ted Cruz, who has announced his bid for the White House, has also bragged about the success of the four interrelated Super Pacs that are backing his campaign.
In a speech at the April meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition in Las Vegas, the Texas senator boasted that a Super Pac supporting him had “raised $31m” in the first week of his campaign. “That’s more money than any other Super Pac has raised … in the history of politics” in a comparable period, he said.
Each of the four Super Pacs supporting Cruz is funded entirely by one major donor and devoted to one specific campaign task.
Nor are Republicans alone in such activity. Hillary Clinton, the clear Democratic frontrunner for 2016, is holding a number of fundraisers for one of her affiliated Super Pacs, Priorities USA. A separate group, Correct the Record, has spun off from the Democratic research Super Pac American Bridge, solely to do rapid response for Clinton.
Correct the Record insists it will be able to coordinate with the Clinton campaign, despite taking unlimited contributions, because it will not run any ads on her behalf.
Not all of this may end up being legal. But as Rick Hasen, an election law expert who teaches at University of California, Irvine, points out, even “if some of these things don’t pass muster with the courts”, such matters probably won’t be resolved until after the 2016 election.
Furthermore, campaign finance may have changed dramatically by the time such legal issues are resolved.
“Nothing is permanent when it comes to campaign finance,” said Hasen.
For now, though, the landscape is dominated by Super Pacs.
By: Ben Jacobs, The Guardian, May 17, 2015
“How John Roberts Made Hillary Clinton President”: The Irony Is So Rich, Thank You Citizens United!
During Hillary Clinton’s first campaign event in Iowa, the (finally) announced presidential candidate laid out the four main goals of her campaign, including the need to fix our “dysfunctional” political system and to get “unaccountable” money out of politics, even if it requires a constitutional amendment. And thus we have the latest chapter in Clinton’s unique and evolving relationship with Citizens United v. Federal Exchange Commission.
It may be easy to forget that the basis for the claim that led to the controversial Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. FEC was a barely watchable film titled Hillary: The Movie, featuring prominent conservatives such as Dick Morris and Ann Coulter that was trying to damage Hillary Clinton on eve of the January 2008 Democratic presidential primaries. The film was produced by Citizens United, a D.C.-based conservative nonprofit organization.
The film was supposed to be distributed on cable television and video on demand, but the federal government blocked the airing of the film because it violated the McCain-Feingold Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 that prohibited corporate and nonprofit funded advocacy ads that mentioned a candidate’s name within 30 days of a primary or caucus, or 60 days of a general election.
At the time, no one could have predicted that Clinton would finish third in the Iowa caucuses behind Barack Obama and John Edwards, so many conservatives thought that more than just attack ads would be needed to defeat her eventual rise to the presidency: Attack movies were the new and necessary medium.
Well, roughly a year into President Obama’s first term, the Supreme Court made its decision on Citizens United v. FEC, saying that certain provisions in the McCain-Feingold BCRA were unconstitutional, and this brought us into the modern era of a nearly unrestricted and confusing flow of cash into our electoral process through various 501(c)(4)s, PACs, and Super PACs.
Stephen Colbert may have actually best explained how this absurd network of constantly flowing political money works when he announced on his show that he was officially forming an exploratory committee for his potential candidacy for President of the United States of South Carolina, and therefore could no longer run his Super PAC. See the videos here and here.
And here we are today. Less than a week into Clinton’s second official presidential bid, she has already done two things that may completely alter Citizens United v. FEC and our electoral process. Her support of a constitutional amendment limiting or regulating campaign finance is a smart and popular decision among liberal voters, but her campaign’s announcement that it intends to raise a staggering $2.5 billion combined by the official campaign, Hillary for America, and various unaffiliated 501(c)(4)s, PACs, and Super PACs has completely altered our political landscape.
Roughly eight months before the Iowa caucuses, the fundraising machine that will drive or greatly influence Clinton’s campaign has set goals that dwarf those of Obama’s in 2012, and may scare away potential Democratic challengers.
The 2012 presidential election between President Obama and challenger Mitt Romney was the most expensive campaign in history, with each candidate’s election team and supporting groups raising $1.123 and $1.019 billion respectively. Clinton’s campaign intends to surpass that entire amount on its own, and she is allowed to do so because of a case brought to the Supreme Court because a conservative group wanted to have a larger impact on hopefully preventing her from winning the presidency in 2008. The irony is so rich.
Who knows if Clinton will be able to defeat the GOP and Republicans at the game they insisted on creating, but she most likely will at least be able to match them dollar-for-dollar in the general election.
The brilliance surrounding all of this is the fact that Clinton has steadfastly been against this sort of external influence into politics. She articulated her objections on her first day of campaigning in Iowa, and the main reason why campaign finance laws have changed in recent years was due to her objection to the previously unlawful attempt to disseminate a campaign attack video denouncing her in 2008.
Clearly, her campaign’s $2.5 billion fundraising estimate may point to the contrary, but the fundraising strategy of her campaign is actually based around small donations. Additionally, she has not named a finance chair for her campaign.
According to an internal campaign memo obtained by Politico, Hillary for America intends to have a “flat fundraising structure” and a “grassroots donor base and a merit-based finance organization.”
“The campaign will have the resources needed to compete,” continued the memo. “Initially fundraising will be a challenge—with lower limits and a smaller list than Obama in 2011.”
The campaign has moved away from her 2008 strategy of seeking mega-donors, but it also knows that it has the support of unaffiliated organizations such as Ready PAC, formerly Ready for Hillary, that desperately want a Hillary Clinton presidency. (According to FEC regulations, Ready for Hillary was forced to change its name once Clinton officially announced her candidacy.)
Arguably against the wishes of many Clinton supporters, two Clinton 2008 volunteers launched Ready for Hillary in 2013 and have raised more than $15 million for Clinton’s campaign and amassed a 4 million strong grassroots fundraising list that will be given to Hillary for America. Clinton’s campaign has already hired six Ready for Hillary staffers, including co-founder Adam Parkhomenko. These former staffers can no longer coordinate with remaining staffers, and Ready PAC intend to shut down completely in the coming days.
Essentially, Hillary Clinton’s campaign can develop only the fundraising strategy that the candidate supports, but the numerous other political groups that independently support her can fundraise how they see fit. Independent of each other they all collectively believe that these various efforts should enhance candidate Clinton’s chances of moving back into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
All told these fundraising efforts may make her the unstoppable, inevitable candidate that she wanted to be in 2008. The big difference now is that she did not have Citizens United v. FEC to support her campaign.
If Hillary Clinton becomes the 45th president of the United States, the GOP may want to give themselves a nice pat on the back for all the hard work they indirectly have done to fund her presidential campaign.
By: Barrett Holmes Pitner, The Daily Beast, April 16, 2015
“Political System Owned Outright By The Wealthy”: In A Citizens United World, We Should At Least Know Who Is Buying Our Politicians
In 1899, an ultra-wealthy Montana copper magnate named William Clark wanted to be one of the state’s U.S. senators. In those days, senators were elected by state legislatures, so Clark tried a straightforward tactic: mass bribery. He gave $10,000 to every legislator who would take it, which worked like a charm. Unfortunately for Clark, the Senate got wind of this, and refused to seat him. He resigned, though he tried again without the overt bribery and won in 1901, when he served a full term.
Mark Twain wrote of Sen. Clark: “He is said to have bought legislatures and judges as other men buy food and raiment. By his example he has so excused and so sweetened corruption that in Montana it no longer has an offensive smell. His history is known to everybody; he is as rotten a human being as can be found anywhere under the flag…”
Such stories inspired some of the original reforms against organized money in politics. Indeed, Clark was almost singlehandedly responsible for the direct elections of senators.
But we should not be too self-righteous when it comes to poor old William Clark. Not only is the problem of political corruption fast returning to its Gilded Age nadir, in some respects it is actually worse than in Twain’s day. Then as now, our political system is essentially owned outright by the wealthy. But today we have allowed them to hide their identities behind legal chicanery.
Removing the money from politics altogether is a worthy goal. But until then, simple transparency about who is buying which politician would be an excellent stopgap measure.
It was Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy who wrote the Citizens United decision, which abolished limits on independent political spending by unions and corporations and sparked a stupendous growth in shadowy nonprofits allied with various parties and candidates. The decision’s most famous line is this: “Independent expenditures do not lead to, or create the appearance of, quid pro quo corruption.”
I would like to direct Justice Kennedy’s attention to this story by Michael Isikoff, about a Wisconsin hardware store magnate named John Menard, Jr. When Menard wanted to help Gov. Scott Walker (R) defeat a hard-fought recall attempt in 2012, post-Citizens United groups were a handy weapon of choice — especially 501(c)(4) nonprofits, which do not have to disclose their donors:
He wrote more than $1.5 million in checks to a pro-Walker political advocacy group that pledged to keep its donors secret, three sources directly familiar with the transactions told Yahoo News.
Menard’s previously unreported six-figure contributions to the Wisconsin Club for Growth…seem to have paid off for the businessman and his company. In the past two years, Menard’s company has been awarded up to $1.8 million in special tax credits from a state economic development corporation that Walker chairs, according to state records. [Yahoo News]
According to Isikoff, Menard has also benefited from regulatory laxity under the Walker regime — the Wisconsin government had previously levied stiff fines against him and his company for “illegally dumping hazardous waste.” In a telling coincidence, an old William Clark mining site is now one of the biggest contaminated Superfund sites in the country.
These documents were obtained as part of a state investigation into whether Walker’s campaign committee actually violated the few remaining stipulations of campaign finance law. But this says more about the carelessness and arrogance of these people than the laws themselves — it is pitifully easy to do an end-run around disclosure or non-coordination requirements.
Justice Kennedy’s assertion that a tsunami of corporate money cannot even create the appearance of corruption is so preposterous it surely has to be willful ignorance. Nevertheless, I defy him to argue with a straight face that Isikoff’s story is not the foulest of quid pro quo corruption.
And even if he can manage that, it is utterly indefensible for the ultra-wealthy to purchase state governments whole without disclosing who is doing the purchasing. An email sent to Walker by one of his aides stressed the importance of secrecy to the scheme: “Stress that donations to WiCFG [Wisconsin Club for Growth] are not disclosed and can accept corporate donations without limits… Let them know you can accept corporate contributions and it is not reported.”
So if the conservative majority on the Supreme Court insists on government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich, there’s precious little the citizenry can do about it. But can we proles at least know which plutocrat deserves our cringing deference?
By: Ryan Cooper, The Week, March 26, 2015
“This SCOTUS Destroyed America”: How Citizens United Is Ruining More Than Our Elections
In the years since conservative Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy’s landmark Citizens United v. FEC decision gave wealthy interests the political power they’d apparently lacked, the media has mostly been interested in how the ruling was affecting elections. On the presidential level, the consensus, at least among political scientists, is that the impact has been marginal. But in less rarefied air, like the grubby environs of Congressional campaigns or the sometimes sordid realm of state and municipal politics, the consequences of the ruling have been substantial. It is quite likely that dozens of state governments in the U.S. will reflect Kennedy’s vision — as well as that of the Koch brothers — for decades to come.
What has gone less-examined, however, is the role that dark money — which is spending by groups that are supposedly devoted to “social welfare,” and that consequently don’t have to reveal their donors — has played since 2010 in the crafting of legislation. This is somewhat odd, in retrospect, since the ostensible point of winning an election, after all, is to legislate. But perhaps the political and media class’s lack of attention to the new reality of sausage-making can be attributed to a campaign-finance version of climate change fatalism. One can gaze up at only so many seemingly insurmountable obstacles before wondering if one’s time would be better spent coming to terms with giving up.
And make no mistake: The reality of lawmaking in post-Citizens United Washington is enough to make even the most stalwart campaign finance reformers wonder if their advocacy and organizing is little more than professionalized windmill tilting. As the Huffington Post showed this week in a lengthy, impressive and profoundly dispiriting report, the walls separating the interests of the wealthy from the legislative process that a century of reformers fought to build have been leveled. They were never as lofty or sturdy as reformers would have wished, of course. But they now exist as little more than rubble and dust.
One of the things the report from HuffPo’s Paul Blumenthal and Ryan Grim makes clear is the way Citizens United’s pernicious effect on lawmaking is at once deliberately opaque and ploddingly simple. To take one of the many examples of now-kosher corruption they detail as a case in point, look at the story of the Property Casualty Insurers Association of America (PCI) and the 2014 election. Blumenthal and Grim note that PCI is lucky enough to have two former aides to Speaker of the House John Boehner on its lobbying team. Even better for PCI, the trade group had the foresight to donate significant chunks of money as of late to pro-Republican outside groups: $185,000 since 2012, they report.
But they weren’t done there. In addition to all of those obviously stringless donations to arms of the GOP machine, PCI also decided to give $75,000 to Crossroads GPS, the Karl Rove-affiliated “social welfare” nonprofit, and $25,000 to the Kentucky Opportunity Coalition, a “non-partisan” nonprofit. Both organizations, according to HuffPo, are run by Steven Law, who just so happens to be a member of now-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s “inner circle.” Incidentally, both groups also happened to spend large amounts of money to support McConnell in his 2014 campaign against Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes. Outside groups spent $1.3 million in support of Grimes and $16.4 million in opposition, while McConnell got $5.7 million outsider bucks in his favor and $10.5 million going the other way.
For PCI, the pro-McConnell donations ended up being money well spent. McConnell obliterated Grimes after a campaign that had been, for the most part, surprisingly competitive. And because GOP Senate candidates in Iowa and Georgia, who also were supported by outside groups using PCI money, defeated their Democratic opponents, too, McConnell became the new majority leader of the Senate. And wouldn’t you know it, one of the first things the McConnell-run Senate did with the reins of power was to pass a provision rolling back capital standards on insurance companies that were implemented by Dodd-Frank. Believe it or not, this was an act of deregulation that PCI strongly supported.
Now, is this all proof that McConnell engaged in a quid pro quo with PCI and other members of the insurance industry? That the current Senate majority leader told the folks at PCI to make a gesture or two (or three, or 4,000) to show how much they care about supporting a “coalition” to enhance Kentucky’s “opportunity”? No, it’s not. It may be suggestive — and to the jaundiced eye, extremely so — but it’s hardly irrefutable evidence. As defenders of these types of arrangements are quick to note, it’s eminently possible that removing obscure provisions of Dodd-Frank just happens to be an issue on which the Kentucky senator and big insurance fortuitously agree.
But what’s lost in all the fuzziness, which Blumenthal and Grim deftly filter out, is that the world Justice Kennedy’s decision created was, by his own admission, supposed to be one in which even the appearance of corruption was negated. Democracy would suffer no harm, Kennedy assured us, by letting “independent” groups like Crossroads GPS or the Kentucky Opportunity Coalition spend at will with precious little regulation. “[I]ndependent expenditures do not lead to, or create the appearance of, quid pro quo corruption,” Kennedy writes in the majority opinion for Citizens United. “That speakers may have influence over or access to elected officials does not mean that those officials are corrupt,” he assures. “And the appearance of influence or access will not cause the electorate to lose faith in this democracy.”
At the time that the ruling was delivered, Kennedy’s faith that access and influence would not corrupt the system was exceeded in curiousness only by his belief that the American people would feel similarly. But as the years have passed, and as studies showing the U.S. to be a donor-run system akin to oligarchy have gone mainstream, his declaration has begun to make a bit more sense. Just so long as “the electorate” is defined as the lobbying industry and its clients, his prediction looks downright clairvoyant. I bet the fine people at the Property Casualty Insurers Association of America — who are probably investing right now in the Jeb Bush-affiliated Right to Rise “social welfare” group — would strongly agree.
By: Elias Isquith, Salon, February 28, 2015
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 