Stevens Accuses Supreme Court Conservatives of Judicial Activism
So where are all the cries of judicial activism from the right?
By ruling today that corporations and unions can independently spend as much money as they want to back or trash congressional and presidential candidates, the conservative Supreme Court justices are throwing out over a century of jurisprudence that backed the regulation of corporate involvement in elections. Yet will the right denounce the five-to-four decision as an act of judicial overreach? That's not likely. But Justice John Paul Stevens, in a stinging dissent written for the minority, argues that the right wing of the court has engaged in a brazen act of activism--and has done so to award corporations more legal rights than they have previously been afforded.
A few excerpts:
* Even more misguided is the notion that the Court must rewrite the law relating to campaign expenditures by for-profit corporations and unions to decide this case.
* The conceit that corporations must be treated identically to natural persons in the political sphere is not only inaccurate but also inadequate to justify the Court’s disposition of this case.
* Although they make enormous contributions to our society, corporations are not actually members of it. They cannot vote or run for office. Because they may be managed and controlled by nonresidents, their interests may conflict in fundamental respects with the interests of eligible voters.
* The financial resources, legal structure,and instrumental orientation of corporations raise legitimate concerns about their role in the electoral process. Our lawmakers have a compelling constitutional basis, if not also a democratic duty, to take measures designed to guard against the potentially deleterious effects of corporate spending in local and national races.
* The majority’s approach to corporate electioneering marks a dramatic break from our past. Congress hasplaced special limitations on campaign spending by corporations ever since the passage of the Tillman Act in 1907....We have unanimously concluded [in 1982] that this “reflects a permissible assessment of the dangers posed by those entities to the electoral process"...and have accepted the “legislative judgment that the special characteristics of the corporate structure require particularly careful regulation...The Court today rejects a century of history when it treats the distinction between corporate and individual campaignspending as an invidious novelty born [in a 1990 opinion].
* The Court’s ruling threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions across the Nation. The path it has taken to reach its outcome will, I fear, do damage to this institution.
With this dissent, Stevens is scoffing at Chief Justice John Roberts' self-proclaimed fancy for "judicial modesty" and waging battle on one of the major fronts in the court's history: how far should the justices go in equating corporations with citizens. You can read the decision here.
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Comments
This piece of Judicial
This piece of Judicial Activism goes back to Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad. en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Santa_Clara_County_v._Southern_Pacific_Railroad
THAT'S WHAT NEEDS TO BE OVERTURNED.
Really?
So the so-called conservatives on the Supreme Court think it is just fine for Hugo Chavez to spend millions of dollars influencing our elections as long as he has Citgo write the checks.
Even more cash!
Washington is already awash in corporate loot, this just opens the floodgates wider. Flesh and blood, breathing citizens lose again.
In Steven's dessent he
In Steven's dessent he states, "eligible voters." That's exactly the problem, most Americans today are simply not intellectually capable to vote. Many have no grasp, beyond skin color or party affiliation why they vote for a particular person! Truth hurts America, but this is a stupid country!
Re: In Steven's dessent he
You forgot religious affiliation. Or perhaps you include those in the stupid group as would I.
"I want to know who's allowed to breed
All the dogs who never learned to read
Missionary politicians
And the cops of a new religion"
- Green Day, "East Jesus Nowhere"
RE: Judicial Activism
After all Chief Justice Roberts & Justice Alito are shills for Corporations. It is sad that Roberts succumbed to the influence of his former paymasters. The US Supreme Court's Conservative Majority smacks of US Special Interests' Water Carriers. They are immoral, unethical & have done the gravest of the gravest damage to America. As America's middle-class is being reduced to the poor class year after year, the ONLY hope for America's hard working is GOD. Unfortunately a majority of those who preach about GOD have also capitulated to become puppets of the rich, the wealthy & the powerful.
Supreme Court protects corporate speech
This is one of the blackest days in U.S. history. On this date, the country has legally ceased to be a democratic republic and has been transformed into a corporate fascist state. Elections will continue to be conducted, but henceforth a candidate's success will be totally dependent on his/her ability to attract corporate sponserships. The Fox "News" perspective will prevail across the media spectrum and dissenting voices will be suppressed, and eventually threatened. Heil the corporation!
too many problems
too many problems
If the American people ever
If the American people ever allow private banks
to control the issue of their money,
first by inflation and then by deflation,
the banks and corporations that will
grow up around them (around the banks),
will deprive the people of their property
until their children will wake up homeless
on the continent their fathers conquered. Thomas Jefferson
A complete travesty.....
I think even the right-wing teabaggers should be hostile to the very thought of a complete corporate (special interests, Lobbyists, "K" Street) take-over of Government, that is certainly not in the Constitution, that they wave around..if they have any understanding of what SCOTUS just did, or even what a Corpocracy is really called. Congress should impeach Scalia, Alito and Roberts for "legislating from the bench", ( I am sure that the Corporations will "pay off" any kind of legislation that would suggest that) granting Corporations more individual rights (they have more money and now they have more power, to spend unlimited funds on their form of "free speech", buying, bribing and blackmailing "Lawmakers" in Government ) than the people have. This is the final straw....
It is understandable how
It is understandable how corporations can be equated to a person as regards
Its legal identity. It has to be able to bank and hold money and other issues
that are required to exist. This is why a corporation has the status of and
Individual. Business, by the way, are give no rights in the constitution. It has
Not individual rights as a political entity. Its interests as a political entity are
subservient to the individual rights. This law makes it just the opposite. In an age when money can dedicate election results money put into political
campaigns needs to be restricted not expanded. This is exactly the wrong way to go. Campaign reform should eliminate the money influence. The
Only way to do this is to have limited and equal campaign funds for all
Candidates. I propose that all candidates can only receive x-amount of
Dollars if they don’t reach that dollar amount the government will supply
The difference. Money is prostituting our political process and must be eliminated. As a side comment: where are the complaints of judicial activism now ? I hate hypocrites
How long now before the
How long now before the Chinese Communist Party is choosing the candidates for the Republican and Democratic parties.
Might just be
a temporary iimprovement. It would take the Chinese Communists decades to develop the level of greed and avarice to be found throughout congress today.
Tea Partiers
It will be interesting to see how the Tea Party people and their heroes in the media react to this ruling, because if they aren't up and screaming out against this further intrusion by Wall Street and Big Money in opposition to the common man, then we know exactly where their real loyalies lie...............
This is it
I've often asked myself over the past 10 years, 'how could it get any worse?'
Well, now I know...I had to ask!
"A Republic, if you can keep
"A Republic, if you can keep it"
I, for one, salute our new corporate overlords. sigh
I, for one, salute our new corporate overlords. sigh
My salute of choice in this case would be a Full Monty Moon!
Stop eating corporate food! Eat only grass-fed, free-ranged meat. Stop buying foreign products. Install PV solar and force the utilities to pay you. Support local organic grass (the kind that cows eat) farmers.
America has just died. OMG I
America has just died.
OMG I am just not believing what I am hearing.
Further proof that my
Further proof that my decision to get a vasectomy was one of the most prudent decisions of my life.
Supremes
Why don't they just kill us and be done with it... no... wait... they haven't exploited us enough yet.
We Americans are goddamn fools. We deserve just what we get.
We do NOT deserve this!
I feel your pain.
We have been fools.
But we do NOT deserve this!
We are WORTHY of real justice!
We CAN insist on our rights!
We can put corporations in their place.
They need us more than we need them.
We can prove these things in our everyday lives.
We choose not to loose.
lower our flag to half
lower our flag to half mass,for all working people in america are dead meat to all migthy money, hail to our new world order.'''''''
fascists? really? i think
fascists? really? i think you all are making this out to be a little more of a disaster than it really is. you act as though money indefinitely buys elections, which history has proven is not true. quit overreacting.
No, really. This IS the
No, really. This IS the definition of fascism. Check out Italy's history, old and current, to see how it's done.
America just died today. Maybe we need a new revolution...
time to impeach
Time to impeach Roberts, Alito and Scalia. Next to be overturned will be women's rights. All the handwringing : "there's nothing we can do about this because of the way the decision was written" is evidence that as a nation we're already cowed by authority. This got a foothold when W was president. Ah, this is the same court that gave us Pres Bush II. Do we notice a pattern here?
Wow-
Wow - so Stevens hates that little First Amendment thingy- go figure, a leftist who hates free speech - what a surprise.
So before now it was ok for far left unions (redundant) to select candidates but not businessmen - the weeping and wailing is all because the playing field is now level.
the same rules applied to
The same rules are applied to unions as are applied to corporations. How many times does that have to be repeated before it sinks in. Literacy is not the problem, so what impedes comprehension? Could it be blind ideology?
And corporations donations so far exceed union donations as to be laughable. But, if you are only bothered by union donations, perhaps some serious introspection would remove the scales from your eyes. Anyone who is offended by too much money in the political system should be outraged. Unless of course your a Fat Cat, wannabe Fat Cat, or Fat Cat stooge. In which case, you must have loved the corporate bail-outs and their non-taxable multimillion dollar bonuses, and so have no right to complain about it, or any other misdeeds. If you want no regulation and no oversight, you forfeit the right to complain.
After all, government regulation and oversight is evil Big-Bad-Government. So don't complain if you or a loved one is sickened, injured, or killed by something that proper oversight would have prevented. And absolutely, positively - do not sue. "Buyer Beware" too bad, so sad.
Government to the highest bidder is perfectly fine - talk about credulousness. But, as for those of us who what a government "for the people," forgive us if we fight to get the money out.
sigh
How many more decades will it take to escape the insidious influence of Geo. Bush, Jr.?
To assume that a corporation is human enough to require the conference of the civic advantage of free speech but not being able to assume some of the roles of civic responsibilities (e.g., voting or serving in the military) is alien definition. The corporation (or the Union) is human enough to be able to wield influence in the guise of expenditures of fantastic amounts of legal tender as an expression of “free” speech. This drowns out that miniscule amount of the capability of mere mortal non-corporate entities to influence things, reducing their impact to that of child-like contributions. Why bother?
If we assert, in all honesty and with a straight face, that there is an equivalence of cash as a metric of speech, then isn't it obvious that some of our recognized performers on the stage of public discourse have oodles more speech than many other equally deserving and more recognizable members of the human community? Is that a hallmark of a democratic society? Does oligarchy mean anything to anybody?
There seems to be a limited amount of legislative redress available to blunt the force of the ruling of the Supreme Court which would remain unchallenged given the precedent of equating a corporation to a human being . The congress may attempt such remedies but given the performance of the current bodies, well ... good luck.
Corporations perform significant value in our culture. The organization of collective efforts, economies of scale contributions and the protection of assets of the actual individual human beings making up the mind and spirit of these legal constructs are among some of the strengths of the corporate reality. But it doesn't seem that it is equitable to have it both ways; many advantages of human membership but few of the pesky attachments facing the lives and futures of the flesh and blood human contingent of the "human race".
The gist of the problem of the insidious influence of money in the political realm is the incredible hypothesis that things are decidedly influenced the more money that is applied to the machinery of communication. We are basically black boxes that fed sufficient amounts of legal tender, tend to respond in predictable fashions. The gist of the problem is me; "We have met the enemy and it is us". I give us no ground to contradictory reasoning as the amounts of money already previously spent keeps getting spent because of the predictable results in many circumstances. It doesn't always work but works always enough.
What we may need to survive this onslought may be mandatory instruction in critical thinking throughout grades 1 - 12; a prerequisite to graduation and getting a driver's license. We might just have to save ourselves. Or divide the culture into competing concentrations of organized communities of agreement in order to compete with corporate treasuries. Or awaiting the decline of the well-being of the current crop of legal genius' so other more fair-minded individuals may ascend to the courts to reverse this recent reversal.
sigh.
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