But it's what conservatives want: Wal-Mart and Goldman Sachs and GE need to be able to buy campaigns to preserve America's free speech in 2010 and beyond.The morning concludes with Seth Waxman doing a sort of Shakespeare in the Park reading of "the sober-minded Elihu Root," who was "moved to stand up in 1894 and urge the people" to address "a constantly growing evil which has done more to shake the confidence of plain people of small means of this country in our political institutions than any practice which has ever obtained since the founding of our government." Which is more or less lost on the majority of the court because 1894 was soooo a century ago, and as Scalia points out, today's corporations are awesome and not the "railroad barons and the rapacious trusts of the Elihu Root era."
Alito scolds Waxman because "all this talk about 100 years and 50 years sounds like the sort of sound bites that you hear on TV." (It's funny to hear TV sound bites denigrated as junk political speech in a case about the urgent political importance of TV sound bites.) But Alito's big point here is that the court isn't considering overruling 100-year-old cases—only McConnell and Austin.
Olson very effectively uses his five minutes of rebuttal time to taunt Kagan for the government's changed positions. And while it looks as though there are five votes to fundamentally alter the way American elections will work, we've been through enough renditions of the Roberts Court slapping litigants around at oral argument then loving on them in decisions to make such predictions unwise. Of course, as Waxman suggests in his closing, it does take a somewhat "self-starting" institution to be deciding a case about campaign finance laws in which no litigant has directly raised the issues and no factual record even exists.
What you and I think doesn't matter.
i hate the other 95% of Slate but i have always enjoyed reading Dahlia Lithwick.
ReplyDeleteand of course we the citizens of america are f***ed - we have been for quite some time but after the 5 supremoes get done with this current crapola it will be quite open and transparent.
the original decision allowing corporations to be treated as a person or some such horseshit back in the 1890's let the hounds of hell loose and we have been f***ed ever since.
the part that puzzles me is don't human beings work at these corporations ???
If You Think Corporations Run The Government Now…
ReplyDeletehttp://www.openleft.com/diary/15017/if-you-think-corporations-ran-the-government-now
Then just wait and see what happens after, as expected, the Supreme Court allows corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money on behalf of their favored candidates.
To a certain extent, it is hard to even conceptualize why this matters. To paraphrase Dick Durbin, powerful moneyed interests already run the government.
Through vast lobbying, astroturf, media and legal efforts that dwarf anything progressives have created, powerful moneyed interests in this country have been able largely to control legislation even after 30-year peak in Democratic electoral success. A ruling like this will simply be the icing on the cake.