Republicans and Supreme Court are Carrying U.S. to Hell in a Handbasket.
Remember when a simple majority was enough to get a law made?
Remember when the money you spent at Domino’s couldn’t be used to defeat a lawmaker or an issue?
Gone.
The Super-majority is now needed in congress to get a law passed. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky now decides which laws will get passed because he is in control of the 41 Republican Senators. One man, one vote. One man, 41 votes.
So the legislative branch of government is paralyzed.
Does a corporation have to defeat every politician they dislike?
Nope. Only a couple. The rest will get the message: What’s good for GM is good for Congressional campaign funds.
The Supreme Court, in a pure activist move, reached out and grabbed a First Amendment case because the conservative judges wanted to give more power to the very very rich and powerful corporations.
Corporations now have the same rights as the rest of us when it comes to influencing Congress. What about unions you ask? Big difference. Unions get to elect their leaders, so presumably the leaders speak for the majority of the people who are providing the money to influence elections and referendums.
The framers of the Constitution could not have foreseen how big corporations could become.
“Under the majority’s view, I suppose it may be a First Amendment problem that corporations are not permitted to vote, given that voting is, among other things, a form of speech.”
– Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens in the dissent on the opinion giving corporations the same freedoms as people.
Tom Monaghan, the founder of Domino’s, is a hard-line activist Catholic. He doesn’t run Domino’s anymore, but if he did there is no reason to believe that he would not have spent a fortune to advance his causes. Money that wasn’t his, it’s shareholder money.
I am a strong believer in the First Amendment.
But the First Amendment protects a person’s rights.
Nineteen years ago a precedent was set on a case because the court said
“the corrosive and distorting effects of immense aggregations of wealth that are accumulated with the help of the corporate form and that have little or no correlation to the public’s suport for the corporation’s political ideas.”
So there you have it, 19 years ago corporations were corrosive and distorting. Today they are just another person.
- Where does this leave the those of us that are trying to stop big coal from removing the tops of mountains in Eastern Kentucky?
- Where does this leave those of us that think cigarettes should be more heavily regulated because they are the only product that will kill you when used in the manner prescribed?
- Where does this leave those of us who think health care reform needs to happen sooner rather than later?
- Where does this leave those who work for a company that doesn’t have the same political or societal beliefs?
Up shit crick.
A fine sight on this you possess, even though I do not believe everything that was explained I can see your case.
I’m not saying that a corporation should be construed as a person. I’m just saying that the ban against Congressional abridgement of free speech covers all expression, not only statements uttered or published by individuals.
But free speech goes both ways. So it’s my right to say that Domino’s pizza sucks — regardless of its founder’s politico-religious views. Let’s get Indian take-out instead.
.-= Larry Wallberg´s last blog pith“No Law” Means No Law =-.
You would then favor the right for a corporation to be able to vote? Experts say they are halfway toward getting this right.
You are splitting hairs when you say corporations are NOT excluded from the First Amendment. The Constitution was written by “we the people…” not “we the people and corporations and unions and other special interest groups…”
We can’t know the Supremes motivation? Clearly in this instance, we do know.
Oops. The third paragraph should read … “filed briefs for the appellant …”
.-= Larry Wallberg´s last blog pithSo Does That Mean I’m Always Right? =-.
I agree with you that the immediate aftermath of the decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission will further empower big corporations to interfere with politics, at least in a non-clandestine way. (They never stopped trying to influence elections in a covert manner.)
However, I disagree strongly that the decision was a bad one. The First Amendment says: “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech or of the press …” Notice that this says nothing about “a person“; it’s a blanket ban on Congress censoring or restricting any kind of speech.
Civil libertarians on both the left and the right filed briefs for the appellee in this case. Along with all the usual “bad guys,” supporters of Citizens United included the ACLU, the California First Amendment Coalition, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the Center for Competitive Politics, and the AFL-CIO.
We can’t know the motivations of the Supreme Court Justices. They may well have wanted to favor big businesses over “everyday Americans” — whoever those mythical creatures may be. But I think the Court’s decision was dead-on correct.
.-= Larry Wallberg´s last blog pithSo Does That Mean I’m Always Right? =-.