Drowning elections in corporate cash

By Steve Dzielak
January 21 may join December 7, November 22 and September 11 as dates that changed America forever, and not for the better. On January 21, 2010, the five conservative justices of the United States Supreme Court granted corporations the right to spend unrestricted amounts of money supporting or opposing candidates in federal elections.
“The rule announced today,” wrote Justice John Paul Stevens in dissent, “that Congress must treat corporations exactly like speakers in the political realm, represents a radical change in the law. The court’s decision is at war with the views of generations of Americans.”
Justice Stevens added that “if taken seriously, our colleagues’ assumption that the identity of a speaker has no relevance to the government’s ability to regulate political speech would lead to some remarkable conclusions. Such an assumption would have accorded the propaganda broadcasts to our troops by ‘Tokyo Rose’ during World War II the same protection as speech by Allied commanders. More pertinently, it would appear to afford the same protection to multinational corporations controlled by foreigners as to individual Americans.”
Republicans will benefit, of course. Corporations have vastly more money than unions, and corporations by and large prefer to support the G.O.P.
Corporations will now be able either to contribute millions to the campaign funds of preferred candidates, or to spend millions on media advertising to drown the campaigns of disfavored candidates – or both.
The decision will also provide the rationale for overturning state and local electoral regulations based on federal law. At a time when U.S. politics are increasingly chaotic, it will further undermine the influence of the two major parties.
Corporate interests have a huge stake in the outcome of judicial elections, because most personal-injury lawsuits and other civil cases are handled at the state level. The notion of electing judges is tawdry and awful; Justice Sandra Day O’Connor has devoted her energies in retirement to urging states to move to appointive systems. The court’s decision now frees corporations to dump untold amounts of money into judicial races, making a bad system worse.
Conservatives have long harangued against “judicial activism” – the practice of unelected judges imposing their own policy judgments to overrule the will of representatives elected by the people. But it is hard to imagine a more activist decision than this one. Congress passed the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform and President George W. Bush signed it in the knowledge that the Supreme Court had repeatedly endorsed restrictions on corporate political activity.
But Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion blithely overturned Supreme Court precedent and rejected the work of the elected branches – all in service to the bizarre legal theories that (1) corporations have the same rights as human beings, and (2) spending money is the same thing as speaking.
Tara Malloy, an attorney with the Campaign Legal Center in Washington, DC, says corporations will now have more rights than people. Only U.S. citizens may donate or influence campaigns, but now any foreign government, veiled behind a corporate treasury, can dump money into a U.S. election.
A relevant slice of political history: The 1994 GOP takeover of Congress that brought Newt Gingrich to power was funded by a very strange source. Congressional investigators found that in crucial swing states, Democrats had fallen victim to a flood of last-minute attack ads funded by a group called “Coalition for Our Children’s Future.” The $25 million that paid for those ads came, not from concerned parents, but from a corporation called “Triad Inc.” Evidence suggests that “Triad” was the front for the ultra-rightwing billionaire Koch brothers and their private petroleum company, Koch Industries.
Hidden money of this kind, whether domestic or foreign, is the new venom that the Supreme Court has injected into our electoral system with its glaringly activist decision of January 21.

Back to Home Page