Americans have long recognized that the First Amendment guarantee of political free speech applies to citizens and their volunteer associations -- but not to corporations which could use their vast financial resources to steer elections to political cronies and shape banking, regulatory and environmental laws, among many possibilities, to do their bidding. The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld Congress' 1947 law that conclusively banned political spending by corporations in elections for candidates, and that explicitly acknowledged the principle behind similar state laws dating back to the late 1800s.
Yet Thursday, the present, arch-conservative Supreme Court, in a bitterly contested 5-4 ruling, trampled these long observed civic electoral safeguards, common sense and well-established court precedents to toss out the 1947 law and free corporations to run roughshod in American political elections as they please.
In so doing, the so-called conservative bloc made tragic mistake in upending this nation's political processes. It also made a mockery of the justices' professed principles against activist legislation of laws from the bench. And it shredded their transparent pretense at judicial modesty.
No longer can Justices John G. Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito, Anthony Kennedy and Clarence Thomas pretend that their principle duty, as Chief Justice Roberts fatuously promised in his confirmation hearings, was just to "call balls and strikes and not to pitch or bat" on the issues before them.
Indeed, as they have already amply shown, they are prepared not just to squash citizens' rights to fair treatment, but also to trample the traditional judicial principle of stare decisis -- the doctrine of respect for deeply entrenched legal precedents that have remained fixed and long upheld by prior courts to mark the nation's legal boundaries. And they are prepared to go well out of their way to trash such principles.
This case indisputably reflects that. It arises from a case that easily could have been determined on narrow grounds. Instead, the conservative bloc worked overtime and beyond customary procedures to grab this case from the legal hinterlands, to adjust their vacation schedules and demand a re-hearing of it, and to blatantly advertise that they intended to inflate a minor squabble into grounds on which they would rush to toss out legal precedents and rewrite election law.
Their breathtaking abuse arose from a lawsuit by Citizens United, which claimed it was wrongly denied the use of its 90-minute documentary, "Hillary: The Movie," a caustic political film designed to thwart Mrs. Clinton's run for the presidency in the 2008 presidential primaries. The plaintiff lost its initial suit against the Federal Election Commission in a lower federal court. Its ruling held that the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 -- more commonly known as the McCain-Feingold law -- prohibited such "electioneering communications" financed by corporations in the 30 days before a presidential primary and the 60 days before a general election.
When the case got to the Supreme Court in March last year, it seemed certain to be decided on narrow grounds -- whether a 90-minute documentary qualified as an illegal advertisement, or whether the law applied to video-on-demand plans for the film.
Instead, the court chose in June not to issue a ruling in the case, but to reset its calendar, and to demand and rush a September rehearing on the more momentous issue of overturning First Amendment boundaries for political free speech for corporations that had been fixed by a string of prior court rulings.
There was no independent need or request for such a broad, rushed revision of core First Amendment protections. Rather, the ruling Thursday was a deliberate, calculated strategy by the court to leap to loose the vast purse-strings of corporate power and open the floodgates on corporate money in elections for candidates.
Until this ruling, individuals in corporations could establish Political Action Committees and pour funds into a cause or candidate that reflected a corporation's agenda. But such PAC funds were not allowed to come from corporate funds per se, and were limited to $2,000 per individual per election cycle.
Now, corporate treasuries will be open full blast. In the 2008 election cycle, Fortune 100 companies had total revenues of $13.1 trillion and $605 billion in profits. The potential for such companies to swamp the seemingly meager $1.5 billion spent the political parties in that period, or the $1.2 billion spent by PACS, is frightening.
Sen. John McCain said in September following the court's rehearing that he was afraid of the "extreme naiveté" of the judges about the damage such vast special-interest money could do in elections. He might now say, with deep fear for our republic, "we ain't seen nothin' yet."