As Mike McCabe at the Big Money Blog recently wrote, we've ultimately got that bearded guy to the right, Bancroft Davis, to thank for Thursday's 5-4 Supreme Court decision giving our plutocrats an even tighter grip over the system they clutch in their greedy little fists.
Bancroft Davis. Former president of a railroad company. As the court reporter for the U.S. Supreme Court, he gave railroad companies a great gift in 1886 when he added a comment to the high court's ruling in a case involving the taxation of railroad properties. And in so doing, this one man gave all corporations a great gift by inventing the pseudolegal doctrine of corporate personhood. Out of thin air.
If the current Supreme Court rules in Citizens United the way many legal experts expect, the handiwork of Bancroft Davis will be affirmed and further cemented in place.
If the Roberts court does this, it will not just be naked judicial activism. It will not simply be the very thing they claim to abhor - legislating from the bench. These "strict constructionists" will be effectively rewriting the Constitution.
Another insane Supreme Court ruling more than a century and a half ago - the evil Dred Scott v. Sandford decision - sought to forever make certain human beings into things. The ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission has now made things into humans.
As one person put it: War is peace, slavery is freedom, corporations are people, money is speech.
With this ruling, the concentrated big media will now be a megaphone for even more of the oligarchs' points of view. As if we weren't already inundated. As if they didn't already have us by the short hairs. As usual, the class war will be blamed not on the guys who started it, but on those who resist.
Joe Conason writes:
The notion of right-wing "populism" is suddenly fashionable following last Tuesday's special election in Massachusetts, when even stiff millionaire suit Mitt Romney could be heard braying about the "royalists" who rule Washington. But all such fakery was exposed today by an event of far greater moment. The Supreme Court's narrow, poorly argued and highly political decision in the Citizens United case -- which removes century-old restrictions on corporate influence-buying -- is the culmination of a Republican dream. From this moment forward, what the original American populists once called "the money power" will be enabled to overwhelm all other forces in American democracy using sheer wealth -- and that includes every "tea party" activist with a dissenting opinion about bank bailouts, executive abuses or crooked contracting.
For establishment Republicans like columnist George Will and Texas Sen. John Cornyn, the court's decision is simply an overdue recognition of the First Amendment right to free speech. (Or what in fact is more aptly described as "paid speech.") But to understand its actual impact, listen to Michael Waldman, executive director of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School, who drew this pithy comparison: Under the old dispensation, which prohibited direct corporate expenditures on elections for nearly a century, Exxon Mobil could spend only what its political action committee raised from executives and employees. In 2008, said Waldman, that was roughly $1 million. Under the new order, the world's biggest oil company can spend as much as its management cares to siphon from its earnings -- which in 2008 amounted to $45 billion. ...
All the ultra-wingers and tea partyers who agitate constantly over U.S. sovereignty should recall again how little loyalty the multinational corporations and banks have displayed toward the United States in their drive for profit. Now, in effect, the Supreme Court's "conservatives" have opened up the American electoral process to a new, potentially limitless source of foreign influence.
Now, as never before, American Democracy™.