Admittedly, anything less would be a surprise, but the testicular fortitude of this particular brand of mendacity should not overlooked. Just read the beginning of this Wall Street Journal article by James Taranto:
In his State of the Union Address in January, President Obama thundered: "Last week the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests--including foreign corporations--to spend without limit in our elections."
The president was either ignorant or lying, for the decision he denounced, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, in fact left in place a complete ban on corporate contributions to political campaigns. What the court did hold is that the First Amendment protects political speech that is independent of campaigns, even when the speakers are big bad scary corporations. (Or labor unions, but pointing that out did not suit Obama's demagogic purposes.)
So, how's it working out? Target Corp. donated $150,000 to a group called MN Forward, which is running TV ads supporting Tom Emmer for Minnesota's Republican gubernatorial nomination. The Associated Press reports that Target CEO Gregg Steinhafel said the contribution--which, pre-Citizens United, would have been prohibited by state campaign-censorship laws--"was designed to support Emmer's stance on economic issues..."
Now read it again. Do you see the problem here? Taranto is either stupid, or he's lying and he thinks his readers are. He says Obama is lying for claiming that Citizens United will allow unlimited corporate spending in elections because the contributions have to be "independent of campaigns"--and then goes right on to say that Target made a contribution--that in the days before Citizens United would have been illegal--to an "independent organization" specifically to support a particular candidate.
There are no words for this treachery. It's brazen, baldfaced lying. Shameless, mendacious hypocrisy. And I wasn't even going to get into the absurd point that Taranto was trying to make, but since we're here, let's do it. To provide a little bit of context, Target Corporation, which has been renowned for its support of LGBT rights and diversity in the workplace, has come under fire from its courted community recently for doing something stupid: donating $150,000 to a group called MN Forward, which was using the unlimited corporate money to support a right-wing candidate for Minnesota Governor. The problem? Let's have Taranto continue:
But Emmer is "an outspoken conservative opposed to same-sex marriage and other gay-rights initiatives that have come before Minnesota's Legislature," and Targets's support for the effort raised hackles of gay groups like OutFront Minnesota, which last month issued an "open letter"...
Indeed, Target's contribution has become a big issue in areas heavily influenced by the LGBT community. But Taranto seeks to make a larger point: the fact that pressure from activist groups was successful in causing Target to think twice is, in Taranto's mind, evidence of the acceptability of unlimited corporate influence:
This episode illustrates why liberal fear of business corporations is nothing more than irrational prejudice. A company's purpose is to make a profit, not to advance a principle or to stir up controversy. Companies are accountable in the marketplace in a way that politicians and interest groups are not.
Target's executives believed, probably rightly, that Emmer's economic policies would serve Target's interests better than his opponents'. It didn't occur to them that his social policies had the potential to upset customers and hurt the bottom line. Merely by taking offense, scrappy little OutFront Minnesota was able to humiliate the leaders of a company with a market capitalization of $38 billion. Who has the real economic power here?
The first problem with hacks like Taranto is that they are exclusively focused on the marketplace and unable to see beyond it. Thus, Taranto and his ilk see no problem with political donations being an exclusively economic investment designed to generate a maximum rate of return from a government official made more pliant--or more elected--by the contribution made. But while the rare mega-corporation with a conscience, such as Target, may be swayed by the lobbying of a group far less economically influential than the corporation itself, the vast majority of corporate "speech"--that is to say, political investment--will not be. No amount of interest group pressure, for instance, could possibly convince the far-right Koch Industries not to contribute a million dollars to the Republican Governors Association.
Corporate contributions are not speech. They are often, instead, calculated investments made by a legal fiction with no other legal motive besides profit--something which Justice Stevens explained all too well in his dissent:
It might also be added that corporations have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires. Corporations help structure and facilitate the activities of human beings, to be sure, and their “personhood” often serves as a useful legal fiction. But they are not themselves members of “We the People” by whom and for whom our Constitution was established.
These basic points help explain why corporate electioneering is not only more likely to impair compelling governmental interests, but also why restrictions on that electioneering are less likely to encroach upon First Amendment freedoms.
Taranto got one thing right: a corporation that chose to make itself vulnerable to the pangs of conscience was successfully lobbied by an attack at its weakest point. But it is specious at best to take that one specific case and extrapolate it into an opinion that it's entirely harmless to open up our government to the unlimited sway of deep-pocketed legal fictions created entirely to generate profit.