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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThe John Roberts Project
If you think that the Supreme Courts decision in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission was bad, just wait: worse may be on the way.
The issue before the Court was fairly narrow, even a little obscure. Congress bars individuals from contributing more than fifty-two hundred dollars to any candidate for federal office in any election cycle. It also bars individuals from contributing more than a hundred and twenty-three thousand dollars, in total, to multiple federal candidates in a cycle. In the McCutcheon case, by a vote of five to four, the Court struck down the overall hundred-and-twenty-three-thousand-dollar limit. But this ruling will affect relatively few campaign contributors. In the most recent cycle, fewer than six hundred donors maxed out to candidates.
So why is the case important? Because the language of Chief Justice John Robertss opinion suggests that the Court remains committed to the project announced most prominently in the Citizens United case, four years ago: the deregulation of American political campaigns.
The court, and Roberts in particular, has been very clear that regulation of campaign contributions is allowed under a single rationale. As he wrote in McCutcheon, It is not an acceptable governmental objective to level the playing field, or to level electoral opportunities, or to equalize the financial resources of candidates. Rather, Roberts wrote, Congress may target only a specific type of corruptionquid pro quo corruption.
more
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2014/04/the-john-roberts-project-beyond-mccutcheon.html
Sarah Ibarruri
(21,043 posts)And here's the head of Citizens United, in case anyone is interested. A typical Repuke pig:
http://www.exposethebastards.com/who_is_david_bossie
Gothmog
(145,635 posts)We can add the opinion in the McCutcheon case to a list of horrible opinions by Roberts. Justice Roberts' opinion on Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act was a really horrible opinion which is based on the same flawed legal concept used to justify the Dred Scott decision. http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/12pdf/12-96_6k47.pdf It is hard to read and is based on a concept of equal sovereignty among the states. I found the concept of equal sovereignty among the states to be a new concept that Roberts was using solely to gut the Voting Rights Act (Roberts has hated the Voting Rights Act since he was lawyer in the Reagan justice department). It seems that the "equal sovereignty concept is an old doctrine that was used to justify the Dred Scott opinion http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/demeaning-insult-chief-justice-john-roberts-voting-rights-act-decision
One of the enduring mysteries of Chief Justice John Robertss opinion striking down part of the Voting Rights Act is which part of the Constitution the landmark civil rights law actually violated.
Roberts argued that the Voting Rights Act violated the tradition of equal sovereignty of the states. That concept is far more dubious than it might seem at first glance, according to a legal paper published by two longtime voting rights experts.
The equal sovereignty principle is not in the Constitution, said James Blacksher, an Alabama attorney with a long career in Voting Rights. It is, as the Chief Justice says, a historical tradition. Go straight past the penumbras, hang a right at the emanations.
Blackshers paper, co-authored with Harvard law professor Lani Guinier, argues that Robertss opinion in the Voting Rights Act case is a descendant of what is widely regarded as the worst Supreme Court decision in American history: The 1857 Dred Scott case, in which the high court held that blacks, slave or free, could never be citizens of the United States. That case is the origin story of the equal sovereignty principle, the authors argue, because the opinion by Chief Justice Roger Taney held that it would violate the sovereignty of the slave states to recognize blacks as American citizens. By invoking that principle, the authors write in Free at Last: Rejecting Equal Sovereignty and Restoring the Constitutional Right to Vote, Roberts was reviving the oldest and most demeaning official insult to African-Americans in American constitutional history.
Equal sovereignty was the basis of the longstanding argument, going all the way back to the founding of the United States, between the slave states and the free states. The slave states claimed that they were equally sovereign with the other states to decide whether to have slavery or not to have slavery, Blacksher said. The equal sovereignty doctrine that Chief Justice Roberts relied on last year is rooted in the jurisprudence of slavery....
Prior to last years ruling, Akhil Reed Amar, a Yale law professor, wrote a Harvard Law Review article arguing that the Voting Rights Act was clearly constitutional. Amar wrote that an extravagant anti-congressional theory of state equality drove the Dred Scott decision, and that the court should take care to avoid the decisions biggest mistakes.
The Dred Scott opinion was bad law back when decided and I am not surprised that Roberts is now using this same concept to gut the Voting Rights Act.
The Shelby County is one of the most partisan opinions in the history of the SCOTUS and is on a par with Bush v. Gore and Citizens United. We need to point out to the conservatives that Roberts is nothing but a racist who has to rely on the legal principle behind the Dred Scott decision to justify the gutting of the Voting Rights Act.
I personally think that the Shelby County opinion is actually worse than the McCutheon opinion.
librechik
(30,677 posts)The chair was his reward for helping the election steal in Florida. It's all part of the plan. If the coup worked, he gets on the bench. And it did. And now the real damage begins.
Gothmog
(145,635 posts)Since 1981, Justice Roberts has been on a mission to gut or limit the Voting Rights Act. Chief Justice Roberts' Long War Against the Voting Rights Act,
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/02/john-roberts-long-war-against-voting-rights-act
When he was in his late 20s, John Roberts was a foot soldier in the Reagan administration's crusade against the Voting Rights Act. Now, as chief justice of the Supreme Court, he will help determine whether a key part of the law survives a constitutional challenge.
Memos that Roberts wrote as a lawyer in President Reagan's Justice Department during the 1980s show that he was deeply involved in efforts to curtail the effectiveness of the Voting Rights Act, the hard-won landmark 1965 law that is intended to ensure all Americans can vote. Roberts' anti-VRA efforts during the 1980s ultimately failed. But on Wednesday, when the Supreme Court hears oral arguments in Shelby County v. Holder, he'll get another chance to gut the law. Roberts' history suggests a crucial part of the VRA may not survive the rematch.