Alito Rising: What to Expect From the Supreme Court’s New Alpha Conservative

[marmar]

from truthdig:


Alito Rising: What to Expect From the Supreme Court’s New Alpha Conservative

Posted on Nov 27, 2012
By Bill Blum


“The Supreme Court follows the election returns,” or so opined satirist Finley Peter Dunne in 1901 in language purged of its original Irish brogue (see Chapter 3 of Dunne’s Mr. Dooley book). Back then, the court was headed by Melville Weston Fuller, its eighth chief justice, under whose enlightened stewardship it handed down Plessy v. Ferguson, the infamous decision that upheld the constitutionality of state laws requiring people of different races to use “separate but equal” public facilities.

What Dunne meant, of course, was that the court was a partisan political institution, often less dedicated to following constitutional values than currying favor with the nation’s elites, and that it was also capable of responding to shifts in public opinion. So it was at the turn of the last century and so it is today.

But exactly how the court reads and reacts to elections is by no means a given. Thus we must ask whether the court’s current ultraconservative Republican majority will interpret Barack Obama’s re-election as a call for reflection and moderation or as a signal to lurch even harder to the right. At least one member of the Republican majority—Justice Samuel Alito—has answered that he sees no reason to do anything but double down on past practices.

Speaking in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 15 at a Federalist Society convention dinner, Alito delighted an estimated throng of 1,500 with a self-righteous defense of the court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, which overturned decades of federal campaign finance law, ushered in a new era of corporate personhood and unleashed an orgy of political spending through super PACs and thinly regulated nonprofit organizations. Rebutting criticisms of the decision leveled by many liberals, lawyers and the president, Alito praised Citizens United as a common-sense ruling that merely extended the same First Amendment rights to corporations that had been long accorded to individuals, newspapers and media companies. “Surely the idea that the First Amendment protects only certain privileged voices,” he declared, “should be disturbing to anybody who believes in free speech.” .................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/alito_what_to_expect_from_the_supreme_court_new_alpha_conservative_20121127/

[CincyDem]

1. Why limit personhood of corporations to free speech...what about jail time ?

IIRC, BP has recently been charged with some level of manslaughter charges relative to the Gulf Spill.

OK - let's have a trial. If found guilty, let's incarcerate them. What would that look like? Well, just like jail time for a person takes away their rights to interact freely with society and conduct business as usual, maybe this looks like shutting them down in the US for some period of time. Completely. None of this spend the day working and spend the night in jail - that's why you get for jaywalking, not murder.

While it sounds crazy, try this:

"Surely the idea that getting away with murder", he declared, "should be disturbing to anybody who believes in crime prevention".

If you're going to believe corporations are people when it comes to speech (which I don't but let's move on), then logic dictates that they should be treated like people when it comes to murder.

Or - maybe this is just another example of "privatize the benefits and socialize the negatives" of being a person.

[jsr]

2. A rising star in The Best Little Whorehouse in Washington