Jason Linkins, HuffPo: "We are all royally, hopelessly fucked for the rest of recorded time"

[highplainsdem]

You KNEW this had to be about the SCOTUS disaster, right?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/21/the-supreme-courts-citize_n_432127.html

If you're looking for a concise way of capturing today's Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, how about: "We are all royally, hopelessly fucked for the rest of recorded time"? It's coarse, I know, but it really does the trick.

As you may have heard, in a 5-4 decision, the SCOTUS essentially went at the teeth of McCain-Feingold reform with hammer and tongs, leaving America in a "David After Dentist" state, wailing, "What's happening? Is this going to be forever?" Except that its not the anesthetic talking -- it's the very real, excruciating pain.

In one swoop, the court did away with nearly everything in federal campaign finance law, allowing corporations free reign to inject as much money as they jolly well please into federal campaigns. The decision completes what Slate's Dahlia Lithwick calls "The Pinocchio Project," in which the Court transforms "a corporation into a real live boy," complete with personhood, free-speech rights and the unfettered opportunity to drown the body politic in a tidal wave of perverse incentives.

-snip-

What, if anything, is preserved from campaign finance reform? Well, corporations still have to disclose the money they spend -- I'm sure that you're only too familiar with the awesome job the media has done penetrating the shadow network of corporate influence, which I would characterize as "the null set." Also, issue ads will continue to require those teensy disclaimers at the bottom of the screen, divulging the entity behind the ad. So, look forward to ads from outfits like "Americans For Freedom and Awesomeness" and crap like that.

-snip-

Let's go back to Lithwick, on the scene as this decision was rendered:


While Stevens is reading the portion of his concurrence about the "cautious view of corporate power" held by the framers, I see Justice Thomas chuckle softly...Stevens hammers, more than once this morning from the bench on the principle that corporations "are not human beings" and "corporations have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires." He insists that "they are not themselves members of 'We the People' by whom and for whom our Constitution was established."

But you can plainly see the weariness in Stevens eyes and hear it in his voice today as he is forced to contend with a legal fiction that has come to life today, a sort of constitutional Frankenstein moment when corporate speech becomes even more compelling than the "voices of the real people" who will be drowned out. Even former Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist once warned that treating corporate spending as the First Amendment equivalent of individual free speech is "to confuse metaphor with reality." Today that metaphor won a very real victory at the Supreme Court. And as a consequence some very real corporations are feeling very, very good.


This decision is nutlog, utterly bonkers. If corporations can't be held to account in electoral politics, we are seriously at an end.

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[tabatha]

1. Welcome to the Foreigner-owned and ruled United States of America.

[KG]

2. and both political parties gleefully rubber-stamped the policies that made it happen.

[tonysam]

3. Not foreign--REPUBLICAN

This was as partisan a decision as Bush v. Gore.

People are forgetting what this decision is REALLY about. The GOP was on the ropes and destined to be marginalized, but now the Roberts court has basically guaranteed Republicans will rule forever.

Corporations=Republican first and foremost.