How Stupid Do You Have to Be to Think that Bribery and Speech Are the Same Thing?

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Sat Jan-23-10 05:11 PM
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How Stupid Do You Have to Be to Think that Bribery and Speech Are the Same Thing?

Well, the illustrious Supreme Court of the United States did it again. Their decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which in effect said that bribery of government officials and candidates for high elective office is a form of constitutionally protected “speech” brings to mind some of the most despicable ideas I’ve ever encountered, including: the Dred Scott decision that said that black people are property rather than people; the Bush v. Gore decision of 2000 which raised the bar for judicial hypocrisy to a new record high; and George Orwell’s futuristic fictional account in which war is peace, slavery is freedom, and ignorance is strength.

Bribery

A common definition of bribery is:

the offering, giving, receiving, or soliciting of something of value for the purpose of influencing the action of an official in the discharge of his or her public or legal duties.

Anyone with a modicum of common sense who is familiar with the political system practiced in the United States of America is aware that the system is rife with bribery, and that that bribery makes a mockery of the pretension that our country is founded upon democracy.

All but the most naïve of the American citizenry know that the wealthy and powerful in our country routinely influence our local and national elections through huge campaign contributions. And they also know that they are generally well rewarded for their “contributions”. And they also know that bribery is presumably against the law in our country. Yet, on the rare occasion that our politicians are actually accused of bribery, our news media makes a great big deal over it, as if bribery is actually a rare event in American politics.

The end result is that a great many of our politicians do everything they can to make their wealthiest constituents happy with them, at the expense of everyone else. They do that with the knowledge that the voters they lose in doing so will be more than compensated for by the disinformation that will be paid for by their wealthiest constituents. I discuss this situation in more detail here, here, and here.

There are a few dots to connect here, but any reasonable assessment of American politics tells us that bribery is routinely used to buy and sell elections in our country. So routine is it that it is actually built into our system and legalized. But that fact is never overtly spoken of. To do so would imply that our system of government is as much or more an aristocracy than it is a democracy.

Bill Moyers, in his book “Moyers on Democracy”, shows that he understands the difference between bribery and speech:

We have lost the ability to call the most basic transaction by its right name. If a baseball player stepping up to home plate were to lean over and hand the umpire a wad of bills before he called the pitch, we’d call that a bribe. But when a real estate developer buys his way into the White House and gets a favorable government ruling that wouldn’t be available to you or me, what do we call that? A “campaign contribution”.

Let’s call it what it is: a bribe.

Speech

For those who don’t understand the difference between bribery and speech, consider the First Amendment to our Constitution. In its entirety, it reads:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Granted, the First Amendment does not define “speech”. Perhaps our Founding Fathers felt no need to define such a basic word. Perhaps it never occurred to them that some future corrupt judicial officials might have the audacity to use the First Amendment’s protection of speech to include protection of the right to bribe public officials.

But if one considers the context of the whole First Amendment, one should note a common thread between the various rights that it protects: freedom of religion; freedom of speech; freedom of the press; freedom of peaceable assembly; and freedom to petition the government. What all these freedoms have in common is the freedom to express one’s opinion.

Bribery, as one can see from the definition quoted above, involves far more than the expression of an opinion. It involves the attempt to influence government officials to enact laws favorable to the briber – at the expense of most of the nation’s other citizens. If bribery is equated with “speech” simply because it involves an expression of opinion, then every act conceivable to the human mind also involves an expression of opinion. Rape involves an expression of opinion. Murder involves an expression of opinion – the opinion that one doesn’t want the murder victim to live. Should these things be protected by our First Amendment?

Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission

Oh, what a noble sounding organization – “Citizens United”! And what a noble sounding goal – the protection of our First Amendment rights to free speech! The nobility of this goal drips from the hypocritical rationalizations of our Supreme Scumbuckets:

This case cannot be resolved on a narrower ground without chilling political speech, speech that is central to the First Amendment’s meaning and purpose.

Oh, gee! They are so concerned with protecting our First Amendment. They even use a phrase that is normally used by liberals: “chilling political speech”. So, if they’re so concerned about protecting our First Amendment, where were they when the Bush administration limited our right of free speech to its “First Amendment Zones” whenever the Bush administration wanted to hide from public view the opinions of those who disagreed with them? Such actions, and many others, constituted a direct attack on our First Amendment rights to free speech, and yet nothing was ever done about it.

And consider this part of the Scumbuckets’ opinion:

This Court now concludes that independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption. That speakers may have influence over or access to elected officials does not mean that those officials are corrupt. And the appearance of influence or access will not cause the electorate to lose faith in this democracy.

So that we don’t miss the point, they refer to those who lobby and give millions of dollars to public officials as “speakers”. And they claim furthermore that these “expenditures” “do not give rise to corruption” or even the appearance of corruption. What world do these creeps live in?!! How stupid do they think the American people are?

Analogy with Bush v. Gore

The parallel between this decision and the Bush v. Gore decision, in which George W. Bush won election to the presidency of the United States by a vote of 5-4, is no coincidence. Three of the justices are the same idiots – Scalia, Thomas and Kennedy. The other two who contributed to this destruction of our democracy were appointed to the Supreme Court by the man who was the beneficiary of Bush v. Gore.

I discussed this abomination in the first article I ever wrote for the Democratic Underground, before I was even a member (I wrote it under my son’s name because as a federal worker I was afraid at the time of breaking federal rules.) As I said above, Bush v. Gore set a new record for high level judicial hypocrisy. The core of the decision was the equal protection clause of our 14th Amendment to our Constitution:

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

The purpose of this clause in our 14th Amendment was to give all our citizens equal protection under the laws of our country. Enacted in 1868, just three years after the conclusion of our Civil War, it was especially created in response to the need to ensure the protection of our former slaves.

Just as in their decision to legalize bribery by equating it with speech, in Bush v. Gore they single-handedly elevated an incompetent and corrupt man to the presidency of the United States under the guise of protecting our right to equal protection under the law.

The premise under which that was accomplished was that that the hand counting of paper ballots was unfair because different jurisdictions used different standards. In coming to that conclusion, the 5 “justices” totally ignored the fact that the election results as they currently stood were based on election machines that were disproportionately poorly constructed – and therefore often failed to register the voters’ intent – in areas of the state of Florida that contained disproportionate numbers of minorities and the poor. They also totally ignored the fact that jurisdictions throughout the United States, and within almost every state used widely differing methods for counting votes. By the standards they claimed to espouse, the electoral votes of almost every state in the country should have been ruled invalid. Thus was their excuse for halting the counting of votes and “electing” the worst president in the history of our country.

Vincent Bugliosi, in an article titled “None Dare Call it Treason”, summed up the absurdity of perhaps the most corrupt Supreme Court decision in our history:

And if the Court's five-member majority was concerned not about Bush but the voters themselves, as they fervently claimed to be, then under what conceivable theory would they, in effect, tell these voters, "We're so concerned that some of you under-voters may lose your vote under the different Florida county standards that we're going to solve the problem by making sure that none of you under-voters have your votes counted"?

In conclusion

The legality of currying favor with public officials through bribery has now been enshrined by the highest court in our land, on the proposition that bribery is synonymous with “speech”. But the absurdity of that contention should be obvious to anyone with some primary school education. The danger to our democracy should be obvious. If one billionaire or powerful corporation has one thousand times as much opportunity to “speak” through their money than several thousand other people added together, the “speech” of that one billionaire will drown out the speech of most other people, thereby interfering with their right to speech and making a mockery of our pretensions to democracy. As long as bribery is equated with "speech", democracy has no hope.