Study Documents Corporate Takeover Of Supreme Court

[Donnachaidh]

http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2010/10/26/cac-corporate-court/

In an unfortunate interview with Bloomberg’s Greg Stohr, Justice Stephen Breyer rejected the notion that the Roberts Court is unusually pro-corporate because business interest “have always done pretty well.” Yet a new empirical study by the progressive Constitutional Accountability Center demonstrates that Breyer is mistaken. The study compares the right-wing Chamber of Commerce’s win-rate since Justice Alito joined the Court in January of 2006 to their win-rate twenty-five years ago, and the results are clear and undeniable:

:snip chart:

If anything, this chart understates just how successful the Chamber’s powerful corporate lobby has been in stacking the Court with right-wing justices. The study also examines each individual justices’ votes, and finds that fully five of today’s justices — a majority of the Court’s members — are significantly more pro-corporate than the most pro-corporate member of the Court in the early 1980s (the study did not include the Court’s two newest members because of an insufficiently large data sample):

:snip chart:

Also significant is the increasingly ideological nature of the Court’s votes on the Chamber’s cases:

The Burger Court, during the period of our study, was also dramatically less polarized by corporate cases than it is today. As noted above in our study of the Roberts Court, the average level of support for Chamber positions among the Court’s conservative bloc was 31 points higher than the average support for the Chamber by the Court’s moderate/liberal bloc (74% to 43%). There simply was not a similar ideological division revealed in our study of the Burger Court. For example, the voting records of then-Justice William Rehnquist, widely viewed as the most conservative member of the Burger Court, and Justice William Brennan, probably its most liberal member, differed by only three points – 46% Chamber support compared to 43%, respectively. Even Justice Lewis Powell – who worked for the Chamber before joining the Court, writing a now famous memorandum urging the Chamber to take advantage of a “neglected opportunity in the courts” – only supported the Chamber’s position 53% of the time, the highest percentage of any member of the Court during that period.

MORE at the link ---

[xchrom]

1. Recommend

[catzies]

2. And with Chief Justice Roberts it will become more and more so as years pass. n/t