Obama Responds to the Supreme Court

In a followup to my previous post, President Obama devoted this week's weekly radio and Internet address to discussing the Supreme Court's ruling in Citizens United v. FEC, vowing that "as long as I am your president, I'll never stop fighting to make sure that the most powerful voice in Washington belongs to you."

Transcript:

One of the reasons I ran for President was because I believed so strongly that the voices of everyday Americans, hardworking folks doing everything they can to stay afloat, just weren’t being heard over the powerful voices of the special interests in Washington. And the result was a national agenda too often skewed in favor of those with the power to tilt the tables.

In my first year in office, we pushed back on that power by implementing historic reforms to get rid of the influence of those special interests. On my first day in office, we closed the revolving door between lobbying firms and the government so that no one in my administration would make decisions based on the interests of former or future employers. We barred gifts from federal lobbyists to executive branch officials. We imposed tough restrictions to prevent funds for our recovery from lining the pockets of the well-connected, instead of creating jobs for Americans. And for the first time in history, we have publicly disclosed the names of lobbyists and non-lobbyists alike who visit the White House every day, so that you know what’s going on in the White House – the people’s house.

We’ve been making steady progress. But this week, the United States Supreme Court handed a huge victory to the special interests and their lobbyists – and a powerful blow to our efforts to rein in corporate influence. This ruling strikes at our democracy itself. By a 5-4 vote, the Court overturned more than a century of law – including a bipartisan campaign finance law written by Senators John McCain and Russ Feingold that had barred corporations from using their financial clout to directly interfere with elections by running advertisements for or against candidates in the crucial closing weeks.

This ruling opens the floodgates for an unlimited amount of special interest money into our democracy. It gives the special interest lobbyists new leverage to spend millions on advertising to persuade elected officials to vote their way – or to punish those who don’t. That means that any public servant who has the courage to stand up to the special interests and stand up for the American people can find himself or herself under assault come election time. Even foreign corporations may now get into the act.

I can’t think of anything more devastating to the public interest. The last thing we need to do is hand more influence to the lobbyists in Washington, or more power to the special interests to tip the outcome of elections.

(more of the transcript and the video of the address after the jump)

A FRESH HELL or How the Supreme Court Is Destroying America Democracy

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My friend Carly likes to discuss politics with me and sent me an email Thursday night with the subject line, "And what about this FRESH HELL?"  She was talking about the Supreme Court's 5-4 decision in Citizens United v. FEC, and FRESH HELL (in all caps) is one of the best descriptions I've heard so far on the decision.  The conservative justices on the Roberts Court in their infinite wisdom...oops, sorry, that should be infinitesimal wisdom...decided that biggest problem with American politics was that there just wasn't enough corporate money involved.

You see, in today's Orwellian world, money is speech and corporations are people with all the rights you and I enjoy with none of the responsibilities, and the conservative majority, those damned judicial activists, went far beyond the limited legal questions of the case before them and overturned decades of legislative restrictions on the role of corporations in political campaigns, including a large part of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance act that the same court, albeit with a different lineup, declared constitutional just six years ago in McConnell v. FEC, and even broadened the scope of the case to include constitutional questions raised by a 1990 case (Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce), which they also managed to overturn. The decision also threatens many state laws.

In the minority dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens declared, "Essentially, five Justices were unhappy with the limited nature of the case before us, so they changed the case to give themselves an opportunity to change the law."  Later, he declared, "Under the majority’s view, I suppose it may be a First Amendment problem that corporations are not permitted to vote, given that voting is, among other things, a form of speech."  Perhaps that's next.  Stevens concluded his dissent with...

"At bottom, the Court's opinion is thus a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt. It is a strange time to repudiate that common sense. While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics."

For a fascinating look at how far this court overreached and how badly they managed to subvert American democracy call up the .pdf file of the decision and skip ahead to page 88 where Justice Stevens's dissent begins, then read until you feel your head start to explode.  If you're not that ambitious or masochistic, the Progressive Review has a very small excerpt.

The Roberts court struck down a law dating back to 1947 which prohibits corporations and labor unions from using money from their general treasuries to produce and air campaign aids in congressional and presidential races, and struck down a McCain-Feingold provision that prohibits corporations and unions from airing campaign ads in the 30 days before a primary or 60 days before a general election. They did manage to retain a century-old ban on donations from corporations from their general treasuries directly to federal candidates and upheld disclosure requirements on campaign activities.

So why is this such a big deal?  In 2008, the Fortune 100 companies amassed $600 billion in profits.  Just 1% of that enormous total ($6 billion) would double the amount spent by Obama, McCain, and every candidate for the House and Senate in 2008 combined.  The Roberts Court expressed concern that the free speech rights of corporations were being suppressed, but even with the restrictions that were in place, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce still managed to spend $123 million in lobbying efforts in 2009, the financial sector invested $5 billion in influence peddling in the past decade, and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) spent $26 million in 2009 alone to influence health care reform, with the individual drug companies ponying up tens of millions more in the effort.