By Joe Conason
Salon.com
Enjoying life tenure and political immunity as they do, the judges on the nation’s highest court are never held accountable for their transgressions in any meaningful way, except by history. Yet rarely if ever has a landmark opinion by a Supreme Court justice been proved wrong as quickly and as decisively -- and with such fateful effects -- as the historic decision penned by Justice Anthony Kennedy last January in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission. Wrong not only as a matter of ideology, partisanship, or constitutionality, although it is arguably all of those, but wrong in its most important assertions.
When Kennedy, along with his four conservative colleagues, overturned the century-old limitations on corporate funding of political campaigns, he justified this enormous gift to his fellow Republicans with what amounted to a false promise. Full and timely disclosure of the sources of the expected flood of corporate money, according to Kennedy, would serve the same essential purpose as the discarded restrictions, keeping voters informed by exposing politicians and their business benefactors.
"The Court has explained that disclosure is a less restrictive alternative to more comprehensive regulations of speech," Kennedy wrote in a tone of condescension, citing earlier cases in which the Supreme Court had upheld federal disclosure requirements even while rejecting limits on expenditures and noting the disclosure requirements imposed on lobbyists. With the zeal of an internet huckster, he claimed that technology would dispel the aura of corruption and secrecy that inspired McCain-Feingold and earlier attempts to restrict corporate money.
(More here.)
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