[Updated 1/23/10 @ 11:40 a.m.]
More than 100 years ago the Congress of the United States passed a law that opened the horizons to a kind of America the country’s founders envisioned.
In reigning in runaway political spending by corporate power, it tried to insulate the country from corporate domination of the government. If America was going to be a country embracing the principles of fairness in the bounty and opportunities it offered its citizens, it needed an election process free of the stranglehold of big money. It should be a country ruled by government institutions answering to the fundamental markers of democracy. These were and are defined with breathtaking simplicity by the greatest of all Republican presidents, Abraham Lincoln, as “government of, by and for the people.”
The Congress in 1907 acted to prevent corporate power from feeding billions of dollars directly into candidates' campaign pockets. In so doing it created a relatively even playing field for the battle of political ideas. Among the results was the flowering of a great middle class that fueled the yearnings of the American people and the rise of the American Century that literally became the hope of the world.
On Thursday a Republican-dominated Supreme Court of the United States, acting almost vengefully, re-examined one of those bedrock principles — fairness in how we run our elections — and revoked it.
As an open and direct assault on the American political process it was an intervention that could not have been more crass, cynical and brazen.
By a vote of 5-4 the Supreme Court’s five Republican appointees decided that corporations are human beings, entitled to the same First Amendment rights of free speech. This now gives corporations the right to splatter whatever millions they want as a form of “free speech,” a corruption of the First Amendment's intention that is a brutal caricature of fair and stable public policy.
What it means is that some of the country's biggest corporate powers, including insurance, pharmaceuticals, oil, Wall Street alliances, transportation, construction and more can open their cash bins, some of them swelled by the public’s bailout and stimulus money, and pump their millions into political spending. It is spending that overwhelmingly favors Republican candidates.
It’s not the kind of spending where the money goes directly into a candidate’s campaign. It can now legally come in from vaults and from the alley. It can finance unlimited political muggings on television, around the clock, with the kind of defamation that swamped the war hero, John Kerry.
Do you want some irony laced into all of these new "speech" freedoms open to corporate power in political spending? As a counterweight to the stash now open for campaign manipulation by big business, fronted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Republican five offered the same opportunities to American unions.
To American what?
The political strength of American labor, except for remnants here and there, fundamentally disappeared with the election of Ronald Reagan. What there was left was further eroded by the recession of today, which was basically enabled and triggered by the under-the-table manipulations of Wall Street and the dismantling of government regulations that could have saved millions of jobs.
So the decision by the Supreme Court turns loose on the next big elections the very powerhouses and speculators that created the recession.
These are the same Supreme Court judges whose promoters in their confirmation hearings decried the idea of “judicial activism” by Democratic-appointed judges
What we saw this week was the same kind of closet activism that in the year 2000 stripped thousands of Florida citizens of the right to have their votes counted. It gutted the candidacy of Al Gore, who outpolled his opponent, George Bush, by 500,000 votes across the country
So this has been the progression of plunder of this political right-wing domination of the Supreme Court in the last ten years. What it means is that the U.S. Supreme Court, the Roberts Court Five, has now become the campaign manager and self-appointed fund raiser of the Republican Party.
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Jim Klobuchar returns to an arena that will be familiar to his readers when he was a columnist for the MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE.
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