The
Four Courtsmen of the Apocalypse are poised to finally bury American
democracy in corporate money. The most powerful institution in human
history---the global corporation---may soon take definitive possession
of our electoral process.
It could happen very soon.
While
America agonizes over health care, energy and war, Justices John
Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas could make it
all moot. They may now have the fifth Supreme Court vote they need to
open the final floodgates on corporate spending in political campaigns.
In
short, the Court may be poised to shred a century of judicial and
legislative attempts to preserve even a semblance of restraint on how
Big Money buys laws and legal decisions. The ensuing tsumani of
corporate cash could turn every election hence into a series of virtual
slave auctions, with victory guaranteed only to those candidates who
most effectively grovel at the feet of the best-heeled lobbyists.
Not
that this is so different from what we have now. The barriers against
cash dominating our elections have already proven amazingly
ineffective.
But a century ago, corporations were barred from
directly contributing to political campaigns. The courts have upheld
many of the key requirements.
Meanwhile the barons of Big Money
have metastasized into all-powerful electoral juggernauts. The sum
total of all these laws, right up to the recently riddled
McCain-Feingold mandates, has been to force the corporations to hire a
few extra lawyers, accountants and talk show bloviators to run
interference for them.
Even that may be too much for the
Court's corporate core. John Roberts's Supremes may now be
fast-tracking a decision on CITIZENS UNITED v. FEDERAL ELECTION
COMMISSION, centered on a corporate-financed campaign film attacking
Hillary Clinton. According to the Washington Post's account of oral
arguments, "a majority of the court seemed impatient with an
increasingly complicated federal scheme intended to curb the role of
corporations, unions and special interest groups in elections."
Former
solicitor general Theodore B. Olson, who in 2000 "persuaded" the Court
to stop a recount of votes in Florida and put George W. Bush in the
White House, said such laws "smothered" the First Amendment and
"criminalized" free speech.
The conservative Gang of Four has
already been joined by Anthony Kennedy, the Court's swing voter, in
signaling the likely overturn of two previous decisions upholding laws
that ban direct corporate spending in elections.
When he was
confirmed as the Court's Chief, Roberts promised Congress he would be
loathe to overturn major legal precedents. But the signals of betrayal
now seem so clear that Senators John McCain and Russell Feingold have
issued personal statements warning Roberts that a radical assault on
campaign finance laws would be considered a breach of faith with the
Congress that confirmed him.
Liberal Justice Ruth Bader
Ginsburg did assert during oral arguments that "a corporation, after
all, is not endowed by its creator with inalienable rights."
But
since the 1880s the courts have generally granted corporations human
rights with no human responsibilities. Thom Hartmann (UNEQUAL
PROTECTION) and Ted Nace (GANGS OF AMERICA) have shown with infuriating
detail how corporate lawyers twisted the 14th Amendment, designed to
protect the rights of freed slaves, into a legal weapon used to
bludgeon the democratic process into submission.
Civil
libertarians like Floyd Abrams and the American Civil Liberties Union
have somehow argued that depriving these mega-conglomerations of cash
and greed their "right" to buy elections might somehow impinge on the
First Amendment.
HARVEY WASSERMAN'S HISTORY OF THE US is available at http://www.harveywasserman.com/, as is A GLIMPSE OF THE BIG LIGHT and clues to the whereabouts of the Holy Grail.
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors.
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