In this, the sixth in the series of our analyses condemning the Supreme Court corporate personhood decision, we demonstrate how Kennedy cites cases for propositions they never decided, and on that bogus pretext asserts he can overturn real decisions as if they all have equal standing and weight, a supreme act of case law fraud.
But first, we have a critical NEW action page, which we are asking EVERYBODY to submit, calling on the House Administration Committee (with a special function which will send them a direct fax) to pass strong legislation reinstating control over corporate influence. Of course we also need a Constitutional amendment categorically repudiating the wrongful reading by the Supreme Court 5 (Kennedy, Kennedy, Scalia, Alito and Thomas), but we still need Congress to immediately confront the Constitutional crisis already in high gear, to try to mitigate the damage before the next general election.
House member Alan Grayson stepped forward with at least 6 proposals, three of which have already been incorporated into legislation sponsored by Senator Schumer and House member Chris Van Hollen, which is now already before the House Administration Committee. These proposals would:
* Prevent government contractors like Blackwater from stealing our elections.
* Force disclosure to shareholders when a company wants to bribe and threaten elected officials
Please urge Chairman Brady of the House Administration Committee to move these bills as expeditiously as possible, and to strengthen the final bill with additional measures to not only disclose political bribery, but to STOP it.
House Administration Committee Action Page: http://www.peaceteam.net/action/pnum1035.php
The link above is the regular action page. For Facebook participants ONLY use the link below instead
[Facebook] House Administration Committee Action Page: http://apps.facebook.com/fb_voices/action.php?qnum=pnum1035
And this is the Twitter reply for this action
@cxs #p1035
OK, let's jump back into it. If you recall from our 5th scary episode, we were discussing the concept of "weight" in judicial precedents, specifically the fact that ONLY the actual "holding", the actual issue addressed and DECIDED by a prior court is binding on a later court, which forms the basis for stare decisis.
Here, Kennedy, writing the decision for the Supreme Court 5 demonstrates that he is either functionally incapable, or otherwise unwilling or too dishonest, to even engage in critical thinking. For he claims license to revisit the holdings in the Austin and McConnell cases by arguing that there were "conflicting" lines of precedent (opinion p. 32), based on his reading of the Buckley and Belloti cases (opinion pp. 28-31). In effect he is arguing a kind of stare decisis standoff between these other cases and the ones he would overturn, thus inviting himself to step in to resolve the non-existent conflict.
Except that Kennedy ADMITS in writing that Buckley did NOT "consider" the ban on corporate and union independent expenditures (opinion p. 29), and Belloti did NOT "address" the constitutionality of this ban EITHER (opinion p. 31). Thus, neither case has binding value as a precedent since those courts did not rule at all on the issue at hand.
Instead he asserts that, based on some other stray language NOT the actual holdings in those cases, those Courts, in his omnipotent after the fact opinion, WOULD have rejected such bans IF they had decided those issues. This is despite the fact that the only support for such an assertion are the LOSING dissents by himself and his black robed conspirators from these same cases!! In short, he rewrites ad hoc the decisions in the Belloti and Buckley cases to say what they would have said if he had prevailed originally, and asserts that his counterfeit version of those decisions now call the legitimacy of the real decisions into question.
This is judicial, intellectual fraud at its most despicable level. Kennedy elevates, to the status of binding precedent, dubious speculation about what a previous Court would have done, equates that in weight with the holding of a case that DID directly decide the issue (Austin, as further reinforced by its AFFIRMATION in McConnell), and then throws up his hands and says in essence, "Oh, gosh, nothing to do but decide this anew."
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