JAMIN RASKIN: Indeed. The Supreme Court has reached out to strike down a law that has been on the books for several decades. And moreover, it reached out when the parties to the case didn't even ask them to decide it. The Citizens United group, the anti-Hillary Clinton group, did not even ask them to wipe out decades of Supreme Court case law on the rights of corporations in the First Amendment. The Court, in fact, raised the question, made the parties go back and brief this case, and then came up with the answer to the question that the Court itself, or the five right-wing justices themselves, posed here.
There would have been lots of other ways for those conservative justices to find that Citizens United's anti-Hillary Clinton movie was protected speech, the simplest being saying, "Look, this was pay-per-view; it wasn't a TV commercial. So it's not covered by McCain-Feingold." But the Court, or the five justices on the Court, were hell-bent on overthrowing McCain-Feingold and the electioneering communication rules and reversing decades of precedent.
And so, now the people are confronted with a very serious question: Will we have the political power and vision to mobilize, to demand a constitutional amendment to say that it is "we, the people," not "we, the corporations"?
AMY GOODMAN: Jamin Raskin, we want to thank you very much for being with us, professor of constitutional law at American University's School of Law and a Maryland state senator.
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