END OF A SYSTEM OF THINGS
Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 08-205 (2010), 558 U.S. ––––, 130 S.Ct. 876 (January 21, 2010), was a landmark decision by the United States Supreme Court holding that the First Amendment prohibits government from placing limits on independent spending for political purposes by corporations and unions. The 5–4 decision originated in a dispute over whether the non-profit corporation Citizens United could air a film critical of Hillary Clinton, and whether the group could advertise the film in broadcast ads featuring Clinton's image, in apparent violation of the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, commonly known as the McCain–Feingold Act in reference to its primary Senate sponsors.[2]
The decision reached the Supreme Court on appeal from a January 2008 decision by the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. The lower court decision had upheld provisions of the 2002 act, which prevented the film Hillary: The Movie from being shown on television within 30 days of 2008 Democratic primaries.[1][3]
The Supreme Court reversed the lower court, striking down those provisions of the McCain–Feingold Act that prohibited all corporations, both for-profit and not-for-profit, and unions from broadcasting “electioneering communications.”[2] An "electioneering communication" was defined in McCain–Feingold as a broadcast, cable, or satellite communication that mentioned a candidate within 60 days of a general election or thirty days of a primary. The decision overruled Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce (1990) and partially overruled McConnell v. Federal Election Commission (2003).[4] McCain–Feingold had previously been weakened, without overruling McConnell, in Federal Election Commission v. Wisconsin Right to Life, Inc. (2007). The Court did uphold requirements for disclaimer and disclosure by sponsors of advertisements. The case did not involve the federal ban on direct contributions from corporations or unions to candidate campaigns or political parties, which remain illegal in races for federal office.[5]
CriticismsAmerican politicians
President Barack Obama stated that the decision "gives the special interests and their lobbyists even more power in Washington — while undermining the influence of average Americans who make small contributions to support their preferred candidates".[41] Obama later elaborated in his weekly radio address saying, "this ruling strikes at our democracy itself" and "I can't think of anything more devastating to the public interest".[42] On January 27, 2010, Obama further condemned the decision during the 2010 State of the Union Address, stating that, "Last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law[43] to open the floodgates for special interests — including foreign corporations — to spend without limit in our elections. Well I don't think American elections should be bankrolled by America's most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign entities."
Democratic Senator Russ Feingold, a lead sponsor of the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, stated, "This decision was a terrible mistake. Presented with a relatively narrow legal issue, the Supreme Court chose to roll back laws that have limited the role of corporate money in federal elections since Teddy Roosevelt was president."[44] Representative Alan Grayson, a Democrat, stated that it was "the worst Supreme Court decision since the Dred Scott case, and that the court had opened the door to political bribery and corruption in elections to come.[45] Democratic congresswoman Donna Edwards, along with constitutional law professor and Maryland Democratic State Senator Jamie Raskin, have advocated petitions to reverse the decision by means of constitutional amendment.[46] Rep. Leonard Boswell introduced legislation to amend the constitution.[47] Senator John Kerry also called for an Amendment to overrule the decision.[48]. On December 8, 2011, Senator Bernie Sanders proposed the Saving American Democracy Amendment, which would reverse the court's ruling.[49][50]
Republican Senator John McCain, co-crafter of the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act and the party's 2008 presidential nominee, said "there's going to be, over time, a backlash ... when you see the amounts of union and corporate money that's going to go into political campaigns".[51] McCain was "disappointed by the decision of the Supreme Court and the lifting of the limits on corporate and union contributions" but not surprised by the decision, saying that "It was clear that Justice Roberts, Alito and Scalia, by their very skeptical and even sarcastic comments, were very much opposed to BCRA."[44] He pointed out that "Justice Rehnquist and Justice O'Connor, who had taken a different position on this issue, both had significant political experience, while Justices Roberts, Alito and Scalia have none."[51] (In fact, Rehnquist had joined Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Kennedy in dissenting in McConnell v. FEC). Republican Senator Olympia Snowe opined that "Today's decision was a serious disservice to our country."[52]
Sanda Everette, co-chair of the Green Party, stated that "The ruling especially hurts the ability of parties that don't accept corporate contributions, like the Green Party, to compete." (In fact, 2 U.S.C. 441i, which was not altered by the decision in Citizens United, prohibits all parties from accepting direct contributions from corporations.) Another Green Party officer, Rich Whitney, stated "In a transparently political decision, a majority of the US Supreme Court overturned its own recent precedent and paid tribute to the giant corporate interests that already wield tremendous power over our political process and political speech."
Ralph Nader, a lawyer who placed third in the popular vote in the last three presidential elections, condemned the ruling,[53] saying that "With this decision, corporations can now directly pour vast amounts of corporate money, through independent expenditures, into the electoral swamp already flooded with corporate campaign PAC contribution dollars." He called for shareholder resolutions asking company directors to pledge not to use company money to favor or oppose electoral candidates.[54] Pat Choate, Reform Party candidate stated, "The court has, in effect, legalized foreign governments and foreign corporations to participate in our electoral politics."[55]
International
Ambassador Janez Lenar, speaking for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe's election body, which has overseen over 150 elections, stated that the ruling may adversely affect the organization's two commitments of "giving voters a genuine choice and giving candidates a fair chance" in that "it threatens to further marginalize candidates without strong financial backing or extensive personal resources, thereby in effect narrowing the political arena".[56]
Super PACs
GOP Fault Lines Expose Ideological Divides
There is a diversity of views in the Republican field for president that is wide, even wild. Host Scott Simon talks with Ross Douthat, a conservative author and New York Times columnist, about the ideological divides in the Republican Party, as apparent in the GOP presidential race.
http://www.npr.org/2012/01/14/145221284/gop-fault-lines-expose-ideological-divides
Citizens United paved the way for the creation of independent expenditure political action committees, sometimes dubbed Super PACs. These organizations may accept unlimited contributions from individuals, unions, and corporations (both for profit and not-for-profit) for the purpose of making independent expenditures. The Court majority wrote that, for purposes of establishing a "compelling government interest" of corruption sufficient to justify government limitations on political speech, "independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption."[72] Accordingly, lower courts, most notably the D.C. Circuit Court in Speechnow.org v. Federal Election Commission, held that groups could pool contributions and make expenditures in support of or opposition to a candidate provided that the expenditures were made independently of a campaign or a candidate.[73] The effectiveness of this system remains a hot topic in American politics.
DRED SCOTT DECISION & THE CIVIL WAR
Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857), also known as the Dred Scott Decision, was a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court that people of African descent brought into the United States and held as slaves (or their descendants,[2] whether or not they were slaves) were not protected by the Constitution and could never be U.S. citizens.[3] Despite the fact that the decision is no longer "jurisprudentially important," it nevertheless had, and continues to have, lasting cultural and historical ramification/implications.[4]
The Opinion of the Court, written by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, was, and remains, extremely controversial: legal scholars of diametrically opposed jurisprudence do not debate whether or not the decision was wrong, but rather why it is wrong. The decision was 7–2, and every Justice besides Taney wrote a separate concurrence or dissent. For the first time since Marbury v. Madison, the Court held an Act of Congress to be unconstitutional. The decision began by first concluding that the Court lacked jurisdiction in the matter because Dred Scott had no standing to sue in Court, as Scott, and all people of African descent for that matter, were found to not be citizens of the United States. This decision was contrary to the practice of numerous states at the time, particularly Free states, where freed slaves did in fact enjoy the rights of citizens, such as the right to vote and hold public office.[4] The decision of the court is often criticized as being obiter dictum because the Court went on to conclude that Congress had no authority to prohibit slavery in federal territories and that, because slaves were not citizens, they could not sue in court. Furthermore, the Court ruled that slaves, as chattels or private property, could not be taken away from their owners without due process.
In reaching this decision, Taney had hoped to settle the issue of slavery in the United States with the Court's decision, but it had the opposite effect. The decision was fiercely debated across the country, as perhaps best exemplified by the Lincoln–Douglas debates of 1858. Abraham Lincoln, the second-ever Republican nominee for President, was able to win the presidential election in 1860; the stopping of the further expansion of slavery was a key Republican party plank. The court’s decision was so contentious that some go as far as to suggest that the Dred Scott decision caused the Civil War. Although such an assertion is rejected by most legal and historical scholars, it is nevertheless acknowledged that the decision did play an important role in the timing of state secession and the Civil War. The decision is also acknowledged for the influential role it played in altering the national political landscape: the decision is credited with launching Abraham Lincoln’s national political career and ultimately allowing for his election.[4]
Although the Supreme Court has never explicitly overruled the Dred Scott case, the Court stated in the Slaughter-House Cases that at least one part of it had already been overruled by the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, which created citizenship at the national as opposed to the state level:.[5]
The first observation we have to make on this clause is, that it puts at rest both the questions which we stated to have been the subject of differences of opinion. It declares that persons may be citizens of the United States without regard to their citizenship of a particular State, and it overturns the Dred Scott decision by making all persons born within the United States and subject to its jurisdiction citizens of the United States.[6]
The reasoning used in the "Slaughter-House Cases" is extremely sound considering the fact that the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments were written with the intention of overturning the Dred Scott decision.
Consequences
Perhaps the most immediate consequence of the decision was to trigger the Panic of 1857. Economist Charles Calomiris and historian Larry Schweikart discovered that uncertainty about whether the entire West would suddenly become either slave territory or engulfed in combat like Bleeding Kansas immediately gripped the markets. What was unusual about the initial panic, though, was that it only struck the railroads running east and west—where the impact of the Dred Scott decision would be greatest (the territories). The bonds of east/west railroads collapsed immediately (although north/south-running lines were unaffected), causing, in turn, the near-collapse of several large banks and the runs that ensued. What followed these runs has been called the Panic of 1857, and it differed sharply from the Panic of 1837 in that its effects were almost exclusively confined to the North. Calomiris and Schweikart found this resulted from the South's superior system of branch banking (as opposed to the North's unit banking system), in which the transmission of the panic was minor due to the diversification of the southern branch banking systems. Information moved reliably among the branch banks, whereas in the North, the unit banks (competitors) seldom shared such vital information. In the broader scope, the Panic convinced the South that "Cotton is King" and that it had nothing to fear economically from the North unless a move was made to end the system of slavery.[19]
Prior to Dred Scott, Democratic Party politicians had sought repeal of the Missouri Compromise, and were finally successful in 1854 with the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. This act permitted each newly admitted state south of the 40th parallel to decide whether to be a slave state or free state. Now, with Dred Scott, the Supreme Court under Taney sought to permit the unhindered expansion of slavery into the territories.
The Dred Scott Decision, then, represented [like Citizens United means disaster for the Union] a culmination of what many at that time considered a push to expand slavery [or a lessening of the rights of citizenship]. Southerners at the time, who had grown uncomfortable with the Kansas-Nebraska Act, argued that they had a right, under the federal constitution, to bring slaves into the territories, regardless of any decision by a territorial legislature on the subject. The Dred Scott decision seemed to endorse that view. The expansion of the territories and resulting admission of new states would mean a loss of political power for the North, as many of the new states would be admitted as slave states, and counting slaves as three-fifths of a person would add to the slave holding states' political representation in Congress.
Although Taney believed that the decision represented a compromise that would settle the slavery question once and for all by transforming a contested political issue into a matter of settled law, it produced the opposite result. It strengthened Northern slavery opposition, divided the Democratic Party on sectional lines, encouraged secessionist elements among Southern supporters of slavery to make bolder demands, and strengthened the Republican Party.
THE RISE OF AMERICAN POLITICAL DISCONTENT
Carl T. Bogus in Buckley: William F. Buckley JR. and the Rise of American Conservatism (2011) dissects our present political obstructionism as a consequence of both liberals and conservatives winning their individual causes.
Carl T. Bogus
He states that of course, liberals and conservatives have not joined hands, poured each other glasses of champagne, and celebrated unity. Just the opposite has happened: We are experiencing hyperpartisanship. Paradoxically, it is confusion within each camp—not certainty—that fuels the vehemence. It is because each side can’t see its own compass clearly that makes it so distrustful and defiant whenever the other side suggests a direction.
South Carolina's Tea Party Mulls GOP Candidates
January 17, 2012
Much has been made of how conservative Christian voters have struggled to select one Republican presidential candidate. The same can be said about the Tea Party which has largely been critical of front-runner Mitt Romney. http://www.npr.org/2012/01/17/145326757/south-carolinas-tea-party-mulls-gop-candidates
The Tea Party movement is one manifestation of our entering a time of ideological reconsideration. The Tea Parties were ignited by a fear that government bailouts of banks, financial institution, and automobiles manufacturers meant the end of capitalism, even though those decisions were made by both the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations. Tea Party members are considered generally conservative—but they did not rush to defend conservative battlements. They instead created new organizations and often supported unorthodox politicians over established conservatives. The Tea Parties too are searching, and even they do not know exactly for what. (22) Except to put President Obama out of office.
We are all prisoners of our up-brings. It cannot be otherwise. Sometimes we are able to break our constraints and see the world through different eyes, but sometimes our prisons are simply too ingenious. Unable to perceive a greater reality, we are like fish in an aquarium that bump their noses against the glass.
HOW DID THE GOP BREAK WITH REALITY
Romney Emerges From Week Of Contradictions
by Ari Shapiro
On the one hand, Mitt Romney's landslide win in New Hampshire put him solidly on a course to focus on the general election last week. On the other hand, a new series of attacks on his years as a venture capitalist forced him to engage more directly than before with his primary rivals. NPR's Ari Shapiro reports from Aiken, S.C.
http://www.npr.org/2012/01/14/145221282/romney-emerges-from-week-of-contradictions
David Frum
Republican David Frum answers a pertinent political question in his article “When Did The GOP Lose Touch With Reality? In the November 28, 2011 issue of New York Magazine. He states that I can’t shrug off this flight from reality and responsibility as somebody else’s problem. I belonged to this movement; I helped to make the mess. People may very well say: Hey, wait a minute, didn’t you work in the George W. Bush administration that disappointed so many people in so many ways? What qualifies you to dispense advice to anybody else?
Fair question. I am haunted by the Bush experience, although it seems almost presumptuous for someone who played such a minor role to feel so much unease. The people who made the big decisions certainly seem to sleep well enough. Yet there is also the chance for something positive to come out of it all. True, some of my colleagues emerged from those years eager to revenge themselves and escalate political conflict: They send one of ours to the hospital; we send two of theirs to the morgue. I came out thinking, I want no more part of this cycle of revenge. For the past half-dozen years, I have been arguing that we conservatives need to follow a different course. And it is this argument that has led so many of my friends to demand, sometimes bemusedly, sometimes angrily, What the hell happened to you? I could fire the same question back: Never mind me what happened to you?
So what did happen? The first decade of the 21st century was a crazy bookend to the twentieth, opening with a second Pearl Harbor and ending with a second Great Crash, with a second Vietnam wedged in between. Now we seem caught in the coils of a second Great Depression. These shocks radicalized the political system, damaging hawkish Democrats like Hillary Clinton in the Bush years and then driving Republicans to dust off the economics of Ayn Rand.
Some liberals suspect that the conservative changes of mind since 2008 are opportunistic and cynical. It’s true that cynicism is never entirely absent from politics: I won’t soon forget the lupine smile that played about the lips of the leader of one prominent conservative institution as he told me, “Our donors truly think the apocalypse has arrived. Yet conscious cynicism is much rarer than you might suppose.” Few of us have the self-knowledge and emotional discipline to say one thing while meaning another. If we say something often enough, we come to believe it. We don’t usually delude others until after we have first deluded ourselves. Some of the smartest and most sophisticated people I know canny investors, erudite authors sincerely and passionately believe that President Barack Obama has gone far beyond conventional American liberalism and is willfully and relentlessly driving the United States down the road to socialism. No counterevidence will dissuade them from this belief: not record-high corporate profits, not almost 500,000 job losses in the public sector, not the lowest tax rates since the Truman administration. It is not easy to fit this belief alongside the equally strongly held belief that the president is a pitiful, bumbling amateur, dazed and overwhelmed by a job too big for him and yet that is done too.
Conservatives have been driven to these fevered anxieties as much by their own trauma as by external events. In the aughts, Republicans held more power for longer than at any time since the twenties, yet the result was the weakest and least broadly shared economic expansion since World War II, followed by an economic crash and prolonged slump. There’s one thing you know for sure: None of this is your fault! And when the new president fails to deliver rapid recovery, he can be designated the target for everyone’s accumulated disappointment and rage. In the midst of economic wreckage, what relief to thrust all blame upon Barack Obama as the wrecker-in-chief.
The Tea Party Pain-in-the-GOP Ass
For the past three years, the media have praised the enthusiasm and energy the tea party has brought to the GOP. Yet it’s telling that that movement has failed time and again to produce even a remotely credible candidate for president. Sarah Palin, Donald Trump, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich: The list of tea-party candidates reads like the early history of the U.S. space program, a series of humiliating fizzles and explosions that never achieved liftoff. A political movement that never took governing seriously was exploited by a succession of political entrepreneurs uninterested in governing but all too interested in merchandising. Much as viewers tune in to American Idol to laugh at the inept, borderline dysfunctional early auditions, these tea-party champions provide a ghoulish type of news entertainment each time they reveal that they know nothing about public affairs and have never attempted to learn. But Cain’s gaffe on Libya or Perry’s brain freeze on the Department of Energy are not only indicators of bad leadership. They are indicators of a crisis of followership. The tea party never demanded knowledge or concern for governance, and so of course it never got them.
Many hope that the Tea Party mood is just a passing mania, eventually to subside into something more like the businessperson’s Republicanism practiced in the nineties by governors and mayors like George Pataki and Rudy Giuliani, Christine Todd Whitman and Dick Riordan, Tommy Thompson and John Engler. This hope tends to coalesce around the candidacies of Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman, two smart and well-informed former governors who eschew the strident rhetoric of the tea party and who have thereby earned its deep distrust. But there are good reasons to fear that the ebbing of Republican radicalism remains far off, even if Romney (or Huntsman) does capture the White House next year.
SOURCE OF NEWT’S STANDING OVATION: “ETHNIC COMPETITION”
South Carolina: Gingrich's Last Stand?
Categories: 2012, Republicans
GOP presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich addresses the South Carolina Chamber of Commerce on Tuesday in Columbia, S.C. The state holds its primary on Saturday.
In South Carolina, the race to be the conservative alternative to Mitt Romney is hitting a fever pitch. The state is seen by many as the last stop before inevitability in the GOP primary.
In campaign stops Tuesday, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich laid out what sounded like an ultimatum. http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2012/01/18/145380302/south-carolina-gingrichs-last-stand
White America has been plunged into a mood of pessimism and anger since 2008. Ron Brownstein reports in the National Journal: 63 percent of African-Americans and 54 percent of Hispanics said they expected their children to exceed their standard of living. Even college-educated whites are less optimistic (only about two-fifths agree). But the non-college whites are the gloomiest: Just one-third of them think their kids will live better than they do; an equal number think their children won’t even match their living standard. No other group is nearly that negative. Those fears are not irrational. In post-recession America, employers seem to show a distinct preference for foreign-born workers. Eighty percent of the net new jobs created in the state of Texas since 2009 went to the foreign-born. Nationwide, foreign-born workers have experienced a net 4 percent increase in employment since January 2009, while native-born workers have seen continuing employment declines. Which may explain why President Obama’s approval rating among whites slipped to 41 percent in January 2010 and is now testing a new low of 33 percent. The president’s name and skin color symbolize the emergence of a new America in which many older-stock Americans intuit they will be left behind.
It is precisely these disaffected whites especially those who didn’t go to college who form the Republican voting base. John McCain got 58 percent of non-college-white votes in 2008. The GOP polls even higher among that group today, but the party can only sustain those numbers as long as it gives voice to alienation. Birtherism, the claim that President Obama was not born in the United States, expressed the feeling of many that power has shifted into alien hands. That feeling will not be easily quelled by Republican electoral success, because it is based on a deep sense of dispossession and disinheritance.
OCCUPY WALL STREET MOVEMENT
We used to say “You’re entitled to your own opinion, but not to your own facts.” Now we are all entitled to our own facts, and conservative media use this right to immerse their audience in a total environment of pseudo-facts and pretend information.
When contemplating the ruthless brilliance of this system, it’s tempting to fall back on the theory that the GOP is masterminded by a cadre of sinister billionaires, deftly manipulating the political process for their own benefit. The billionaires do exist, and some do indeed attempt to influence the political process. The bizarre fiasco of campaign-finance reform has perversely empowered them to give unlimited funds anonymously to special entities that can spend limitlessly. (Thanks, Senator McCain! Nice job, Senator Feingold!) Yet, for the most part, these Republican billionaires are not acting cynically. They watch Fox News too, and they’re gripped by the same apocalyptic fears as the Republican base. In funding the tea-party movement, they are actually acting against their own longer-term interests, for it is the richest who have the most interest in political stability, which depends upon broad societal agreement that the existing distribution of rewards is fair and reasonable. If the social order comes to seem unjust to large numbers of people, what happens next will make Occupy Wall Street look like a street fair.
I refuse to believe that I am the only Republican who feels this way. If CNN’s most recent polling is correct, only half of us sympathize with the tea party. However, moderate-minded people dislike conflict and thus tend to lose to people who relish conflict. The most extreme voices in the GOP now denounce everybody else as Republicans in Name Only. But who elected them as the GOP’s membership committee? What have they done to deserve such an inheritance? In the mid-sixties, when the party split spectacularly between Ripon Republicans, who embraced the civil-rights movement, and Goldwater Republicans, who opposed it, civil-rights Republicans like Michigan governor George Romney spoke forcefully for their point of view. Today, Republicans discomfited by political and media extremism bite their tongues. But if they don’t speak up, they’ll be whipsawed into a choice between an Obama administration that wants to build a permanently bigger government and a Conservative movement content with permanently outraged opposition.
This is, unfortunately, not merely a concern for Republican voters. The conservative shift to ever more extreme, ever more fantasy-based ideology has ominous real-world consequences for American society. The American system of government can’t work if the two sides wage all-out war upon each other: House, Senate, president, each has the power to thwart the others. In prior generations, the system evolved norms and habits to prevent this kind of stonewalling.
January 19, 2012
All the Republican presidential candidates are campaigning in South Carolina Thursday because the primary is on Saturday. Many voters have still not made up their minds which candidate to vote for.
http://www.npr.org/2012/01/19/145437577/s-c-primary-voters-struggle-to-decide-on-ballot-choice
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