Just what the court ordered: more money in politics

Just what the court ordered: more money in politics

Suppose we argued that if our nation’s founders were transported to the 21st century, one of the things they’d conclude would be that there wasn’t enough money being spent in election campaigns.

We don’t expect our argument would resonate in many places — except, of course, among those special interests who have millions of dollars to spend ... and among a scant majority of the sitting justices on the Supreme Court of the United States.

We could only marvel at the flexibility shown by our “conservative” jurists when they were asked to rule in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. The case arose from the FEC’s determination that a 90-minute movie, “Hillary: The Movie,” released in 2008 as Clinton entered presidential primaries, was the equivalent of a political ad and so could not be run so close to elections. The court could have chosen to write a decision that was carefully crafted to address the questions presented by the specifics of the case. That would have been the non-activist approach.

Models of restraint?

Among the most recent appointments to the court since a campaign financing case last came before it were Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Samuel Alito. These very men were held up as the exemplars of what a justice should be by U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., when he was running for president in that same 2008 election. McCain is one of the co-authors of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law that was under attack in Citizens United.

Roberts and Alito “would serve as the model for my own nominees if that responsibility falls to me,” McCain said during the campaign.

From that we might extrapolate that if Sen. McCain had been elected, President McCain would have seen his signature campaign finance bill rejected by a vote of 6-3 instead of 5-4, because the ninth justice would have been a Roberts-Alito clone rather than Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who was named to the court by President Barack Obama.

The court’s ruling in Citizens United demonstrates the absurdity of the common complaint by conservatives about “liberal activist judges.”

During their confirmation hearings Roberts and Alito were apparently only pretending to revere court precedents as the glue that gives the law stability. There was no need for them to reach back to overturn a 63-year-old law and two Supreme Court precedents in arriving at a decision in Citizens United. They chose to do so.

As a result, corporations, unions and special interest groups of every stripe can spend as much as they like to affect elections. And among the beneficiaries are multinational corporations, which makes us wonder how the people who are horrified that some noncitizens are given constitutional right when they’re arrested feel about what this ruling does.

There’s limited recourse

The Supreme Court has spoken — or at least it has spoken until the next time the court’s political make-up changes, which is not the way it’s supposed to work. There appears to be little Congress can do to limit the enormous amounts of money that will spent by, for and against political candidates. The best it might do is tighten up reporting requirements to give the spending transparency.

And this, we are supposed to believe, is a strict-constructionist view of how the founders would have wanted it. Men who hated the monarchy would have loved government by corporate checkbook. Sure they would have.