Corporate money is the diseased life-blood of American politics; it carries its cancerous spores to all extremities.
The Supreme Court really should be named the Unbeseem Court. Without any Constitutional justification whatsoever, as Justice Holmes, dissenting in Lochner, pointed out, the Court has taken its task to be the constitutionalization of a totally immoral, rapacious, economic system instead of the promotion of justice, domestic tranquility, the general welfare, and the blessings of liberty. Consider this short list of examples:
· It is legal for a vendor to sell a product which does not work but illegal for a buyer to purchase a product with a check that does not work.
· During a corporate bankruptcy, the company's assets are distributed first to other companies and last, if anything remains, to employees and even people who have obtained judgments from courts for company wrongdoing.
· If a homebuyer who has paid regularly on his mortgage for 20 and even more years, who has paid the property taxes and the property's insurance, is forced to default for no fault of his own, such as a death, serious illness, or economic collapse, the mortgage holder gets to keep all the money and gets the house too, transferring the risk that investors are supposed to bear entirely to the buyer.
· Entire industries can uniformly require consumers to accept contracts that require them to relinquish their legal and even Constitutional rights.
· And those industries can also uniformly require consumers to accept contracts that the companies can change in any way at any time for any reason without gaining the consent of the consumer. Has a consumer ever had such a right?
· Companies can collect personal information on people without their consent yet are allowed to keep company secrets even those which hide wrongdoing, as when a civil case is settled and the company involved is allowed to not admit to any wrongdoing and the court seals the detailed record.
For more, see my piece How the Government Cheats Ordinary Taxpayers, but any astute reader can add items to this list.
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Although Stevens has demolished the Court's rationale, there is one important inconsistency that he overlooks. Kennedy, in the majority opinion, quotes Douglas in United States v. Automobile Workers: “Under our Constitution it is We The People who are sovereign. The people have the final say. The legislators are their spokesmen. The people determine through their votes the destiny of the nation. It is therefore important—vitally important—that all channels of communications be open to them during every election, that no point of view be restrained or barred, and that the people have access to the views of every group in the community.” But there is a more important conclusion that follows from the first three sentences of this quotation and the Court's action.
Look at it this way. (1) The people are sovereign; they have the final say. (2) The legislators are their spokesmen. (3) The sovereign people have said on numerous occasions through their spokesmen that corporate financing of electioneering must be limited. Yet (4) the Court rejects such limitations which nullifies the people's sovereignty. Instead of the people having the final say, the final say is the Court's.
If the Court has the final say, then democracy in America is a sham. It simply does not exist and the Constitution has been subverted. No two ways about it: If the people don't have the final say, the people are not sovereign. The Court has merely allowed the people to vote and the legislature to enact laws only to the extent that those laws don't offend the sensibilities of the Court's members.
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