I'm still huffing about last week's U.S. Supreme Court decision effectively taking the lid off corporate campaign spending. Some people who follow these matters more closely than do I think the ruling won't make matters much worse than they already are. Okay, maybe they are right; I suspect they are not. But who knows?
But I do want to share with you a few paragraphs from the great, and apparently, soon to retire, Justice John Paul Stevens who wrote for the dissenters:
Today’s decision is backwards in many senses. It elevates the majority’s agenda over the litigants’ submissions, facial attacks over as-applied claims, broad constitutional theories over narrow statutory grounds, individual dissenting opinions over precedential holdings, assertion over tradition, absolutism over empiricism, rhetoric over reality. ... At bottom, the Court’s opinion is thus a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt. It is a strange time to repudiate that common sense. While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.
Thank you, Justice Stevens, for supporting values that once set our nation apart from many others.
