Make no mistake. Our nation’s democratic foundations took a blow last month with a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that took the lid off corporate campaign spending. It remains to be seen precisely how the 5-4 ruling will play out. Be assured, it won’t be pretty. To cite Justice John Paul Stevens’ dissenting opinion: “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.”
The decision struck down a major portion of a 2002 campaign-finance reform law by saying it violates the free-speech right of corporations to engage in the public debate of political issues. The idea that corporations have a First Amendment right to spend money and advocate political and policy positions during election campaigns, just as individuals do, is disingenuous. It continues the false notion that money equals free speech and that putting limits on the financing of political campaigns is unconstitutional. However, what history shows is that money drowns out free speech by limiting political influence to the increasingly smaller circles that can harness huge amounts of money.
Meanwhile, big money has already so eroded our political system that few seem able to imagine, citing Abraham Lincoln’s words, how a “government of the people, by the people, for the people” might function.
Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito (incidentally, all Catholics) were in the majority. Stevens’ dissent was joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor.
The constitutional law part of the case that the court majority addressed was the question of how the federal law regulating corporate financial electioneering fits with the original meaning of the First Amendment’s freedom of speech clause. The clause is brief and addresses “speech,” which is something that obviously can only be made by people. There is no further constitutional text or direct history explaining the meaning of this clause. In the end, this ruling qualifies as writing legislation from the judicial bench, the very act conservatives claim to deplore, unless, of course, it fits their ends.
