Corporate Personhood! Activist Conservative Supreme Court Protects Corporate Freedom to Buy Elections!

You would have never known a liberal Democratic Party even existed after what has taken place since Obama became president. The low information tea party movement advanced health care misinformation, the GOP successfully killed reform while turning Americans against Democrats and the conservative activist Supreme Court opened the floodgates to corporate campaign control. What Democratic Party? Freedom appears to extend the constitutions original meaning governing individuals to on paper artificial entities, corporations.

AP/NY Times- The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that corporations may spend as freely as they like to support or oppose candidates for president and Congress, easing decades-old limits on business efforts to influence federal campaigns.

By a 5-4 vote, the court overturned a 20-year-old ruling that said companies can be prohibited from using money from their general treasuries to produce and run their own campaign ads. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor joined Stevens' dissent, parts of which he read aloud in the courtroom.

''The censorship we now confront is vast in its reach,'' Justice Anthony Kennedy said.

''It's the Super Bowl of bad decisions,'' said Common Cause president Bob Edgar, a former congressman from Pennsylvania.

Strongly disagreeing, Justice John Paul Stevens said in his dissent, ''The court's ruling threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions around the nation. Essentially, five justices were unhappy with the limited nature of the case before us, so they changed the case to give themselves an opportunity to change the law,'' Stevens said.


(NYT-2) He said the majority had committed a grave error in treating corporate speech the same as that of human beings. His decision was joined by the other three members of the court’s liberal wing.

WSJ- Stevens called the majority opinion "a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have…fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt. The notion that the First Amendment dictated [today's ruling] is, in my judgment, profoundly misguided. In the context of election to public office, the distinction between corporate and human speakers is significant. Although they make enormous contributions to our society, corporations are not actually members of it. In a democratic society, the long-standing consensus on the need to limit corporate campaign spending should outweigh the wooden applications of judge-made rules."

Yet to come, Thom Hartmann on the subject and Fox News.



Here's a fair and balance short take on the decision presented by Fox News. Apparently, the tea party movement should love unlimited amount of big money influence, at least according to the freedom loving conservative in this clip. Notice how much time Fox News gave this breaking story at the time.

According to Fred Wertheimer, the founder and president of Democracy 21, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that works to promote campaign finance reform and other political reforms:

Chief Justice Roberts has abandoned the illusory public commitments he made to “judicial modesty” and “respect for precedent” to cast the deciding vote for a radical decision that profoundly undermines our democracy.

The constitutionality of the corporate spending ban was never even raised by the plaintiffs in the lower court consideration of this case. Instead, the justices, on their own, opened up the case to the broader constitutional question, when they could have decided the case on narrower grounds without eliminating more than 100 years of national policy.