The Least Dangerous Branch?

 
Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission will go down in infamy - unless we all get completely rolled over by the corporate steamrollers a 5 member majority of the Supreme Court has licensed to hit the roads.


The White House promptly declared:

With its ruling today, the Supreme Court has given a green light to a new stampede of special interest money in our politics. It is a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans. This ruling gives the special interests and their lobbyists even more power in Washington--while undermining the influence of average Americans who make small contributions to support their preferred candidates.

That's why I am instructing my Administration to get to work immediately with Congress on this issue. We are going to talk with bipartisan Congressional leaders to develop a forceful response to this decision. The public interest requires nothing less.

They are going to "talk with bi-partisan Congressional leaders".  Like who?  John McCain, I suppose, whose campaign is flooding Arizona with robo-calls from Scott Brown - the new Anti-Kennedy Senator from Massachusetts.  Certainly not Mitch McConnell - Minority Leader and relentless opponent of campaign finance reform.  In fact who among the Republican representatives does not think that unrestricted corporate "independent" spending will benefit Republican candidates much more than the trickle of union spending will benefit Democrats.


Hope is hard to find these days.  Obama's vision of hope dissolved into earnest pretty please and let's make a deal - which has been falling on deaf ears.  In any event it is hard to see that anything other than a change in the court's composition will accomplish much.  A change that would likely have to await  the now less likely event of a second Obama term.  The language of Justice Anthony Kennedy, embracing with Hugo Black-like absolutism free speech for corporations makes clear that the majority will not hesitate to strike down any restrictions of which they (and their acolytes in the District and Circuit Courts) disapprove:

Legislatures may have enacted bans on corporate expenditures believing that those bans were constitutional. This is not a compelling interest for stare decisis. If it were, legislative acts could prevent us from overruling our own precedents, thereby interfer-ing with our duty “to say what the law is.” Marbury v. Madison, 1 Cranch 137, 177 (1803).