It's too bad they can't fire back, because Obama was completely off base with that remark.

2/1/2010 10:27:56 AM

It's not like the media is being any kinder over the SCOTUS decision... probably because it was a pretty bad one... and they should expect some criticism when they make a 5 to 4 controversial decision in favor increased corporate influence over elections.

2/1/2010 3:23:15 PM

i still dont understand how you can possibly think it was the wrong decision or that its going to increase corporate involvement in politics. They're already active in politics, they just have to launder their funds via non-profits.

2/1/2010 3:26:16 PM

Quote :

"It's not like the media is being any kinder over the SCOTUS decision... probably because it was a pretty bad one... and they should expect some criticism when they make a 5 to 4 controversial decision in favor increased corporate influence over elections."

So if I want to release a movie 45 days before an election that happens to criticize a candidate, it should be illegal for me to do so? Do you really want to go down that road?

2/1/2010 3:29:18 PM

Some of the concerns mentioned here I agree with. Rather than try to recreate the formatting I'm trying out a screen shot. May not come out crisp, but should still be easily legible. The third point in particular was a strong one I thought. (maybe this conversation should be carried on in the campaign finance thread?)

2/1/2010 4:02:57 PM

^ all those arguments boil down to whaaa i dont like this. Not "well heres why this is unconstitutional". Explain why an individual has the right to free speech, but when that individual and a like minded individual get together they lose their right to free speech?

The argument for the ruling is that groups of people retain the same rights as their members. What is your argument against that?

2/1/2010 4:34:07 PM

Those points all seem insignificant to me. The job of a justice is not to determine the policy implications of a given ruling. They're supposed to read the constitution and determine if the government has made a law or done something unconstitutional. The constitution doesn't need to be interpreted. It's written in plain English. It says what the federal government can do, and says that anything else is dealt with by the states or the people.

1) Advocating "honoring precedent" doesn't mean a wholesale acceptance of every Supreme Court decision ever. I guarantee each of the justices could cite examples of past rulings that they disagreed with. It's the job of the court to overturn previous rulings if necessary. In no way was this ruling judicial activism. The only "activism" was the passing of laws that restricted individual freedom in the first place.

2) I don't know if this ruling does "level the playing field" for anyone, but who gives a damn. If you want to release a movie that criticizes a certain politician, go for it. This is the United States. Read the first amendment. If this "opens the door" for corporations to donate money without their shareholders permission, then those shareholders can vote with their money. The bottom line is that we shouldn't be abridging freedom of speech, which is precisely what this is.

3) Ah, ye olde "compelling state interest." If state interest ever conflicts with your constitutional rights, you can bet that your rights will get thrown out first. It isn't the Supreme Court's job to fight corruption. Their job is simple, yet they fail horribly on a regular basis.

4) Foreign corporations and terrorists? Really? Candidates get shouted down now as soon as a Stormfront member donates 25 bucks and they don't return it immediately. I don't think an Al Qaeda donation will be a ringing endorsement. In any case, this ruling changes nothing concerning foreign corporations. They're still banned from directly contributing.

As is so often the case, modern liberalism is completely detached from liberalism. Suddenly, when political concerns come into the mix, it's acceptable to restrict an individual's (or group of individuals) right to free speech.

2/1/2010 4:40:55 PM

Why can't corporations cast a vote?

2/1/2010 4:44:00 PM

Because a corporation isn't an individual. It's a group of individuals. It's like saying "why can't a marriage cast a vote" or "why can't the chess club cast a vote." Each person gets to vote.

The whole argument from "corporations don't have rights because they aren't an individual" is incredibly stupid, to me. People don't suddenly lose their rights when they form a corporation. The government can't just take whatever it wants from corporations because "it" isn't an individual. Anything it takes from that corporation is coming from individuals.

2/1/2010 4:48:03 PM

Quote :

"The job of a justice is not to determine the policy implications of a given ruling. They're supposed to read the constitution and determine if the government has made a law or done something unconstitutional."

That was true in the beginning, but hundreds of years of new laws and precedences makes this MUCH more complicated than that. If you read the decision on this case, there is significant consideration for precedences, and what the intent of certain phrases was, and what "free speech" really means in the context of decisions along similar issues in the past.

Quote :

"The constitution doesn't need to be interpreted. It's written in plain English. "

This is not true at all. It definitely needs to be interpreted, and like many legal documents, it's written with an ambiguity that's supposed to be filled in with new knowledge and deference to the society of the time.

Quote :

"It says what the federal government can do, and says that anything else is dealt with by the states or the people."

If it were really this straight forward, then people wouldn't have been arguing over this for that past hundreds of years.

2/1/2010 5:10:27 PM

Quote :

"This is not true at all. It definitely needs to be interpreted, and like many legal documents, it's written with an ambiguity that's supposed to be filled in with new knowledge and deference to the society of the time."

It's not ambiguous. There was an amendment process included in the case that the constitution needed to be changed. It doesn't use mysterious language. It's very easy to understand. The founders didn't want the meaning of each line to be up for debate, because they knew that if it was, it could be morphed into whatever the people in power at that time wanted it to be.

Quote :

"If it were really this straight forward, then people wouldn't have been arguing over this for that past hundreds of years."

"People" want to make sweeping federal laws that force all citizens to live in a certain way. The founders understood that centralized power has a tendency to become corrupt, and that since the United States (even then) covered a pretty broad geographic area, one set of laws would not work for the entire country. That's why you don't have laws like "don't murder people" in the Constitution. That's left to the states to work out. You want laws to be made at the state and local level, because it allows people to leave for a state or city that has less oppressive laws. When a law is made on the federal level, all you can do is leave the country. Federalism wasn't an accident. It's a pretty good system, and people have spent the past couple hundred years trying to find ways to bypass the constitution for their own personal gain.

Now, I understand that the political establishment doesn't want federalism. Republicans, Democrats, they're all the same. They want centralized power, plain and simple. How else can we force our morality on every single person in the country? It'd be such a chore to strip individual's rights on a state by state basis. It's best to do it in one clean sweep through an act of congress.

[Edited on February 1, 2010 at 5:34 PM. Reason : ]

2/1/2010 5:32:41 PM

They have not been arguing that long, moron. They have been arguing over it since the early 1990s. Before that, it was obvious to everyone that people don't give up their right to speech/press just because they have incorporated.

Quote :

"Why can't corporations cast a vote?"

Because they are not people? Only people have rights, and that includes shareholders.

2/1/2010 5:47:39 PM

Quote :

"The argument for the ruling is that groups of people retain the same rights as their members."

ok...? if this is true, why can't groups of people cast a vote?

[Edited on February 1, 2010 at 7:02 PM. Reason : .]

2/1/2010 7:01:52 PM

Quote :

"They have not been arguing that long, moron. They have been arguing over it since the early 1990s. Before that, it was obvious to everyone that people don't give up their right to speech/press just because they have incorporated. "

This is blatantly wrong.

It was going back to at least the 60s (or 70s?) where laws against corporations being able to put out certain ads within a certain timeframe of an election were created. And there were similar cases decades before that the 60s ruling was based on. And in any case, i was just referring to people arguing about what the constitution means.

2/1/2010 7:46:53 PM

Quote :

"ok...? if this is true, why can't groups of people cast a vote?"

I'm confused. Where did you get the idea they couldn't? It has nothing to do with this case, but last I checked, if a corporation's shareholders wanted to foot the bill for their CEO (or any other agent) to go vote, they can. I suspect many large companies do just this, as their management are probably driving around in company cars with corporate expense accounts. Some of management probably lives in a different state from where they are registered to vote, and might take the corporate jet to their home come election time. What the hell does this have to do with freedom of speech?

2/1/2010 9:21:30 PM

If GE, collectively, has the same rights as it's members, why am I not to believe that GE is its own "person." And why can't a vote be cast by the "person" General Electric? Not the CEO of GE, but GE, the sovereign entity with rights.

It's like shareholders are the mechanical lions from Voltron. They all get a vote. But then, they assemble into Voltron who becomes its own entity, has rights, and gets a vote.

Look, I'm not arguing for or against anything here. I'm legitimately asking. Maybe I'm retarded, but that's fine with me.

[Edited on February 1, 2010 at 10:18 PM. Reason : .]

2/1/2010 10:14:53 PM

You're not retarded, I recognize the concepts are hard to grasp (Although it is not the case that 4 out of 5 justices don't get it, their arguments were all based upon legislating from the bench: enforcing the constitution in this instance would have bad outcomes, they argue, therefore the text and original understanding of that text should be ignored).

To think about this, it helps me to look past the abstractions. Yes, GE is a corporation made up of shareholders and employees. But in brutal reality GE is an intangible concept, it does not exist outside the heads of its stake holders. If you showed GE to a dog, it would see a building, some people, maybe a few desks. As such, when a corporation speaks, here is what is happening:

First, human beings decide to start a corporation. Ignoring the abstraction, a bunch of people named shareholders collectively give their money to a CEO et al. and tell them to manage it for them for whatever reason (profits, influence, activism, etc). That CEO et al. decides the best way to achieve the goals of the shareholders is to make a political movie railing against a politician named Hillary Clinton. The CEO et al. takes the shareholder money and contracts a fourth party, say someone that owns some movie making equipment, to make the movie and distribute it using said money.

Now, at which step in this story did anyone exceed their human rights? Well, who here is actually doing the talking? The only person the audience (or the dog from earlier) sees is the filmmaker. The question is whether that filmmaker or the actors he hired lose their right to speak just because they are being paid to say it by shareholders.

As such, the law is not bunk because it is silencing corporations, or even shareholders. It is bunk because it is silencing real, actual, physical, sentient, walk up and say hi, human beings, such as the filmmaker from my example, whose paychecks just happen to be signed by a CEO.

2/1/2010 11:33:35 PM

I am not sure where I stand on this. on one hand, I dont like the idea of big business 'buying' campaigns...on the other hand, I do agree that corporations should be able to spend their money on whatever they like.

I do know that I would rather know what corporations are contributing to which causes transparently, rather than through an unrecognizable non-profit or the like. that way, more people know what is going on.

2/2/2010 9:07:30 AM

^ quite true. and as this ruling will likely divert money away from lobbyists to pay for expensive advocacy advertising on national television, it will by definition increase disclosure, as even those of us watching C-Span don't see the lobbyists working, but anyone who watches television will see the advertising front and center.

2/2/2010 11:58:33 AM