Will Supreme Court unleash corporate political spending?

The anti-democratic bloc on the U.S. Supreme Court is poised to open the floodgates on corporate spending in political campaigns.

Chief Justice John Roberts has been joined by Justices Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, plus swing voter Anthony Kennedy, in signaling the likely 5-4 overturn of the century-old judicial ban on direct corporate spending in elections.

The case before the court is Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. Instead of ruling on the merits of the case, the Roberts bloc used it to re-open two previously-decided campaign financing cases. And they specifically directed the lawyers in the case to make new arguments, addressing whether existing limits on political spending by corporations should be rendered unconstitutional.

Jim Hightower, who devotes the September issue of his Hightower Lowdown newsletter to the issue, warns of what’s coming.

The cases that the Roberts bloc wants reopened declare that Congress and the states can ban executives from using corporate treasuries to support or oppose political candidates. To overturn these cases, Hightower warns, “would be tantamount to imposing corporate rule on America.”

“The Roberts clique would, in one abrupt blow, reverse more than 200 years of broad public agreement that corporate interests should be subjugated to the public interest,” Hightower says.

The Constitution guarantees the rights of “the people,” but makes no mention of corporations and creates no corporate rights. Corporations, Hightower emphasizes, “are inherently anti-democratic artifices of the wealthy elite.”

Thomas Jefferson expressed the prevailing view of the founders in 1816, when he declared the need to “crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”

Corporations, writes Adam Cohen in The New York Times, “have enormous treasuries, and there are a lot of things they want from the government, many of which clash with the public interest.

“If the ban is struck down, corporations may soon be writing large checks to the same elected officials whom they are asking to give them bailouts, or to remove health-and-safety regulations from their factories, or to insert customized loopholes in the tax code.”

“The founders of this nation,” The New York Times declared editorially, “knew just what they were doing when they drew a line between legally created economic entities and living, breathing human beings. The court should stick to that line.”

-- Will Parry