A Supreme Victory for Special Interests.

So now, according to a stunning decision by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and his conservative court henchmen, corporations have the same right to free speech as individuals do.

The dissent was read by John Paul Stevens. And he points out that a case regarding the movie Hillary, has been expanded by these right wing justices to essentially push their own right wing political agenda:

He said the majority's "glittering generality" that corporate speech, like individual speech, is protected under the First Amendment was a "conceit" that is "not only inaccurate but also inadequate to justify the court's disposition of this case."

He wrote of his conservative colleagues' "agenda" and said they had transformed a simple case about whether a conservative group's movie about Hillary Rodham Clinton violated McCain-Feingold into a constitutional quandary. "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."

Obama has spoken out forcefully against what he sees as "a green light to a new stampede of special interest money" whilst Republicans cheered this ruling, which gives some indication of just how political this decision is.

"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," the president said in a statement.

John Dean gives his opinion:

Chief Justice John Roberts, along with Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Anthony Kennedy (who wrote the court’s opinion), have gone out of their way to further obliterate serious efforts to reform out-of-control campaign spending—spending that conspicuously distorts democracy in favor of those who can buy political influence. This ruling is of the same judical activism ilk that produced Bush v. Gore, not to mention the ensuing eight years of a disastrous Bush/Cheney presidency from which the nation has yet to recover.

It is striking that the Bush administration, which often spoke of the danger of people creating laws from the bench, actually put in place the people who have gone on to do that very thing.

Slate comment here on what we have just witnessed, as they describe an exhausted Stevens reading his dissent:

But you can plainly see the weariness in Stevens eyes and hear it in his voice today as he is forced to contend with a legal fiction that has come to life today, a sort of constitutional Frankenstein moment when corporate speech becomes even more compelling than the "voices of the real people" who will be drowned out. Even former Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist once warned that treating corporate spending as the First Amendment equivalent of individual free speech is "to confuse metaphor with reality." Today that metaphor won a very real victory at the Supreme Court. And as a consequence some very real corporations are feeling very, very good.

Corporations, as Stevens rightly pointed out, "are not human beings" and "corporations have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires." And yet this court has now ruled that their corporate spending is the First Amendment equivalent of individual free speech.

As if my voice and that of a corporation as large as Coca Cola can possibly be both as loud.

It's possibly the most astonishing act of judicial activism in American history. And it's come from the people appointed to the bench by a government which always decried this very thing.

UPDATE:

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Here's Rachel Maddow on what we have just witnessed. As she points out, Obama has had great difficulty selling his healthcare plan because there has been so much disinformation put out regarding death panels and other nonsense.

This ruling will now allow corporations to spend unlimited amounts, possibly billions, to influence the political process.

UPDATE II:

Another thing which strikes me here is that, much as O'Reilly and Beck like to harp on about the "radical left", in the US there really is no such thing as far as I can see. The Democrats are always obsessed with governing from the centre, as Obama's attitude to the healthcare debate amply demonstrates.

In US politics, it appears to me, that the real radicals are almost always on the right of the political spectrum. This is yet another example which bears that theory out.

Tags: bush v. gore, campaign finance, corporation, john dean, john roberts, justice reform, scalia, supreme court