American Maggie

The national media, it seems, is still fuming over the recent Supreme Court ruling in FEC v. Citizens United. Writing in last week’s Washington Post, E.J. Dionne said, “The Supreme Court is now dominated by a highly politicized conservative majority intent on working its will, even if that means ignoring precedents and the wishes of the elected branches of government.”

So what precedents is Dionne referring to? Those would be Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce and McConnell v. FEC. Both addressed corporate spending in elections, and both upheld restrictions that limited said spending in support of or against any specific candidate.

The 1990 Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce case came about when the Chamber of Commerce wanted to sponsor a newspaper advertisement that supported a candidate for state office. They argued that because the chamber was technically a “non-profit ideological corporation,” it should be exempt from any restrictions.

When the case made its way to the Supreme Court however, the restrictions were maintained. In his majority opinion, Justice Thurgood Marshall found that in practice, the Chamber of Commerce more resembled a business than a political organization, and thus was bound to state campaign finance laws.

The second precedent, McConnell v. FEC, was a 2002 suit challenging the constitutionality of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, otherwise known as McCain-Feingold. Like the Michigan case 12 years earlier, the Supreme Court upheld McCain-Feingold, specifically the portion that prohibited corporate spending during elections.

The decisions in these two precedents are now, for the most part, void; something that Dionne and his progressive colleagues mourn. This is where the hypocrisy comes in. Would Dionne be singing the same tune if media corporations and newspapers like his own Washington Post were subject to the same standards and restrictions that bound other corporations?

In each Supreme Court ruling and McCain-Feingold, media corporations were exempt from any restrictions; a fact Dionne manages to leave out of his scathing criticism. If he had been asked about free speech during the 2008 election, Dionne would surely have touted its importance, while the Post and numerous other outlets championed candidate Barack Obama.

What’s even worse, however, is the fact that outrage over the Supreme Court decision has now transferred into voracious attacks on Justice Samuel Alito, who vividly displayed his disagreement when President Obama said the court “reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests –- including foreign corporations –- to spend without limit in our elections.”

Of Alito’s reaction, Dionne says that “His was the honest reaction of a judicial activist who believes he has the obligation to impose his version of right reason on the rest of us.” Judicial activist? Since when does adhering to the part of the First Amendment that says “Congress shall make no law…” warrant the label of judicial activist? But even more than that- Alito was right! Obama’s statement on foreign corporation is provably false.

Moreover, Dionne and others like him seem to think that the decision in Citizens v. FEC is wrong simply because it went against precedent. Should all cases then be decided a certain way simply for the sake of sticking to precedent? If that were the case in 1954, then the Supreme Court never would have ruled in Brown v Board of Education that desegregated schools were wrong.

They would have ruled based on the fact that in the 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson, the highest court in the land decided that segregation in public places was constitutional. From then on, the doctrine of “separate but equal” reigned supreme. That is, until the same court later reversed it- and courageously so.

The First Amendment is as clear cut as they come; there’s no room for misinterpretation. Free speech is free speech, no matter where it comes from. But if corporate spending in elections is such a big problem, then John Stossel has an easy solution: “There is a simple way to get corporate money out of politics: get the government out of our lives and economic affairs. If government has no favors to sell, no one will spend money trying to win them.”

******

Amanda Carey is the Editor of The Tiger Town Observer at Clemson University.  She has previously worked for Robert Novak and has been published in Reason Magazine and The American Spectator.

You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.