IN his series of brilliant exposures of the corruption of the Supreme Court and the federal courts through dark money and manipulation by the super-rich, Sheldon Whitehouse noted that while he was sitting in his house, looking out the windows on the pond and trees while contemplating and reviewing that record of corruption, he could see the effects of the wind though he couldn't feel the wind which is how he could be 100% confident that the wind was blowing. I think it's a very good metaphor for the presence of dark money and corruption, because of the effects it has in rigging the law, legal proceedings, legal decisions up to and including that list of 80 5-4 Supreme Court cases making things so corrupt, the reason I said that the Supreme Court was the major source of corruption in our politics among the three branches. I have noted that it is the branch most remote from the direct consent of We The People, its lofty and lousy priesthood of black robed aristocrats and other thugs able to do terrible things to us based on nice sounding, or at least obscure language.
I think I don't have to see every bit of direct evidence that the ACLU, as lawyers so often do, have come up with some of that nice sounding language to ease the off chance that they feel many qualms about their role in bringing about some of the worst of those split decisions that have damaged, perhaps destroyed egalitarian democracy, I don't have to see the receipts of money for amicus briefs and actions drafted to believe, completely that the ACLU has acted on behalf of those billionaires and millionaires because they've got deep pockets and are ready to pay a little to get a lot.
The effects that lead me to place the ACLU right in the heart of that dark money mold that is killing democracy are there and has been there for decades, as is their obviously corrupting effects of those "free speech" "free press" rulings that have gotten us the lies that gave us the biggest liar in the history of the America presidency and the liars who control the Senate, as I said if they weren't doing it for the money, seeing the effects their reasoning and words have gotten, the explanation isn't that the ACLU is a corrupt con game, suckering daffy liberals and lunatic leftists into supporting what the billionaires and millionaires won't fund, if they aren't getting that graft from the super-rich, it's that they're incredibly stupid or as stupid as the Trump supporters. Though I think anyone in the public who supports it from better motives, after the last several decades has to be as uniformed and stupid as an October undecided voter.
That corruption has even led some of those who were thick as thieves with them on things like tobacco advertising to be horrified at it. And that's not a new thing. As with the 1990s article by the eminent investigative reporter Morton MIntz, there was an article in, of all places, The Nation on March 21, 2012 by former ACLU lawyer Burt Neuborne:
I’ve marched proudly behind the ACLU’s First Amendment flag for almost fifty years. On campaign finance reform, however, I believe the ACLU’s adamant opposition to limits on massive campaign spending by the superrich gets the constitutional issues wrong. Limiting the power of a few individuals and corporations that exercise disproportionate political influence solely because of their enormous wealth has nothing to do with censoring a speaker’s message; it is desperately needed to preserve the integrity of the egalitarian democracy the First Amendment was designed to protect.
The campaign finance mess rests on three erroneous arguments the ACLU advanced in the 1976 Buckley v. Valeo case before the Supreme Court: (1) that spending unlimited amounts of money in an electoral campaign is “pure” speech entitled to the highest level of First Amendment protection; (2) that any attempt to equalize political power by limiting massive electoral spending by the superrich is flatly unconstitutional; and (3) that “independent” expenditures on behalf of a candidate (as opposed to contributions to the candidate) are incapable of corrupting the democratic process. In 2010, in Citizens United, five Supreme Court justices made the Buckley system even worse by ruling that corporations have the same electoral free-speech rights as individuals, which unleashed a torrent of electoral spending by corporations seeking a financial return on their political investments.
I confess to having supported the ACLU position in Buckley. As the corrosive effects on democracy of uncontrolled campaign spending became increasingly clear, however, I joined several former ACLU leaders—Norman Dorsen, Aryeh Neier, John Shattuck and Mort Halperin—in opposing the organization’s campaign finance position. We have argued, before the Supreme Court and the ACLU board, that spending massive amounts of money during an election campaign is not “pure” speech when the spending level is so high that it drowns out competing voices by repeating the same message over and over at higher decibel levels; that a compelling interest in equality justifies preventing wealthy speakers from buying up an unfair proportion of the speech in settings like courtrooms, classrooms, town meetings, presidential debates and elections; that massive campaign spending by “independent” entities poses a serious risk of postelection corruption; and that corporations lack the attributes of conscience and human dignity that justify free-speech protection.
I believe that that list of the repentant leaders didn't include the more recently departed in 2012, or then current ones, who would seem to be all-in on this enabling of the super-rich to buy elections and to put Republican-fascist Supreme Court majority in place who will then destroy any of that less seamy legislation that managed to get trough after a huge effort by the real American left. Since the Rehnquist and Roberts courts have been destroying the high-points of that progress, most of all and most effective in having the same deadly political effect as Buckley v Valeo and the subsequent weaponized rulings attacking electoral democracy, they gutted the Voting Rights Act.
Like a true believer in the dangerous rule by the court and magical thinking about how egalitarian democracy can work Neuborne goes from a realistic rejection of the ACLU campaign to free the billionaires and millionaires to corrupt the electorate to panglossian idiocy that believes with all it's secular heart that magic is going to happen, and throught the agency of some of the members of the same Court, even some of the liberals being relied on fully bought into the ACLU "free speech" language as they are supposed to fix it.
We’ll keep repeating those arguments. The shift of a single vote on the Supreme Court will make them law one day. But we needn’t wait for a new Court. The State of Montana has leveled a powerful challenge to Citizens United that is making its way to the Court. Since 1912, in an effort to shield its democracy from a takeover by out-of-state mining interests, Montana has banned corporate political spending. When the Montana Supreme Court recently stubbornly upheld the corporate electioneering ban in the teeth of Citizens United, corporations asked the US Supreme Court to overturn the Montana Court without a hearing. Instead, the justices temporarily stayed the Montana law and invited the parties to file papers discussing whether the case should be accepted for full-scale review. In reluctantly voting to stay the Montana statute even temporarily, justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer asserted that Citizens United should be reconsidered because massive “independent” spending in the 2012 presidential election has undercut the assumption that such spending is incapable of corrupting democracy. The absurdity of the fiction that election winners will ignore huge debts owed to wealthy supporters who have spent millions to get them elected is now apparent even to the Supreme Court. In Caperton v. A.T. Massey Coal Co. (2009), the Court recognized that massive independent spending by a litigant to elect a member of the West Virginia Supreme Court risked influencing his postelection rulings, requiring the judge to step down in cases involving his electoral sugar daddy. Step one in untangling the current mess is persuading the Supreme Court that in light of the experience in the 2012 presidential election, unlimited independent campaign expenditures pose a significant risk of postelection corruption of elected legislators and executive officials, as well as elected judges.
I certainly don't need to point out this week that Ruth Bader Ginsburg died and is about to be replaced with someone, chosen by the dark money backed Federalist Society, someone who is reasonably considered to subscribe to ideological positions that can reasonably believe she will come out to the right of Antonin Scalia, so give up that pipe dream. Oh and, I won't build suspense, those cases, the Montana case, American Tradition Partnership v. Bullock was reversed without hearing arguments, 5-4 reaffirming Citizens United, I would imagine it was one of the 80 5-4s cited by Sheldon Whitehouse to show the influence of dark money on the court. And, in light of how the rest of Neuborne's argument puts his money on Anthony Kennedy, one of the 5 in that choice to overturn the decision of the Montana Supreme Court, without hearing arguments (part of the "shadow docket" a major part of the corrupt Court practices also mentioned this week), I have to ask is there anyone more clueless about how things work than an ACLU lawyer?
Second, in Citizens United Justice Anthony Kennedy responded to the argument that corporations lack the attributes of conscience and human dignity needed for free-speech protection by insisting that First Amendment protection does not depend on the speaker’s identity. As long as a speaker is generating speech of value to voter/hearers, Kennedy argued, the speech itself enjoys protection. Like Yeats (and the Eagles), Justice Kennedy declined to separate “the dancer from the dance.” The Court has swept away that prop for Citizens United. In Bluman v. FEC, a Canadian graduate of an American law school working at a New York law firm and an Israeli citizen working as a medical resident argued that the Congressional ban on independent electoral spending by lawful resident aliens violates the First Amendment. In January all nine justices rejected the resident aliens’ First Amendment claim without even issuing an opinion. Frankly, it isn’t surprising that the justices disposed of Bluman without an opinion. You just cannot write a principled opinion distinguishing corporate speakers from resident alien speakers without jettisoning Kennedy’s insistence that the speaker’s identity doesn’t matter. Step two in untangling the campaign finance mess is to recognize that after Bluman, the identity of the speaker matters a good deal. Bluman makes it much easier to question whether corporations, lacking the attributes of human dignity, should be treated as protected First Amendment speakers, especially when more than a century ago the Supreme Court denied them the Fifth Amendment right to remain silent in Hale v. Henkel, precisely because corporations lack the attributes of human dignity.
Oh, yeah, right, because Kennedy "declined to separate "the dancer from the dance," there was every reason to believe that as strictly rational beings the Republican-fascist majority, even eight years ago, was reliably going to see the error of its ways. Two elections cycle later, Trump's not only getting but openly inviting foreign money for his campaign - his "free speech" and the debacle the ACLU was in on bringing us to, Neubourne's well trained legal mind is full of shit.
Any liberal who gives money to the ACLU is a sucker and a chump. It is an integral part of the dark money network, maybe not one that will reasonably make one of Sheldon Whitehouse's charts, but it might be the most useful of all of them to the billionaire-millionaire effort to turn the United States from a prospective egalitarian democracy into a gangster governed hell hole.
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