I'm getting complaints about the Government by Judiciary series.
AS YOU CAN HEAR people amazed that Republicans in the Congress, the pundit class, the Republican-fascist media are siding with the murderious dictator Putin as he invades Ukraine in a war that will likely kill tens if not hundreds of thousands, topple a democracy as he tries to reestablish the Soviet Empire - this time without the pretenses of Marxism - there's really nothing amazing about it. The Republican-fascist majority on the Roberts Court were handing the country to him, paving the way for Putin to join other billionaire gangsters, foreign and domestic to put his puppet in place here. And they were told that's what they were doing only to have one of the worst of them lie about it. This account puts it rather well.
Ten years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its disastrous ruling in Citizens United, giving corporations the right to unlimited political spending. Since then, independent groups unrelated to political parties have poured $4.5 billion into federal elections, including almost $1 billion of secret “dark money” that cannot be traced to its source. Raising further concerns, a significant amount of that political spending comes from foreign-influenced U.S. corporations.
Americans are demanding bold reforms to protect elections and make elected leaders more accountable to voters. The good news is that a popular solution exists, and it’s gaining newfound momentum: a ban on election-related spending by foreign-influenced U.S. corporations.
In his 2010 State of the Union address, President Barack Obama issued a dramatic warning about the just-issued Citizens United decision. Standing only feet away from the high court’s justices, Obama predicted that Citizens United would “open the floodgates for special interests — including foreign corporations — to spend without limit in our elections.” Justice Samuel Alito, a member of the Supreme Court’s conservative majority that decided Citizens United, could be seen mouthing the words, “not true.” Obama declared, “I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign entities.”
Unfortunately for our democracy, Obama’s warning was accurate. Americans have witnessed the inglorious rise of super PACs and a deluge of corporate and secret dark money political spending, which have warped our political and policymaking processes. At the same time, the United States has fallen victim to Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, continued foreign interference efforts in advance of the 2020 presidential election, and President Donald Trump’s unconstitutional solicitation of foreign assistance for his re-election.
That was done, with full warning of the consequences by the unelected, court-capture-created Roberts Court through the kind of Government by Judiciary that I've been laying out here using the roadmap to understanding it that Louis Boudin laid in 1931. He would be amazed at how much worse the Court got after that, I cannot imagine he would possibly have imagined a Republican controlled Court undermining American electoral democracy in favor of a Russian imperialist dictator with the full support of a Republican Party under the sway of that Russian dictator's degenerate American puppet. But that's exactly what we got, with the help of the "free press" and such toadies as James Comey.
The Supreme Court as it is now is one of the most dangerous institutions in the United States, its power, self-given, self-expanded, self-unlimited has brought us to where we are now. It was the Congress, especially the House that tried to save democracy here, formerly with the help of elected presidents, the one the Supreme Court, in effect, appointed, George W. Bush and the one who lost the election in 2016 showing how dangerous our Constitution as it remains really is because of the in-specificity and general vagueness of so much of what we are supposed to revere.
What's amazing isn't that I'm attacking the Court and its self-created privileges, what's amazing is that in light of the above record it isn't the universal cry to cut it down to size and save our democracy.
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