SCOTUS Puts ‘Citizens United’ on Steroids

Although the Hobby Lobby decision could be much more far-reaching than Citizens United, Windsor, and overturning the voting act, the case of McCutcheon v. FEC matches Hobby Lobby in impact. Through declaiming “free speech, the U.S. Supreme Court again put democracy up for sale. Its decision struck down the $123,000 two-year limit to campaign contribution limits, $48,600 to all federal candidates and $74,600 to all political committees. The aggregate limits that stopped money laundering schemes in which donors and political parties could evade the cap on donations to individual candidates has been erased.

Now people can donate the maximum per-candidate and per-party to as many sources as they want. One person can now donate $3.6 million directly to candidates and parties in a single election cycle and much more to “independent” groups like Super PACs because of Citizens United. Donated money can legally be redistributed to the races where it is likely to have the most impact.

Some of Citizens United affects:

• The 32 top Super PAC donors who gave $9.9 million each matched the $313 million raised from small donors for both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney of under $200 from 3.7 million people.
• Almost 60 percent of Super PAC funding came from 159 donors, and more than 93 percent of the Super PAC money came in contributions of at least $10,000 from only 3,318 people—0.0011 percent of people in the United States.
• Shel Adelson’s $91.8 million donation is equivalent to the entire net worth of 322,000 average-earning U.S. families.

McCutcheon is worse.

The election cycle limits of $5,200 per candidate and $32,400 per party committee stand, but there is no longer any top limit. Wealthy donors no longer needs to pick and choose among campaigns: they can just fling money everywhere. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) targeted the problem: “I predict again, there will be major scandals in campaign finance contributions that will cause reform. There will be scandal. There’s too much money washing around.”

Reince Priebus, RNC chair, is cheering. House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) praised the Supreme Court. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that he wanted to erase all contribution limits.

The man who won big with the SCOTUS decision is Shaun McCutcheon, owner of Coalmont Electrical Development which makes industrial electrical equipment for coal mines. Fracking, green energy, and believers in the dangers of climate change are hurting his business. Despite the fact that 98 percent of climate scientists understand the dangers of fossil fuels in the changing planet, McCutcheon passed along words from deniers such as S. Fred Singer as his personal beliefs:

“The good news is that science evidence [sic] has made it quite clear that the human contribution to a possible global warming is minor; in fact it cannot even be identified in the data record.”

With more and more evidence against Singer’s position, McCutcheon needs to bribe more people to legislate in his favor, and SCOTUS just gave that ability to him. Each oil, coal, and gas industry executive can spend $312,455,200 in this election to buy lawmakers. That’s a 2,600 percent increase in their legal donations. And it’s a pittance to them. The $150 million that Shel Adelson and his wife donated to GOP PACs last year is the equivalent of $280 to a person worth $50,000. Adelson makes $32 million, more than twice the $150 million, each day for the entire year. 

In 1976, the Supreme Court ruled that the legal basis for upholding campaign finance regulations is to prevent corruption. The Roberts Court takes the position that there are no strings attached to the huge sums of money that wealthy people pay for lawmakers. The majority’s definition of the corrupting “quid pro quo” exists only if a specific result is purchased from a specific legislator—according to five members of the Supreme Court. As in Citizens United, the majority of the court fails to consider “the possibility that an individual who spends large sums may garner ‘influence over or access to’ elected officials or political parties. Once again, Roberts tells Congress that if they want good laws, then they should pass them—knowing full well that the GOP will never try to pass any controls on campaign contributions until it works against them.

J. Gerald Hebert, the executive director of the Campaign Legal Center and one of the nation’s foremost voting rights and campaign finance attorneys, described the ruling as arrogant:

 “The Court today abandoned any pretense of respecting Supreme Court precedent or Congressional expertise on matters of campaign finance when it struck down longstanding federal limits on aggregate contributions to candidates, parties and PACs. Once again, the Roberts Court exhibits its complete ignorance of political realities, or worse, chose to ignore those realities, in striking down laws written by Congress, which is intimately aware of the political corruption that will likely ensue in the wake of this decision.”

As Ari Berman wrote:

“In the past four years, under the leadership of Chief Justice John Roberts, the Supreme Court has made it far easier to buy an election and far harder to vote in one.

“The Court’s conservative majority believes that the First Amendment gives wealthy donors and powerful corporations the carte blanche right to buy an election but that the Fifteenth Amendment does not give Americans the right to vote free of racial discrimination.

“These are not unrelated issues – the same people, like the Koch brothers, who favor unlimited secret money in US elections – are the ones funding the effort to make it harder for people to vote. The net effect is an attempt to concentrate the power of the top 1 percent in the political process and to drown out the voices and votes of everyone else. […]

“A country that expands the rights of the powerful to dominate the political process but does not protect fundamental rights for all citizens doesn’t sound much like a functioning democracy to me.”

Roberts, whose court allowed all states to keep people from voting, will probably never appreciate the irony of his introduction to McCutcheon:  “[t]here is no right more basic in our democracy than the right to participate in electing our political leaders.” 

Media contributes to the dumbing down of people in the United States. Today’s Huffington Post shows how far downhill it has gone since it was sold. The “business” section starts with Starbucks resuming its selling sweetened bread by the slice. This announcement was before GM’s CEO, Mary Barra calling the failure of her company to recall defective cars that killed 303 people in the last 12 years as  “very disturbing.” Following that was the vital information from WSJ that Southwest Airlines is beginning to look just like all the others.

An article on two men saving puppies from a flood is followed by gratuitous celebrity reporting, including “Britney Spears news.” Under “Twitterati” is Justin Bieber’s sage comment, “Why does everyone look like my mom on twitter. lol.” Finish with “how long would you survive the zombie apocalypse,” and you have a diet of reports that can well compete for the most inane Internet entries for the day.

The people who claim that money has no benefit in rulings should consider this news. Wealthy Robert H. Richards IV, who lives off his trust fund, was convicted of raping his three-year-old daughter. After his conviction in 2009, his wife filed another lawsuit charging that he penetrated his daughter with his fingers while masturbating and then molested his infant son. Yet Judge Jan Jurden ruled that the great-grandson of du Pont family patriarch Irenee du Pont would have only probation because he “will not fare well” in prison. As Delaware Public Defender Brendan J. O’Neill said, it is “extremely rare” for someone to fare well in prison. A defense lawyer agreed with the public defender. Michael W. Modica said, “I’ve never heard of the judge saying in general that he is not going to do well. Who thrives in jail?”

This is the kind of money that bought five justices on the U.S. Supreme Court. Today is National Walking Day, the day that the U.S. Supreme Court walked away from the U.S. Constitution—again.