The Supreme Court Reaffirms Its Terrible "Citizens United" Decision

(The drawing above is from the website Social Keith.)

A couple of years ago, the United States Supreme Court made a decision that has had a very negative effect on the electoral system in this country. It was Citizens United vs. Federal Elections Commission, and it said the government could not limit the amount of money that individuals, corporations, or other entities can independently spend in an election. Sine then, rich individuals and corporations have poured many millions into super-PACs designed to support individual candidate campaigns.

These super-PACs were not supposed to be able to strategize with the candidate or his campaign organization, but that all went out the window this last weekend when Willard Mitt Romney invited big donors, including some who were heading up super-PACs (like Karl Rove), to a retreat to plan election strategy. Now it seems like there are no rules, and it looks like the rich will be able to pump much more money into this year's election than ordinary citizens (giving them a larger voice in the electoral process).

Many people hoped that at least one Supreme Court justice would realize what a big mistake they had made and change his position on the matter (since it was only a 5-4 decision). The decision could have been corrected in another case about campaign money and election spending. And it looked like a perfect case was going to the Supreme Court -- American Tradition Partnership vs. Montana. The state of Montana had passed a law that prevented corporations from spending any money to support or oppose a political candidate, and the law was appealed to the Supreme Court.

The Montana Supreme Court upheld the law, saying it does not violate the First Amendment (which guarantees the right of free speech). But sadly, The U.S. Supreme Court, instead of coming to their senses, doubled down on their Citizens United decision -- and they overturned the Montana Supreme Court decision. They reaffirmed that they believe corporations are people and money is speech -- and limiting the amount of money a corporation can spend is a denial of free speech.

It is now clear that there are only two ways to overturn this awful Supreme Court decision -- either replace one or more of the conservative justices with someone who believes in democracy and free elections, or pass a constitutional amendment. The easiest way would be to re-elect the president this November, and give him enough Senate Democrats to get some progressive justices appointed and approved. But if we need to go the amendment route, then so be it. But somehow this must be changed.

Here is the Supreme Court decision.