http://www.theonion.com/video/landma...ans-cra,35707/US currency finally achieves universal suffrage
Unintended consequences...
Mega-Donors Are Now More Important Than Most Politicians
by Peter Beinart at the Atlantic
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/...ors_picks=true"SNIP.....................
It’s time the press starts behaving accordingly. The media, for the most part, still treats elected officials as the key players in our political process. They get most of the scrutiny. Mega-donors, by contrast, are permitted a substantial degree of anonymity. Now that must change. If Adelson or the Koch brothers or their liberal equivalents can single-handedly shape presidential campaigns and congressional majorities, their pet concerns and ideological quirks deserve more journalistic attention than do those of most members of congress. It’s no longer enough to have one reporter covering the “money and politics” beat. Special correspondents should be assigned to cover key mega-donors, and should work doggedly to make their private influence public.
What Mother Jones proved by exposing Mitt Romney’s now-infamous 47 percent comment in 2012, and Huffington Post proved by revealing Barack Obama’s “cling to guns or religion” line in 2008, is that politicians offer their benefactors a candor they would never offer the public at large. This gap between the private and public campaigns must be closed. Every time a mega-donor hosts a fundraiser for a politician, journalists should do everything they legally and ethically can to find out what transpired. When television stations and op-ed pages give Beltway pseudo-scholars a platform, they should identify the mega-donors who pay their salaries. It’s relevant that Adelson, who helps fund the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies—a hawkish think tank whose scholars say new sanctions will help avert war with Iran—has called for nuking that country. It’s relevant that the Koch brothers fund some of the country’s fiercest climate-change deniers while Koch Industries ranks among the nation’s top air polluters.
Big donors will likely fund all this publicity unpleasant. Most would rather shape public policy in private. But the press has an obligation to follow power, to explain how our political system actually works, not to hew to a civics-class fantasy that less and less resembles reality. Since the Roberts Court is dismantling the legal obstacles that prevent America’s 0.1 percent from purchasing politicians, the press should erect cultural obstacles in their place. Our best hope now is massive scrutiny, and, hopefully, some measure of shame.
It’s time the press starts behaving accordingly. The media, for the most part, still treats elected officials as the key players in our political process. They get most of the scrutiny. Mega-donors, by contrast, are permitted a substantial degree of anonymity. Now that must change. If Adelson or the Koch brothers or their liberal equivalents can single-handedly shape presidential campaigns and congressional majorities, their pet concerns and ideological quirks deserve more journalistic attention than do those of most members of congress. It’s no longer enough to have one reporter covering the “money and politics” beat. Special correspondents should be assigned to cover key mega-donors, and should work doggedly to make their private influence public.
Can't We Just Say the Roberts Court Is Corrupt?
The case was about what cons utes a bribe, how big that bribe has to be, and whether an electoral system can be corrupt even in the absence of a legally demonstrable cash payment to an office holder or candidate for an explicitly specified favor.
The Roberts court, or five of its nine members, adopted the misanthrope's faux-naïve pose in ruling that private money in politics, far from promoting corruption, causes democracy to thrive because, money being speech, the more speech, the freer the politics.
Anatole France mocked this kind of legal casuistry by saying "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."
James Fallows has reminded us that during Chief Justice John Roberts' confirmation hearing, the nominee described his own judicial approach as "Humility. Modesty. Restraint. Deference to precedent. 'We're just calling balls and strikes.' "
Fallows goes on to say that that Roberts is cynical for adopting that pose to get through the hearing. It is true that he is cynical, no doubt in the same way that pros utes are cynical women, but I don't think that term quite captures the key quality that makes Roberts decide legal cases the way he does. Nor does his cynicism differentiate him from his jurisprudential clones named Thomas, Scalia, Alito and Kennedy.
Roberts knows he was appointed to be a Supreme Court justice for one reason: to decide relevant cases on behalf of corporate interests.
Roberts perceived the deeper dynamic beneath the ideological posturing over ACA, and that is why he had to be the deciding vote of a divided court to save the act.
Roberts threw a valuable bone to the Republicans by vitiating the Medicaid mandate to the states. This made it harder to implement the law and permitted Republican governors and legislatures to work all manner of mischief.
We now have an algorithm to crack the Enigma Code of the Supreme Court.
Once there are five members of the court who accept as self-evidently valid the 19th century concept of "freedom of contract," other issues become subsidiary.
This framework explains hundreds of cases before the court and clarifies the seeming anomalies like ACA. It explains the court's position in Vance v. Ball State, which made it more difficult to sue employers for harassment, and Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., which barred remedy for pay discrimination (even Congress subsequently saw fit to redress the bias of the court’s decision).
In Wal-Mart v. Dukes, the court rejected a class-action suit of women denied raises and promotions. The Roberts court also took the side of corporations against consumers in Mutual Pharmaceutical Company v. Bartlett and AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion. The Roberts Court declared uncons utional a 1988 law that subjected corporate officers to fraud charges if they could be shown to have deprived clients of honest services.
As Oliver Wendell Holmes stated in his dissenting opinion on the 1902 Lochner case, which established as virtual court theology the freedom of contract notion (without government restrictions), from which many subsequent pro-corporation decisions have flowed, the court's majority was basing its decision on economic ideology rather than cons utional interpretation.
Roberts is wise enough to know that and is wise enough to conceal his hand with occasional strategic references to the free speech or free exercise clauses in the first amendment.
http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/22...urt-is-corrupt
As if the Repug JINOs didn't already know why the Repugs put them in SCOTUS, Preibus makes it clear:
RNC Chair Complains That The Supreme Court Hasn’t Done Enough To Let Rich Donors Give The GOP Money
according to Priebus, is a problem. During his interview with Hewitt, the RNC chair claimed that we should not “have caps at all” — so if Adelson wants to write a single $100 million check to the RNC he should have the right to do so. And then Adelson went after one of the few remaining categories of campaign finance laws that were explicitly endorsed byCitizens United and McCutcheon — disclosure laws. According to Priebus,
You’ve got now groups that are targeting people viciously, both businesses and individuals, because their names are disclosed. I mean, you want to be for disclosure. But when you start to see some of the cases out there where people are targeted, and businesses are targeted and picketed and threatened for political contributions, then now you’re suppressing free speech through disclosure.
Priebus’s decision to tell tales of donors being harassed for their political donations is not exactly surprising. The Citizens United opinion held that a campaign finance disclosure law “would be uncons utional as applied to an organization if there were a reasonable probability that the group’s members would face threats, harassment, or reprisals if their names were disclosed.” So Priebus is prying on a crack that the justices already created for him.
In the world Priebus seems to be advocating for, however, Adelson could not just write a $100 million check to the RNC, he could do so anonymously.
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/201...the-gop-money/
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