Game On
Alter, on the SCOTUS ruling that corporations are people too:
The Citizens United case is the Roe v. Wade of the 21st century, only the roles are reversed. Conservatives who bashed liberal judges for “legislating from the bench” and disrespecting precedent are now exposed as unprincipled poseurs. Liberals who grew up depending on courts to protect the public interest must now build a mass movement to confront the greatest accumulation of corporate power since the age of the robber barons.
At his confirmation hearings, John Roberts said, “Judges are like umpires. Umpires don’t make the rules; they apply them.” He repeated his belief in judicial restraint and the importance of precedent. So what did his court do? It gutted more than a century of law that barred direct corporate expenditures on behalf of politicians. And it slam-dunked GOP stalwarts like Teddy Roosevelt, Robert Taft (his 1947 Taft-Hartley Act limited outside campaign expenditures), and, yes, John McCain. The key to the 5–4 majority finding that corporations have all the rights of people: Samuel Alito, the hardliner who replaced Sandra Day O’Connor.
Read the rest.
