A Plutocracy For Sure

Another statement by the previous post's Roger Hodge explains the serious damage done by the Citizen's United Supreme Court ruling to our political democracy:

The Citizens United decision overturns more than a century of campaign finance legislation and jurisprudence—at least with regard to corporations—and lays the foundation for the complete deregulation of campaign spending. The Court’s majority held that the First Amendment rights of corporations were violated by some modest and heretofore uncontroversial restrictions on election spending. The Court’s reasoning was premised on a view of corporate “personhood” that would have been unintelligible to the framers of the Constitution—and, as Justice John Paul Stevens demonstrated in his magisterial dissent, the majority’s opinion was fundamentally inconsistent with a long series of precedents. The decision is an aggressive assault on anemic and insubstantial restrictions that have failed to prevent the corporate dominance of our political system; consequently, although it is likely to encourage some highly political corporations to spend even more on electioneering, Citizens United mainly serves to clarify the brute fact that our political system is little more than a plutocracy. More disturbing than the curious judicial metaphysics of corporate personhood is the consistent equation of spending with speech. Indeed, throughout Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority decision, the term “speak” was used in place of the words “contribute,” “spend,” and “buy.” This substitution is telling, and despite Kennedy’s vigorous assertions, most campaign spending is less a matter of intelligible speech than a pure show of force.

As for James Madison, without whom the Bill of Rights would never have been brought before Congress, much less ratified, we can be reasonably certain that he would never have extended First Amendment protection to the expenditures of corporations. In fact, during the First Congress, on February 8, 1791, in the midst of debate over Alexander Hamilton’s proposal to charter a Bank of the United States, Madison delivered a speech on the floor of the House denouncing the corrupting effects of “incorporated societies”: They are “powerful machines,” he argued, which often pursue principles that are very different from those of the people. No one who is familiar with Madison’s horror of all forms of political corruption could believe that he would have blithely extended the rights of citizenship to soulless creatures of pure commerce. Even so, the point is not whether one or another eighteenth-century politician would approve of a current law or court decision; what is at issue is the integrity of our political system. Citizens United confirms that we do indeed live in a “capitalist democracy,” as current usage has it, one in which a tiny minority quite literally votes with its pocketbook and in which laws and even lawmakers can be bought and sold like any other commodity.