I watched the president's speech last night. It was excellent. I'm glad he's showing the leadership backbone that those of us who voted overwhelmingly for him expected of him. But there was another story in yesterday's news, overshadowed by the speech, that could result in as much devastation to this country as failing to enact real health care reform assuredly will do.
The Supreme Court, meeting nearly a month before its official opening date of the first Monday in October, yesterday heard arguments in a case that may well result in the overturning of a near-century's worth of election campaign finance laws. Some corporations want to use corporate money to pay for partisan campaign ads. The legal argument is that restrictions on corporate and union campaign spending are illegal and unconstitutional infringement of First Amendment rights.
I almost laughed when I first heard this, for two reasons: (1) unions have lots of money, but not nearly as much as corporations; (2) more seriously, the Supreme Court itself has, since at least the mid-1930s, consistently recognized that corporations do not have the all same rights as do individuals under our Constitution and laws.
Then I realized that the forces of reaction, those who despise the New Deal and all it (and every subsequent advance in civil and real individual rights) means, are not going to try to stop dragging us backwards, to the days where money and privilege meant you got all the benefits of government and civil society without having to share any of the responsibilities that are literally the other side of the coin of being a member of that civil society.
It's called the social contract, people. And it galls me no end that the most strident preachers of "individual responsibility" are the ones who mean "for everyone else" but not for them. As if their money somehow makes them exempt from paying their fair share for the costs of building and maintaining the roads and infrastructure of this country, paying for the military and other mechanisms that allow our country to exist.
This is really sad. There is no First Amendment interest at stake here, period. Corporations are not people. Corporations do not cast ballots in our primaries and general elections. They are business entities. Our government was not created "of the corporation, by the corporation, and for the corporation." The rights contemplated by our Founding Fathers were the rights pertaining to free and unfettered political discourse. Business/commercial speech has never had as much protection under the First Amendment as your or my right to say "the president is a doofus." That's why the government has the authority to keep cigarette ads off TV, for example. And that's why campaign finance laws have never been questioned or successfully challenged in our courts--until, scarily, possibly now.
Americans by and large believe in fair play. That's one of the major reasons the Founders were so adamant about protecting the free expression of opinions in "the marketplace of ideas." Our Founders considered that the best ideas would rise to the top, and bad ideas would sink, and eventually disappear, based on those ideas' own merits. But the infusion of corporate money tilts that playing field, skews it to the point that's it's no longer even close to being level--or fair. People will not be able to tell whether an idea is good and popular because of its merits or because the money behind it has artificially inflated its presence. It's exactly the same reason we decry the presence of steroids in baseball. There's no way to tell whether all the home run and other records were the product of genuine athletic prowess or of artificially-inflated strength.
And the solution, as with steroids, is to keep the corporate money out. If you doubt the skewing effects of the presence of "tons o' dough," consider Fox News. Rupert Murdoch has said flat out that his goal was to promulgate HIS political agenda. Judging from the number of people who buy the crap his "news"papers and TV networks spew, his money is having its intended effect. Also look at all the insanity spit out by the crazy people at the town hall meetings last month. They got attention all out of proportion to their numbers because the opponents of health care reform put their money behind getting those people into position to cause as much disruption as possible. They didn't even hide it--they were wearing polo shirts sporting their insurance company logos as they chaperoned the buses and shepherded the people on them into the meetings.
Yet there is a real chance that, by the slimmest 5-4 margin, the Supreme Court could undo all the good that nearly a century's worth of campaign finance regulations have done. That possibility terrifies me. The amount of noise one can afford to make will drown out the meritorious ideas which do not have rich special-interests behind them. I fear that we are going to forget [presuming many of us ever knew--Ed.] that money does not flow to ideas because of those ideas' merits; money flows to ideas because of the self-interest of those who have the money.
Money is not merit; money is power. And power corrupts. The love of money may be the root of all evil, but the presence of money is the corrupter of all political discourse.
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